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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4711440" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 103: November 1985part 2/3DC heroes! Well, I guess marvel have had an RPG out for a while. I'm not surprised DC want a piece of the pie as well. That's a lot of tm's for one page. Who will win the battle for your playing time? The role of books: The silver Crown by Joel Rosenberg is part three of the Guardians of the flame series. This certainly isn't the end of it though, as our protagonists find changing a fantasy world rather more complicated than you'd think. The writer certainly seems to be keeping up with recent progressions in gaming technology. Where will the story take them next. Will they ever get home. Will it be exactly when they left and no-one will ever know about the things they did.  Shouldn't be hard to find out.The song/flight of Mavin manyshaped by Sheri S Tepper are parts one and two of (what else) a trilogy, set in her True Game world. Thankfully, it's not some overegged piece where the world is in danger all the time, and has good plotting and dialogue. Her world is being built up quite nicely. The secret country by Pamela C Dean takes a different tack to the regular people transported to fantasy land trope, with a bunch of kids dealing with fairytale logic in the Secret Country. They may not deal with it in the same way as Joels protagonists, but give them a few books, and they'll be hard-bitten adventurers too. Bridge of birds by Barry Hughart is a fantasy novel set in 7th century china. Written as the memoirs of the protagonist, it manages to engage in both adventure and world-building while staying in character, building up a detailed and well-researched world. It gets thoroughly recommended for those of you who've just bought Oriental Adventures, and want fiction to help inspire a game. Dragons of spring dawning by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman gets a rather extensive review, also looking at the trilogy as a whole. It builds up to a nice climax, and the reviewer certainly seems to think it's a suitable attempt to match tolkien's epic scope without slavishly imitating the details. Well, it was pretty popular at the time. I shouldn't be too surprised. Magic in Ikthar, edited by Andre Norton and Robert Adams attempts to do for wizardry what the thieves world series did for rogues. Unfortunately, the shared worldbuilding aspect isn't strong enough, so the stories don't fit together that well. This is why you need editorial control. No matter how good the writers are, if they don't communicate, the result will be less than the sum of it's parts. The Gadget factor by Sandy Landsman is your typical tale of teenage geniuses getting themselves into trouble by inventing a time machine. Amazing that I can be unsurprised by a trope that specific. Still, it's fast-paced, fun, and the computer stuff is handled in a coherent way, so it should be good fun for younger readers, who can identify with the protagonists. The centaur papers: Or, we got two good ecology of submissions, so we decided to merge them into an extra long and comprehensive one. At 12 pages long, this is virtually a full special feature. It goes into quite a bit of detail on the oddities of their internal system, diet, ecology and culture, doesn't forget that they are chaotic, and the original greek centaurs were a bunch of marauding drunkards, and treads the fine line between bowdlerisation of the myth and being too gross with aplomb. (yay for castration as a punishment for crime) They are also given PC stats, which is nice, (although they're nowhere near as capable in this area as they were in 2nd edition) and one would certainly make a decent addition to a party as long as they weren't faced with too many confined spaces. All in all, a very good article, that you'd never know was stitched together from two writers. Which means plenty of credit has to be given to Kim's editing as well. Not often you get to say that. Poor editors. The writers take the credit while they take the blame. Many shout-outs to Kim for making the magazine as good as it was, while I'm thinking of the subject.  The actual centerpiece of this issue is considerably less impressive. Another couple of pages of UA errata, designed so you can cut the bits out and stick them over the errors in the original book. Which is an interesting gimmick. Unfortunately, even the errata has errata, as the multi-classing table isn't properly formatted and suffers line drift. Well, at least they're trying. Shame this'll just be cementing peoples opinion of their editing skills. (in complete contradiction to what I said last article, but that just makes it all the more amusing, that they can be producing works of such widely varying quality in the same pages. ) What is going on over there. This issue is going up and down like, er, no, I won't complete this metaphor. Family friendly magazine, and all that. Coming attractions changes its name to TSR Previews, and makes it absolutely clear that there will be no third party stuff here. Boo. They also don't have quite enough new stuff to fill the entire page this month, so they recycle some of last month's synopses. This is not particularly pleasing to me either. Sigh. Lets just see what the new stuff is. D&D gets X10: Red arrow, black shield. As mentioned earlier, this combines roleplaying of troop gathering with Battlesystem and War machine stats for the actual conflict. Not your standard module. AD&D gets Baltrons beacon. A sneaky one where you have to get hold of the macguffin before Baltron returns to his tower. Looks like another one where straight combat is not the solution. One-on-one game books gives us book 4, Challenge of the druids grove. Druid vs Wizard! Who will gain ultimate power?! Muahaha. Conan gets CN3: Conan triumphant. Based on the new book by Robert Jordan, this looks pastichealicious. Powerful barbarians, evil wizards, and hack-and-slash adventure. No pretensions to high art here. Also notable is that there's a couple more cancellations. The SPI stuff gets the shaft,  and has been delayed until next year. Take that, red-headed step-children. Profiles: Oooh. a new feature. Time to put the spotlight on the writers behind the games. They could definitely fill a few years with this stuff. Unsurprisingly, our first one is of the head of the company, Gary Gygax. He really is working ridiculously hard these days, getting up at 5 in the morning to get the creative part of his job done before anyone else even comes in. He is of course, one of the founders of the company, although lots of credit is given to Donald Kaye in helping it find it's feet in those early years, which is nice of him. Of course, the current conflicts of personality the company is going through are completely ignored, and the whole thing is presented in an upbeat, the future is going to be even bigger and better manner. Bloody whitewashes. Still, this again has good advice for any a budding creative. If you have an idea, start doing it now. If you wait until you're ready, you never will be. Don't give up, even when things get hard, and everyone is messing you around. Once again, he is an inspiration to us all. How will they follow this up? Guess after starting at the top, they'll have to do an Orson Welles and work their way down.</blockquote>

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