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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4855528" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 129: January 1988part 5/5 The marvel-phile: Jeff finally delivers the first part of the victims of Scourge. Marvel attempted to clear house recently, getting rid of a big chunk of their Z-list villains. And on the whole this managed to stick, because no-one liked these guys enough to bring them back. Enforcer. Miracle man. Hate-monger III. Megatak. Melter. Titania. Basilisk. Hammer & Anvil. The Fly. Death Adder. Blue Streak. Wraith. These 13 unfortunates get stats, and very short descriptions here. Just looking at the puns in their names is enough to make me groan. The art direction is pretty interesting as well (Pum as the sound for gunshots? What's up with that? ) Jeff proves he is quite capable of cutting the crap when necessary. Definitely another interesting bit of history, that has had me googling away to find out more info on how this went down, and the aftermath of these plots. Funny that this has had the side effect of increasing my comics knowledge quite a bit. Hopefully there's more of that to come as well, as long as TSR keep the license and carry on putting out these columns. Role-playing reviews once again gives us a history lesson before getting down to the reviews. This time, it's on world-building, and TSR's initial reluctance to get involved with it. While Tekumel had some cool setting stuff, stuff like Runequest and Harn massively outdid D&D until 1983, when they decided to play catch-up. And really, they've been playing catch-up ever since, and won't really pull ahead for another year or so, when the Forgotten Realms really starts filling up with supplements covering every area in detail. Ken offers a pretty balanced take on this, pointing out both the good aspects and the flaws in TSR and it's competitor's approaches. Very interesting to see the perspective of someone who lived through that era. GAZ3 The principalities of Glantri is one of the D&D Gazetteers, filling in rather more setting details of the Known World than the old modules did.  The whole line is rapidly becoming notable for being much more high magic than any of the AD&D settings, and this one really takes that to the limit, with it's nobility consisting entirely of name+ level wizards and magically powerful creatures such as liches, vampires, immortals in disguise, some of them from other planets. Religion is outlawed, and magic use is common in every strata of society. Bruce and co have great fun building up a setting that is simultaneously gonzo and well considered, making the ridiculous commonplace, and filling the place with plot hooks. The writing is good, there's plenty of cool new crunch to differentiate your wizards in a MU centric campaign set there, and it makes good use of D&D's rules quirks and implied tropes.  You can have a lot of fun there. The Forgotten Realms campaign set gets an even more comprehensive review, with plenty more comparing and contrasting with the other D&D settings, and even other companies stuff. Each of the booklets is examined individually, and most of it comes off pretty well. Ken probably has more caveats with this than he did with the Glantri stuff, but it's still entirely serviceable as a core product, giving more than enough detail to get going, while still leaving plenty of room for future books to fill in more specific bits in detail. We also get several significant micro-reviews. Whimsy Cards are a creation of Mark Rein·Hagen (damn that pretentious splodge) and Jonathan Tweet. Pull one out whenever you need a random plot twist.  How very amusing. Nice to see those two names who'll go on to bigger things showing up now. Warhammer 40k has also just been released. Ken gets rather ranty about this one, liking the visuals, and lots of the setting elements but being really frustrated that there isn't an RPG based upon it. You're gonna have a Loooooooooooooooooong wait there mate. Overall, this has been one of the most entertaining review columns ever, both in terms of critical depth, significant products covered, and the way it was done being entertaining reading in itself. We're definitely into the magazine's golden years now as far as reviews are concerned, with books, computers and RPG's all getting plenty of well thought out attention. How very pleasing.  Dragonmirth has lots of food related jokes. Snarf runs over another innocent creature. Wormy is missing. The last word: Hee. Comedy central continues with this little feature, which is exactly what it sounds like. Did you suspect your immanent death? The kind of thing we see forum threads on on a regular basis, and is always good for a laugh or two. Another amusing little experiment by Roger, including things like this to keep the format getting too predictable. Keep it up. One of those issues with a somewhat iffy themed section, but the rest of it is pretty good. Of particular note is the quality of the reviews, which have improved massively over recent years. While the quality of the RPG articles is as scattershot as it has been recently, they really are getting the hang of assessing other companies works in an informative, interesting, and often humorous manner. This does result in a more open feeling magazine, and if they maintain or improve on this showing over the next decade or so, before they get cut out, they'll definitely contribute quite a bit more to my overall enjoyment of this journey, and give me plenty more things that I want to investigate at some point in the future. Course, the page count for this is probably coming out of the same bit that would otherwise be used for non TSR RPG's, so it's not all good, but as long as they provide something enjoyable, I'm not complaining too much.</blockquote>

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