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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4795867" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 119: March 1987part 5/5The role of books gets a horrid orange on blue colouring. Colour wheel, people. Tritones are bad, be it in music or light. Lets hope the contents don't show a similar lack of judgement Bordertown, by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold, markets itself as dungeonpunk, with biker elves, goblin street gangs, and lots of other elements that are going to make Shadowrun and the World of Darkness very profitable in a few years time. It's still innovative at this point though, to the point where the reviewer finds it a bit jarring. True originality does that, y'know. Definitely interesting to report upon. Angel with the sword by C J Cherryh is another attempt to kick off a bit of shared world storytelling. It has an interesting writing style which the reviewer suspects may be lost if other authors take the reins, and a detailed appendix on the the world that would be useful to other writers, and gamers, but is a bit jarring when contrasted with the fiction. As ever, we'll have to see what comes of this. The blood of ten chiefs is an elfquest anthology, with a whole bunch of authors and editors. Despite this, it still manages to keep up the general quality of this established series, while providing some new info on the history of the shared world. Morlac: The quest of the green magician by Gary Alan Ruse is three stories in one book, nicely reversing the current fashion for trilogies. Each is nicely differentiated as well. It has plenty of clever ideas, and stands out from most barbarian adventurer books thanks to them. Sounds pretty good. At amberleaf fair by Phyllis Ann Karr gets a rather mixed review. Bad poetry, dodgy plotting, and detached narrative vs interesting magic ideas, small, detailed focus, and idiosyncratic design. Hmm. Given my load, I don't think I'll bother to hunt this one down. Silverhair the wanderer by Diana L Paxton is another post apocalyptic fantasy, where things have mysteriously reverted to imitating an earlier era. The eponymous protagonist becomes a bard and goes adventuring to solve problems threatening the kingdom. So far so cliche. But it still gets a positive review. It's main flaw in the reviewers eyes is that the writer is obviously not a musician, so the technical details of this get glossed over. The silent tower by Barbara Hambly is another story of magic and science meeting, with tensions on both sides, as usual. Very much familiar tropes, and it gets cut off abruptly in the middle of the plot to sell the next book in the series. Yawn. The marvel-phile: Jeff still seems to be pretty busy, only stopping in briefly to give us a single page piece on Psylocke. Egads that's a terrible costume. But then, she has had a lot of those in her time. Fashion sense is obviously not one of her special powers. She's currently more psychicey and less martial arts focussed than she would later become, but has already gone through some pretty serious traumas, including a disastrous stint as Captain Britain. :facepalm: An amusing bit of filler, but filler nonetheless. Bring on the manual of the planes! That's what we really want! Ra ra ra to the power of infinity. This is only a test: Top Secret's article this month is on training missions. A topic we haven't seen since the assassins run. Like then, it's a pretty good idea. Playing out your characters training helps establish their personalities, and gives you a better idea of the tactics that will work in the game without so many PC's dying. Most of this article is devoted to two mini missions for you to run your players through, if you're out of inspiration for this weeks session, or simply want to train them up before sending them on full-on missions in the big bad world. A cool idea, pretty well implemented, apart from the little caveat that it refers you to maps in supplements you may not have. If they were running non D&D stuff in Dungeon, it probably should have gone in there, but their loss is definitely my gain in this case. Profiles: Dennis Kauth is of course one of our graphic designers. With an extensive background in the stainless steel industry, he's accustomed to creating rather more solid works of art than most of our crew, using sheet metal, cardboard, sculptures, and all sorts of other 3D coolness. He lives in a motor home, so if he needs a change of scenery, he can just up sticks any time. He definitely brings some unique talents to the company. It's no wonder they've been using cardboard fold-up things in so many of their recent modules. Michael Dobson is the Director of Games Development. Exactly what this job means in contrast with designers and editors is not made entirely clear, but I'm sure he gets to add his own creative input to lots of products as a result. He's another of our real brainboxes, completing his qualifications rather faster than most people do, and then going through a whole bunch of strange jobs before getting in with TSR. Will he move on again? Meh. Not that important. TSR Previews: D&D continues to tap into it's own history, with DA3: City of the gods. Dave Arneson once again uses technology as a fantastic device. Can your characters get some of the ancient technology and turn it to their own ends, or will the villains beat them too it? AD&D is also on a retread kick with I12: The egg of the Pheonix. Frank Mentzer compiles his old RPGA adventures, and weaves them together into a single larger plot. Will it become better as a result, or will the compression mess things up? Lazer tag gets the Official Tournament book. You've had a couple of months to learn the rules for a game, now you can string several together and score the results, forming league tables and other fun stuff like that. Woo. Dragonlance gets it's first volume of short stories. See, it's not all epic worldthreatening conflicts of good vs evil. More general worldbuilding that Tracey and Margaret probably thought up a while ago, but haven't got a chance to show us before. Solo gamebooks are the big thing this month. Endless quest is up to book 36: Song of the Dark Druid. Stop the evil wizard from corrupting the fabled song of gold. Greyhawk Adventures gets book 3: Master wolf. Marvel super heroes gets book 4: Dr Strange in Through six Dimensions. Hmm. Were these any good? We haven't had any discussion of them at all. Snarfquest starts it's new adventure..... In  Spaaaaace! Dragonmirth parties like it's the 1950's. Wormy shows that scary storm giant being manipulative. Not that it's hard to manipulate ogres, especially when you're smarter and more charismatic than the trolls trying it last issue.  Another pretty strong themed issue, if not quite as tightly focused as the last one. But things continue to progress rapidly in D&D's history at this point, with the forgotten realms finally kicking into high gear, sage advice starting it's classic run, and plenty of other bits and pieces going on. Things seem to be going up again at this point. I'm certainly in the mood to keep pressing onwards. Lets hope next issue is just as full of fun, if not more so. If anything is going to test Roger, it's how he handles our yearly dose of april wackiness.</blockquote>

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