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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4809847" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 122: June 1987part 4/5The leader of the pack: This month's Star frontiers article is a quick one on the nature of the two social stats, and the difference between then. Persuasion is about your charm and skill at social repartee, while leadership measures your ability to boss people around and impart critical information in crisis situations. A perfectly valid way to divide things up, if one that can probably be picked apart by rules lawyers looking for edge cases. Definitely a filler article here, with the amount of text and illustration here finely formatted to fit around the adverts. It does have the neat idea of aiding others with your advice, and actually allowing mechanical benefits from doing so, so it's not a complete waste of time. That is, after all, an idea that would go on to be much more popular in the future. TSR Previews: A decidedly short list of new products this month. Don't worry though, because it looks like there's considerably more in the month after.D&D is getting B1-9: In search of adventure. Another attack of rehash, this ties all these earlier adventures more closely into the Known Worlds setting, giving you a nice little sandbox to level up your characters in with plenty of choices on where to go. It's also getting DA4: The dutchy of ten. Dave Arneson's been back less than a year, and now he's buggered off again, leaving the writing of the final Blackmoor module to his collaborator. Not a very impressive run, really. What was the backstage reason behind things turning out this way? AD&D is getting the Manual of the Planes! One of Jeff Grubb's crowning achievements, this might not have quite the style of the later planescape stuff, but it certainly makes the planes playable and then some. This opens up a lot of campaign options and is pretty fun to read as well. If you don't want to go that far afield, but have still made it to high level, you can instead try H3: Bloodstone wars. Use the mass combat system to forge an army and rid a city of marauding bandits. Must be a lot of bandits. No wonder they're a nightmare to get rid of. Fiction: The Prince's Birthday by Keith Minnion. A question often asked of genius inventors. If you're so smart, then why are you not in charge. Why are you taking commissions from a tyrannical sadistic maniac who's likely to kill you if you fail to amuse, and almost as likely to kill you if you succeed, so no-one else can have a copy of the cool stuff you've made for them. A very valid question. Interestingly, this one has read the legend of Dadaelus and Icarus, and isn't going to make the same mistake. Not only is he smart enough to get out of dodge at the right time, but he's also smart enough to leave something behind that'll really get him out of trouble. I won't spoiler you as to the details, but I did find this pretty enjoyable, and hope that if I have to resign from some big tyrannical corporation, I can go out with half as much style. Profiles: Jeff Butler may look like a jock, play sports like a jock, and wound up marrying a cheerleader, but he's also a skilled artist, growing up on a diet of comic books and swords and sorcery. (with lurid covers, of course) He did all sorts of freelance drawing work before joining a small comics company. When that ran into financial trouble and it all went a bit pear shaped, he was clued in to TSR's job opening, and of course got to draw the big names, as the Marvel super heroes game took off. As a sideline, he's also started creating live action superhero costumes. Seems like he's definitely living the dream. Jane Cooper is one of our book editors. She's gone from minnesota, to wisconsin, to taiwan, and back, picking up a husband while out there. As another of the surprisingly large contingent of staff who never gamed before coming to work there,   she's had a lot to learn, but if you can learn other languages, you can probably adapt to most corporate structures. Patrick McGilligan is yet another of our editors. They sure do have a lot of them. (well, I suppose it's better than White Wolf's only having two editors in the entire company, who give the impression they'd much rather be writers, and farming out the scutwork to Scribendi) He's written plays, biographies, edited Playgirl, (yeah, Suuuuuure you only edited it for the articles.) interviewed tons of famous people, and then decided that he'd prefer a slightly duller life, so he'd work as a book editor for TSR. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> He's played a big part in the making of the new Windwalker, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels. What writers will he sucker in with promises of fame and fortune next?</blockquote>

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