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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4756304" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 112: August 1986part 2/4The role of computers: Hmm. For their second column, the Lesser's tackle one of the great old games of yore. Rogue. A game that's so distinctive, it has an entire subgenre named after it. Create a character, and then venture into a randomly generated (and exceedingly brutal) dungeon. Explore and fight your way down to the bottom level to find the macguffin. Most games would stop there. But no, you then have to fight your way back up again, facing even tougher enemies along the way. You can save the game and stop for a rest, but if you die, it automatically wipes your slot, and you have to start from 1st level, in an all new dungeon where your previous knowledge of the routes and object positioning is useless. It's a very direct analogue of your old skool dungeoncrawling experience, encouraging extreme caution and clever tactical use of items rather than running in swinging if you want to survive and win. With it's tremendous challenge and huge amount of replayability, it, and games based off it such as nethack, still enjoy a small but highly devoted fanbase today. This is a topic I'm very pleased to see them cover, as while it may not actually involve roleplaying, it's a very close relation of RPG's, and has plenty of relevance to gamers. It's a great example of how both computer games and RPG's have become far more forgiving over the years, with way less permanent death and having to start from the beginning if you lose. If they keep up with this kind of stuff, then I'm definitely going to enjoy their new direction. Cloaked in magic: Not everything has changed around here, however. Yes, its another one of those articles where Elminster elaborates on a particular class of magical items, giving us a whole load of interesting variants to play with. After all, why mess with a winning formula? So here's 9 cloaks, all of which are pretty damn handy. The cloak of battle traps your opponent's weapons, allowing you to cut them down unopposed. The cloak of comfort protects you from the weather, and even magical heat and cold based attacks. The Cloak of fangs is a single use device which allows you to suicide in style, taking out everyone around you. The cloak of many colors is the inspiration for a terrible terrible musical. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> The cloak of reflection reflects certain spells, ruining attackers days. The cloak of stars allows you to unleash powerful spells stored in it's threads, but unpredictably, as it's hard to tell which star corresponds to which power. The cloak of survival isn't as impressive as the ring of the same name, but as it never runs out of charges, that's not such a terrible deal. 10 minutes survival in space is still a lot better than nothing. The cloak of symbiotic protection is one of Ed's delightfully quirky creations. It may be a living organism itself, and in return for a slight drain on your HP, it also protects you from fungal infestations, disease, and most critically, the various oozes, slimes and molds that can so ruin your day without a proper battle in old skool dungeons. This may be a nuisance, or incredibly useful, depending on your DM. The cloak of the shield allows you to generate a protective wall of force around you.  It can also be used actively as a telekinetic object, and definitely rewards inventiveness. While these aren't as powerful as say, his magical swords, Ed has once again managed to produce items that are a cut above the rest in terms of both descriptive detail, and inventiveness of powers. As ever, it'll be a real choice as to which one to wear if you have several, as they are all useful, albeit in different situations. Better spoiled for choice than having an obvious optimal one that makes any other build look stupid from a metagame perspective though. Armor, piece by piece: And the run of really cool articles comes to an end, with a little one which introduces a rather complicated new system for hit locations, and the amount different types of armour protect you on different parts of your body. While not a terrible idea, implementing this will add 2 extra rolls to every single attack in combat. I really have no desire for the amount of slowdown that would cause. Very much a filler article. TSR previews is the wrong way round again. Get your act together! Anyway, next month sees the release of the compiled version of the GDQ module series. Follow on from T1-4 and A1-4 to make the ultimate AD&D adventure path, taking you from 1st level to the mid-teens, and challenging a god. Woo. What will they do for an encore? I'll tell you one thing, it won't be I9: Day of Al'Akbar. You'll already be way too high level for the tale of this legendary artifact. On the fiction side, Dragonlance finishes it's second trilogy, with Test of the Twins. Looks like going to the abyss is currently the cool thing for big heroes to do. Question is, how will they get out? We shall see. Marvel super heroes gets a pair of gamebooks from our husband and wife team. Jeff Grubb gives us The amazing spider-man in City in Darkness, while Kate Novak delivers Captain America in Rockets Red Glare. Talk about keeping it in the family. Zeb Cook continues to push Oriental Adventures with a one-on-one gamebook set there. Warlords features the battle between the usurper of the throne, and it's rightful heir. Who will triumph in your game? Gamma world gets it's first module in ages. GW6: Alpha factor. The start of an epic series in which you quest to restore civilization. Will it all get published, or will the game peter out again before they get it done? Don't try and make an epic if you don't have the budget. And finally, we have a very intriguing development. Steve Jackson (the american one) is collaborating with TSR to bring you Battle Road, a solo Car Wars gamebook. I never expected that. Was it any good? Did it help expand their fanbase? The ultimate article index is this month's centerpiece, the last time they would attempt to fit in details on everything they've done. As it eats up 20 pages of extra small type, you can understand why. There comes a point where you can't keep looking back, and holding on to everything you've ever done; but have to move on, and this definitely seems like theirs. This is also the perfect time for me to look over the first 10 and a bit years of the magazine, and reminisce about the bits that most caught my attention. (well, given how few articles this issue has by comparison with their recent ones, this'd be a rather short review if I didn't. ) A is for alignment. We've seen it go from the three categories, to 5, to 9, with a couple of odd and amusing variants, plus a whole load of articles and flamewars over the years. It's form is one of the things that makes D&D unique, and separates it from both reality and most fiction. There are plenty of different ways it can be used, but just as often, people have decided it wasn't worth the hassle and pretty much ignored it in their games. That's the advantage and drawback of vaguely defined, sweeping systems. Everyone will see something different in their own image. B is for Boot Hill. One of their first other games, this got a moderate amount of coverage in early issues, but like so many things, wound up fading away unheralded as the sales couldn't compete with D&D.  It really should have come out a decade or two earlier, as Westerns were already in decline by the late 70's. At least they tried. It's not their fault D&D outsold everything else they did by several factors.  C is for Campaigns. One of the big ways in which D&D has already evolved during the course of the magazine is a much greater emphasis on building a detailed world. People like Katharine Kerr and Lew Pulsipher have driven this cause forward over the last few years, with advice both interesting and dull on building people and places, and weaving them into a coherent universe. We've also had stuff on proper DM'ing, including rather too much on how to depower or reset a game that's got out of hand. This is one topic that isn't going away any time.</blockquote>

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