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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4849046" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 128: December 1987part 4/5King's table: Our centrepiece this month does not spring from the deranged minds of our game designers, but instead is an actual historical boardgame dug out from the historical records, and given to us to try out. Originally called Hnefatafl, and played by the vikings, this has been around for over 1,300 years, with several variants. The king is surrounded by marauding hordes. One side takes that role, and has to defeat them or get the king to escape by reaching the corner of the board.  The other, of course, has to trap him if they want to win. It looks simple enough to set up and learn the rules too, and even the epic variant with 19x19 squares, and 73 pieces should progress at a pretty pacey speed as long as you don't have the kind of player who spends minutes deliberating over every move. They do admit that the king's side is slightly more likely to win, but the imbalance certainly isn't so great as to keep it from being fun. A nicely multipurpose centrepiece, that you could use as a bit of standalone entertainment, or incorporate into your campaign as a game played by the people within, and also gives us some real world historical info I didn't know before. This is well within their remit, and I quite approve. Plane speaking belatedly delivers us the negative quasielementals. All of them have the lovely effect of absorbing their related element, to the detriment of the environment when on the prime material. Not a good idea to mess with them. But if you're a druid who wants to stop ecological devastation, as is your job, you may have too. Blasting them from long range with spells and magic weapons is probably the way to go here. A short and too the point contribution, that completes the symmetry here. (although I don't thing we've seen pure positive and negative elementals (energentals?)) I have no problem with this, but as we've already exhausted most of our talk about it, not much more to say either. I look forward to seeing if I can use them in actual play. Stardate magazine. Another publication I don't remember. Any info on this one?Chopper power!: Top Secret's articles continue to be behind the times, with these fairly crunchy stats for helicopters. Invaluable for both transport and combat, they're another thing that may push your game away from espionage, and towards military gaming if overused. Still, as they've pointed out recently, espionage and war go hand in hand a lot of the time, so drawing a hard line is tricky. It's up to your GM to choose if they want to allow this stuff. The magazine can't hold your hand the whole time. At least now you have the option. A mutant by any other name: Gamma world skips the edition support questions this month with a system free one on slang and naming conventions in the far future. It's no surprise that things like that would carry on evolving, especially when the culture has changed radically, and there's no more mass media to standardize things across the world. There's the usual mix of corrupted existing cultural references, in-jokes, and stuff that seems random to me, but that may just because I don't get all the references. It certainly doesn't seem as immediately memorable and natural to slip into as planescape cant, but that may just be the familiarity speaking. Course, we're not likely to see this stuff go into common use, as it's just a magazine article, so it probably won't get the chance to grow on me either. Still, this is definitely the kind of world-building I approve of, so here's hoping. Polyhedron took our second edition scoop. Sonofabitch. Do they want us to shell out money for three magazines now to keep up with everything D&D?Robotech is now up to four books. Another game line is building up quite nicely. The island in your computer: Another internet-centric article. One of the earliest MMORPG's gets a good looking over. Island of Kesnai is a game on Compuserve's network. (of course, they didn't have standardized protocols, so who had access to what and how much it cost varied widely from region to region. We have no world wide web yet) Anyway, this is a text based adventure game where you build your character, advance them, join teams of other adventures, and complete quests to deal with the (endlessly respawning) threats to the kingdom. Curiously, they deal with the powerful characters dominating the game problem, by giving each character a limited lifespan. So no matter how well you do, your character will die permanently after a while, and you'll have to start a new one. Now that's definitely a sign we're still a long way from home. There are plenty of familiar elements though, such as the classes, alignment system, and scenarios. The message boards and chat system are pretty friendly and helpful. This is another article that's very interesting indeed in terms of getting a view of historical progress. I never even heard of the internet until the mid 90's, when it was already exploding onto the mass market. Seeing stuff from when it was still the preserve of tech nerds with lots of money to burn does make me feel like I've missed something. Oh well, guess I get to see it from nostalgia free eyes. Let's hope there's some more of this stuff to come as well.</blockquote>

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