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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4881411" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 135: July 1988part 4/5Virgin games centre advertises in Dragon. Another depressing reminder of how much more mainstream the hobby was in that era. You bought your gaming products in the regular toy stores along with the computer games and mainstream albums, not some <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> little niche of a <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> little comic book store with a tiny selection. (no offense, forbidden planet, traveling man, and all the rest.) If we didn't have the internet, we'd never find most of the books we want. Also, WFT kind of name is Zavvi? It's no wonder you're suffering these days. TSR Previews: D&D is still mainly gazetteering lately, with The Northern Reaches. A viking raider culture is a perfect place for adventurers to come from. Including a 3D village? Interesting. AD&D gets DL15: The mists of Krynn. Lots of miniadventures, set all over Ansalon, including plenty of familiar faces. This world aint dying any time soon. Marvel superheroes goes from E to M in another 256 page handbook. The frequency which each letter shows up in the alphabet is exceedingly uneven. Top Secret gets TS3: Orion Rising. Lots more details on the good guy bureaus. Just what you need to figure out what missions to give your players. On the books front, we have Sniper! Adventure gamebook 6: Libyan Strike, Greyhawk adventure 6: The name of the game, and Starsong, a novel by Dan Parkinson. Busy busy busy.And finally in boardgames, we get the I think you think I think game. Doublethink your way to victory. I'm sure I've seen something similar as a facebook app, which says a lot about how boardgames have been superceded even more than RPG's by computers. Fiction: Karl and the ogre by Paul J McAuley. Fittingly for an issue which has already had several bits on crossing over genres and converting from one to another, here's a reminder that the boundary between fantasy and sci-fi is easily crossed, and there are many fantasy series set in a time after the fall of modern civilisation, when the magic has come back, for whatever reason. This is one of those, and a somewhat disconcerting one too. The big danger of transhumanism is if you create massively superior people, what they will do to normal people in return. Will they oppress them, look after them for their own good, or simply kill them all so everyone can be superior. And if their minds are that far ahead of ours, will we be able to tell the difference between benevolence and tyranny? A nicely thought-provoking little piece. Up close and personal: Top secret actually gets an S.I specific article at last. A little piece on unarmed combat in the game, what exactly the various moves do. Now you have a little more support for your cinematic moves, instead of letting the fight degenerate into a slugfest because no-one wants to go through the hassle of figuring out how to do more complex stuff. This is a good example of how the universal resolution tables make these kind of things easy to understand, and make it easy to include fun special effects for drastic failures and successes. This certainly makes it look both fun and fast moving. So I think thats a success then. Role-playing reviews: This month's theme is stuff with visual aids. Pictures, miniatures, cutouts, sometimes even full-on constructible castles, these can definitely spice up your game. Ken is a fan of having toys like this, and talks about their upside, problems, and his judging criteria. He also mentions those great bugbears of gridded minis combat, scale and diagonal movement. The square root of 2 is not a rational number, and trying to reconcile this with simple rules causes quite a bit of hassle, while going hex has it's own problems when you want to move in a straight line. Just use a ruler. Another unexpected digression here. This is definitely a promising start. The halls of the dwarven kings is a pretty boxed set devoted to an underground scenario. Build up the abandoned dwarven halls, and have your players explore them. (they're actually too big for you to build the entire thing with the pieces provided, but since they shouldn't know what's coming that just means you'll have to build up and remove stuff on the fly) The whole thing is tremendously detailed, and includes stats "compatible with" D&D and Runequest, and easily convertable to other systems. This is several steps above most generic adventures both visually and mechanically. Blood on the streets is a warhammer supplement which allows you to build your own villages. The different houses are all nicely english and individualised, and fit together nicely. They also tie together into a small collection of villages, with a whole load of NPC's and adventure hooks. Again, it wouldn't be hard to use the pieces in some other game. Citi-Block is a sci-fi variant on the same theme. This is officially for warhammer 40k and Judge Dredd (goes to show how closely related they are in terms of urban construction and philosophy) and obviously wouldn't be of much use in a shiny happy future like star trek. It's probably the most flawed of these three products, but you can still get plenty of use out of it if you put the effort in. Lots more mini-reviews here. Most notable is the his review of Castle Greyhawk, which gets quite a good review. They've taken the old skool dungeon design style, and sent it up in amusing fashion while also lampshading some of it's tropes. And since he cut his teeth on that playstyle, he rather likes this. Hmm.</blockquote>

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