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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4708680" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 102: October 1985part 3/3Creating a cast of NPC's: Our D&D PbM creator returns to give us some advice on creating all the many NPC's that populate you campaign. While you probably won't need the 5000+ he created to provide a diverse cast to all the different parties participating, using his methods to whip out a few hundred general peeps to fill the basic roles in your game could definitely help speed your game along, and avoid the dreaded stupid name made up on the spot problem. Don't sweat too much about the details of unimportant NPC's, just roll them up and put them on an index card. For more critical ones, determine the important details yourself, but still let random rolls play a part. It's quicker and will result in results that surprise even you, making the campaign as a whole feel more realistic than if every NPC is precision tuned for their job. After all, in the real world, very few people are. A case where even if you choose not to heed his advice, you can't dispute his expertise. This method definitely works. That's not to say others don't work as well, but do you want to stumble around figuring out by trial and error what works and what doesn't? Some of us just don't have the time anymore. Fiction: Passing in the night by Rob Chilson. The solar system is being invaded by mysterious and hostile aliens. It's up to your crew to stop them. This is nowhere near as glamorous as in the movies, but still an incredibly tense experience. And while the science may be pretty speculative in this one, the tension is very real. Like real submarine crews, you're packed in this small space with each other for months, and if you mess up, it can result in the death of the whole crew. If people from different nationalities have to do this, it gets even more complicated. And this story captures that kind of emotional interaction quite well. Which is nice for me. Bottleneck scenarios seem to work slightly better in sci-fi than fantasy, and we haven't seen that many of them in the magazine, so this doesn't feel too hackneyed.   Lets hope we don't get a ton of them all of a sudden. What the hell is mandragora the evil-chaser doing on the cover of the ARES section? Rankin-Bass ought to sue <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I guess they'd just be countersued for snarf, so it all balances out. Sticks and stones and death machines: We had some attention paid to determining challenge rating last issue. Now we get a similar article for gamma world. As the random encounter tables are not scaled for challenge in any way, you'll start off in huge amounts of danger from random crap, which then fades away. This is worth reexamining. Unfortunately, this article is too short to do the complete overhaul an idea like this needs, instead giving you a load of ideas on how you can fudge things to help keep them survivable and interesting. Which is pretty much the kind of advice we've heard repeatedly before, and will do so again. A definite filler article. A thousand in one: Ohh. This is an interesting article. How to prevent the monoculture problem suffered when engaging in interplanetary or multidimensional games. It makes things seem shallow and stereotyped, particularly if your home region is the only area that doesn't suffer from it. You can get considerable benefits from condensing these ideas so there are several to a planet, interacting with and influencing one-another more closely. It's a simple lesson, but one many settings could benefit from. I've always been annoyed by monoculture problem in planar stuff in particular, and definitely intend to take it to heart when designing future cosmologies for my games. The marvel-phile: Oh great. For this month's installment, we get the Impossible Man, another indestructible cartoonesque joke character.  Egads, those are irritating. Able to assume any form, and bounce back from any attack, he's been a pain in the ass to the fantastic four, the x-men, Wasp, and even given Galactus indigestion. And if you get mad at him, you lose Karma. Prepare to face the wrath of thrown plushies and the like from your players. Ahh, the joys of having source material silly enough that you don't even need to try. Save it for the april fools issues Jeff. Active duty: Once again we see people pushing what you can do with Traveller's career system. This time, it's some advice on playing characters that are still in the military, rather than retired. After all, it's not as if we're short on sci-fi series with setups like that. And the fact that you'll have to obey orders from your superiors just makes it easier for the GM to run the adventures they want without it seeming like railroading. Jeff Swycaffer once again proves that he has a good idea how to create and run good stories that imitate sci-fi shows like Star Trek or Space:1999, allowing the players a certain amount of discretion in following orders, and if they mess up, turning the punishment into it's own subplot. This opens up another milieu of play that I would certainly have no objection trying. Another thumbs up. Silvertwin!: Star Law continues to get follow-ups in here with this pair of kick-ass custom vehicles, a space car and bike. Guess my joke about evil-chasers was more accurate than I realized. Join the twinteams, the six man sentai teams that  pilot these interlocking pairs of vehicles, and travel the universe, fighting for truth, justice, and the intergalactic way. You didn't need to do this. You already had me sold on the whole space ranger thing, this is just icing on the top. Although I must admit it makes an exceedingly tasty looking cake. And since the whole way the concept pans out is pretty amusing, I'm going to have to give another positive result to this article. Wormy shows how bad trolls are at deception. Snarfquest has an attack of concience. Dragonmirth has both racism and homophobia in it's jokes, my oh my. Another fairly good issue, if not quite as good as the last two. Still, with their current standards, they'd have to fall quite a way to produce one I actively disliked. Lets hope they don't continue to slide downwards. Both writing and production values are staying strong. It's just the usual problem keeping things fresh when you've been doing them for this long. They could definitely be doing more themed issues. Even their specials haven't really concentrated in one area all year. I guess this is what happens when you rule your writers with a light hand. Will my desires be granted? Will they get even better? Or is this the start of the end for the classic run of issues. Guess I can't really know until I can look back and see it in context. Onwards, christian soldiers, yadda yadda yadda.</blockquote>

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