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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4845292" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 128: December 1987part 1/5110 pages. Notice the name change? It may be small, but it's still very much there. Another step towards the magazine being the way I remember it. Curiously, after a year filled with them, they've decided not to have a particular theme for christmas. Hopefully that means they're only giving us the best they have in their reserves, whatever that may be, instead of putting in several filler articles to make up the numbers, but you never can tell. In any case, it definitely looks like we're getting another board game, which is interesting. Lets see if they can make this fun, despite it being just another year at the office for the writers. In this issue: Letters: Two more letters from people still fiddling around with Dragonchess. One has been trying to program it on the computer, while the other has been busy assembling the best minis for representing it. Two letters on Clay-O-Rama. Despite it being an obvious joke game, they still have rules questions. Sometimes I dispair of you people. A letter asking for more frequent board games. Quite a reasonable request, really. You may be in luck. Cthulhu wishes all you puny mortals a merry christmas! Be happy, for tomorrow I may decide to eat you all. Rather missing the point there, methinks. When have cosmic entities cared about human naming conventions? Forum: David Rudge talks about the mystic college rules from issue 123. Drawing from his own experience as a postgraduate, he picks holes in the amount of time you would reasonably expect faculty members to devote to teaching and their own researches. After all, wizards are an iconoclastic bunch, and if the terms of work aren't convenient for them, they are quite capable of going elsewhere. David Carl Argall returns. He's also in favor of mystic colleges in principle, but picking holes in issue 123's article. In his case, this is on the grounds of economics.   As written, it's near impossible to make a profit on running one. Given that real life schools often charge students (or their parents) obscene fees, and make up the rest from government subsidy, this seems pretty realistic to me. Most teachers do it because they want too, (or as the saying goes, because they can't do) not for the money. If you want to make a profit, you've should sell spells for commercial ends, using the apprentices to handle all the low level stuff, and only teaching them what they need to know. Timothy J Cunningham thinks that the magazine shouldn't publish multiple different conflicting sets of new rules. It makes a mess out of the game, and no-one knows which ones to use. Steve Shrewchuk points out a whole bunch of tricks even a low level magic-user can pull to make themselves highly effective. If they're multi-classed, as most elf and half elf ones will be, they can be even scarier, combing cantrips and mundane tricks to great aplomb. That's what high intelligence should involve, and that's how you get them to survive to higher levels. K.B. LaBaw also thinks that the unsurvivability of magic-users at low level has been greatly exaggerated. This is why adventurers adventure in teams. A group of people with varied skills can accomplish what one on their own cannot. You should try and figure out why the designer made the rules the way they are, and what playstyle they intended to encourage with them, before simply saying they're crap and changing them. Welcome to waterdeep: Ed delivers some Forgotten Realms goodies to kick off the issue with. Waterdeep is going to be one of the most important and well documented locations in the world. As usual, Ed has written far more than can fit in a reasonably sized sourcebook, but it's still kickass stuff they want to get out there, so the magazine gets the bonus material. A map detailing the region over a hundred miles in each direction, and 14 locations of note that your adventurers might want to visit. Quite a few of them are obvious adventure locations for the DM to use to challenge players with, which is definitely a good thing. Others are friendly, but still have plot hooks and distinctive flavours added which make them interesting places to visit. This is another volley of classic Ed material, full of ideas that could be extracted fairly easily and placed into your own campaign, but which tie together to create a greater whole in his. I could praise his skills all day, but I don't want to turn this into a sickly love-fest, so I won't. Lets just say it richly deserves it's place as our pole position christmas present and leave it at that.</blockquote>

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