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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4747948" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 110: June 1986part 4/4The marvel-phile: Having mostly been presenting minor heroes I've never heard of recently, Jeff decides to bring another big gun out for this issue. Ghost rider. The kind of name you'd have to be a fool not to use. And one of marvel's few legacy characters, (I wonder why DC wound up with more) where the person with the name changes, but the name remains in use, because it's a valuable bit of intellectual property. ( I have to wonder when we'll see a return of Shadowman, since that's another name that's too obvious for them to leave undefended for some other company to grab.) This is one case where the powers and style of the people possessing the name have varied wildly. Even what they ride varies, with one being a biker, and the others being horsemen. This is important, as it shows how you can progress the continuity of the universe without losing touch with the iconic bits. It's like monarchy. The person may change, even the family, but the state continues. The cycle of life and death goes on. All is well with the world. Or something. Another pretty pleasing contribution from Jeff. Lets hope he can keep that up when they transition to the Advanced game next month. Going for a swim?: Looks like we have another case where the writer is filling in rules that you would think should be obvious. Star frontiers has no rules for swimming. I guess when you're in space most of the time, the idea doesn't come up. Fortunately, the gear needed to survive in space and underwater has quite a few similarities, only you don't need to carry your own oxygen supplies. Anyway, no great surprises here, as we get rules for movement, underwater combat, and the bends. The quirks of the various alien races are dealt with, as are those of equipment. One of those articles that falls under the solid but dull category. Piece of the action: Hmm. Introducing the mafia to Paranoia games as a secret society? That's actually a pretty good idea. After all, using a bad italian accent for your character, having secret agendas conveyed by coded doubletalk, and wielding odd weapons is entirely within the spirit of the game, especially as most commonly played back then. Will you be loyal to the Family, make a profit for them, and work your way up the ranks, or will they be as prone to "retiring for health reasons" as the other members of your troubleshooting team? Either way, I find this quite an entertaining little article, that's useful in itself, and also reminds us that nearly any real-world organization or ideology can be converted to a paranoia one with hilarious results. It may require you to reduce the randomness of character generation, particularly if it's a player who came up with a cool idea for a society, but that's hardly a gamebreaker. This isn't WHFRP, after all. <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=";)" /> Dragonmirth mocks polearms. Not hard to do. Snarf's little leech thing saves the day. Wormy features a very impressive giant showdown indeed. Get subscriptions at a bargain price as a 10th anniversary gift! How generous of them. Not as generous as a lifetime subscription, but they wouldn't be so dumb as to offer them anymore. Looks like Ed is the real star of this show, delivering a one-two punch that comes close to his classic work on the nine hells. Even if he stopped here, he'd already have more than won a place in the D&D halls of fame. But no, next decade is going to bring even bigger things for him, as his world becomes the biggest, most fleshed out campaign world in the entire AD&D multiverse. And this issue has several hints on how that's going to happen. The rest of the issue is considerably better than most of their recent offerings as well, with more big articles, stuff looking back on old things and building upon them, and stuff looking forward and trying out new ideas. I'm definitely coming to prefer the issues with several big articles that link into gaming's overall history to the ones with tons of tiny shallow unconnected bits and pieces. And I'm guessing at this point, plenty of other people will feel likewise, or we wouldn't see the rise in metaplot we do over the next decade. After all, it's not an inherently bad idea, it's just that like any idea, it can be done wrong. And if you link everything up, then one part being fouled up causes problems for everywhere else, while if you have independent replaceable bits with multiple redundancy in your design, you can keep the bits that work and ditch the ones that don't. But I digress. This is about gaming, not mechanical engineering, even if the lessons from one field can be transferred to another. Unless you guys actually want me to go off on tangental discussions and rants when they occur to me. Because that's certainly an option. <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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