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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4808179" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 122: June 1987part 2/5The ecology of the rot grub: Or Ew, ew, it just crawled inside me! getitout getitout getitout! as they are colloquially known. Yeah, these are fun little bastards to trick and squick your players with, and Ed Greenwood is fully aware of this fact. Even the stuffiest of sages will show a crack in their composure at the prospect of one of these getting loose mid-lecture. Ed skips the footnotes completely this time around, but this is still a fun little feature, that feels like a throwback to the early days of the ecologies, back in '83. He knows sage and adventurer psychology inside out by now, and this is pretty well tailored to answering some of the common questions adventurers might have. Nice to see he can still knock em out when in the right mood. A step beyond shogun: We obviously have a lot of oriental articles, because they're continuing on from last month. This is a brief review of 5 of the books from OA's bibliography, so as to give you a little more info on just what you're getting yourself into if you pick them up. The writer goes for the ones that have already made some pop culture penetration, The art of war, A book of 5 rings, another biography of Myamoto Musashi, two books on the nature of what it means to be a samurai, this is very much a japan focussed populist selection. Still, if people are daunted by that bibliography, you want to direct them towards the more accessible stuff first. Don't want them put off before they even play. Very much a filler article. And a step beyond that: Zeb Cook gives us yet more source material to read, this time Officially Recommended. What is Japanese architecture. The Taiheiki. Ugetsu Monogatari. Japanese ghosts and demons. Japanese castles. The samurai film. The medieval Japanese Daimyo. 7 more books for you to check out if you want to fill in your OA campaigns with realistic historical detail. Nice to see he's still enthusiastic abut the topic, but as a dry listing, this doesn't make very interesting reading in itself. Yet more stuff to possibly check out once I've completed this insanely long trek through history. Out of Africa: Hmm. Yes, compared to europe and the orient, africa does get relatively little airtime in mythological circles. But there's no shortage of legends from there. Quite the opposite, given the number of different tribes, it's just that they're not remotely unified, or even particularly well documented in comparison to greek and norse myth. This is the advantage of writing stuff down. It really does help with the posterity thing. Even more helpful is artwork, which is important for getting a fixed form from the strange descriptions in oral tales. Still, we can extract more than enough fairly concrete creatures from those legends to make up a whole bestiary full of monsters. And if you want to make some more, there's a pretty decent bibliography for you to hunt down and read. A nicely flavourful collection that looses a couple of points for being purely fluff. Gaming the dark continent: Fortunately, Our esteemed lead editor is here, and continues his practice of making articles that complement each other, by himself if he has too. So here's stats for 11 creatures from the preceding article. There's something here to challenge you from 1st to low name levels, taking you from tricksy little humanoids, to gigantic swamp monsters. The descriptions are very sparse, because of course most of the fluff was back in the preceding article, which results in lots of annoying flipping back and forth. Would it have been too hard to composite these two articles into a seamless whole? Oh well. Still very much better than nothing. Now what we need is some stuff on playing african PC's. Come on writers. Don't let me down. Paranoia second edition. Now even your own clones are out to get you. Buy it now. Not upgrading is treasonous citizen, as the computer may crash from incompatible code. As the computer is perfect, this cannot be. Long live the computer! The natural Order: Looks like following on from recent issues is the theme of this one, as we now have lots of new druid spells for you to exploit as well. Arthur Collins delivers 21 new spells of all levels. All are suitable to druid's nature control purview, and help add a little more celtic flavour to the class. Utility and combat both get their fair share, and we also get a quartet of seasonal ceremony spells, as inspired by Len Lakofka in issue 58. Someone's maintaining a proper sense of history here, and finally seeing a symmetry like this filled in is curiously pleasing to me. He may not be one of their star writers, but Arthur is certainly continuing to deliver over a longer period than most of their freelancers. And it looks like that will continue for quite some time longer, since I remember him still being around when I started reading. If he continues to deliver little gems like this, I have no objection to this state of affairs.From the sorceror's scroll: Yes, Gary shows his face again (sorta, because the graphic that used to adorn this column is missing) after his mysterious and unheralded disappearance. However, it is only to explain what has been going down in the past year or so, and deliver a terse goodbye. He was forced out by the board of directors (naming no names, but glaring very hard at) After much unpleasantness, he resigned entirely, washing his hands of the crap, and formed a new company. Looks like Kim Mohan and Frank Mentzer decided their loyalties lay with Gary rather than the company as well, and jumped ship. That explains Kim's sudden departure from the editing job, forcing Roger to edit two magazines at once, as they wouldn't have done that intentionally. Even Penny Petticord has switched sides, albeit a bit later. Man, this is uncomfortable. He's trying to couch it in optimistic terms, but all those staff leaving must have left quite a bit of chaos in their wake and bad blood on both sides. It's surprising that they managed to keep the magazine running as smoothly as they did. He hopes to talk to us again soon, but of course I very much doubt we'll see much of that in here. They wouldn't want to give airtime to a dangerous competitor. Rather shoddy of them to stuff this in the middle and treat it like one of those little retractions you see in the newspapers, something faintly embarrassing they'd rather you didn't notice. At least they deigned to say something, even if the true extent of the backstage ugliness remains very much concealed. So long, Gary. Don't be a stranger.</blockquote>

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