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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4752176" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 111: July 1986part 3/4Death of an arch-mage: Looks like we're getting one last module in these pages before Dungeon fires up. And it's quite an impressive one, both in length (21 pages) and ambition. A murder mystery in D&D? Don't see those very often. Amusingly, the tournament pregens are just 1 level too low that they would be able to do some resurrecting, which is good thinking. On the other hand, 2 of them are illegal dual classed characters, which irritates me. It also puts a lot of onus on the DM to set the proper tone, and fill in spurious details to obscure the important bits, which may be problematic. With big chunks of their magical powers forbidden, they'll have to use mundane investigative powers, or choose to go maverick and risk spoiling the case. So yeah, this could be good, or it could be incredibly annoying, and go disastrously wrong very easily, it very much depends on having the right DM and players. TSR previews is back to the right way around. Dragonlance is getting pole position this month, with DL13: Dragons of truth. Can they pass the nine tests of truth? Can they beat Takhisis? Considering the next module is called Dragons of Triumph, the odds seem good. It's also getting another calendar for 1987. Seems a bit early to release one now. Eh. Get a few months just looking at the pictures before you have to write on it. AD&D is also getting REF2: the revised player character sheets. Unearthed Arcana made the previous ones redundant. Ahh, joy. Another excuse to sell you almost the same stuff again. D&D gets IM1: The immortal storm. So you made it this far. Can your adventures as a god match up to the ones that came before? Well, at least they're trying to support it. We also get X11: Saga of the shadow lord. See, if you were the previous characters you could wipe out an army of undead no trouble. Oh well. Guess it's not heroism if it's not a struggle. Our solo gamebooks get the Sorcerer's crown, book number 9. Our first one that follows on from a previous book. Will it involve further sequels? The dread hand of metaplot reaches into even here. Marvel Superheroes gets MA1: Children of the atom. All about the mutants of the marvel universe, and adventures for them. As this is the advanced game, the supplements are bigger. Are they better. Wish I could tell you. Amazing stories unleashes it's second anthology. Visions of other worlds. Containing stories from some of the biggest names in sci-fi. Have their prophecies been proved correct? Since this is a retrospective, I'm betting at least a few of them have.  Profiles: Jeff Grubb is of course one of TSR's most awesome game designers. The son of a teacher man, he's always been pretty damn smart. (apart from maybe thinking playing D&D would be a great way to meet girls, but even that seems to have worked out for him. ) He's responsible for the gods of the Dragonlance setting, the name of the planet the Forgotten realms is set in, virtually the whole of the marvel superheroes RPG, and is now writing the manual of the planes. His contributions are pretty much inextricably linked with gaming as we know it. Go him. Anne Gray McReady is one of our editors. She's completely normal, honest! Nothing to see here at all! Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Anyway, she's responsible for editing all 5 of the BECMI boxed sets, as well as writing the savage coast, so she has made some cool contributions to the D&D universe. Ah pity da foo who believes her lack of hype. Pull the pin and throw: Grenades! We've seen quite a few questions on them show up in Spy's advices over the years. Guess they thought it merited a whole article. So we get three pages of dry stuff like how they're constructed, what they have in them, concussion radii, a scatter diagram, and the all important damage done. Will this settle those arguments, or just reignite them, in ever more fiddly nitpicking detail? Either way, I'm not very interested by this article. Another load of crunchy filler to keep up the page count with.  Fiction: File under B by Esther M Friesner. Oh dear oh dear. The buttoned up young librarian runs across a near-naked barbarian warrior transported into the library by the evil wizard he was fighting. My oh my :fans self: This can't possibly be happening. We must get him out of here before somebody sees. He can't really be from a fantasy world, surely? But if he is then maybe the index can help me get him back. Now, is it in fiction or nonfiction? And then they get back to his world, great acts of heroism are done, bosoms start heaving from the exertion, and it all has to be faded to black before the author starts typing one-handed. Ahh, fantasies. Isn't it great being able to sell them. This is cheesecake, but amusing cheesecake, obviously written by a woman, for women. Nice to see them tackling the problems mentioned in the letters page. Can they keep that up, or will the accusations of sexism be back again soon enough. At this stage, I'm gonna take the pessimistic view. Some people will always bitch, especially if you bend over backwards to accommodate them and they think they can get more stuff that way.</blockquote>

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