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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4938002" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 144: April 1989part 3/5Claydonia conquers the world!: Clay-o-Rama is back! Bigger and better than ever. Now you can advance your surviving creatures, and bring them to future games. And a whole bunch of other optional rules for you to try out. New powers! Playing without a GM! Rebuilding, bigger and badder! Well, the original rules are pretty loose anyway. In this case, a little tightening up probably wouldn't hurt. Not sure about character advancement though. Seems entirely too easy to cheat on in a con game. Oh well. At least it's not useless stuff that you should keep out of your game at all costs. Still more outrages from the mages: Such as this. 27 joke spells, which either do nothing, do something that you could do just as effectively with mundane actions, or do something that is purely useless and harmful to the caster. Bigby's interposing eye, Drawmij's instant death, speak with mud, transmute rock to stone, we get lots of subversions of existing spells here. Mildly amusing, but not useful except as booby prize scrolls to put in treasure hoards and annoy your players with. And so the joke section draws to a close. Role-playing reviews:Toon got reviewed way back in issue 92. But it's still going, has quite a few supplements, and is still fairly groundbreaking. As is far too often the case with retreads, this is rather less interesting than the original review, both in writing style, and level of insight involved. But the game still kicks ass, so if it sells more people on it, then it's not too bad. The Bullwinkle and Rocky Roleplaying game tries to cover similar ground, but with a lot more visual aids, and attempts to make things modular. You can play it purely using the event cards, trying to fit together a coherent story from the prefab pieces. You can play using the spinner, and trading off narrators. And then you can progress to making your own characters. You can't really advance them beyond that, and it does seem very much designed as a party game rather than a "proper" RPG. Have fun with it, but don't expect any deep meaningful stories. We also get reviews of two Paranoia supplements. Ruthless mockery (in a good way) ensues, as you would expect. Tom Wham's new game, Mertwig's maze, also gets mentioned. Finally, we have one of our fun rebuttals. Jim stands by his statement that the new city of the invincible overlord is rubbish. Remember, it's only opinion. If we don't provide negative contrasts, then you can't see just how good the really good ones are by comparison. Ahh, the pressure to whitewash. A perpetual and rather serious problem, particularly when the reviewers are paid by the companies they're reviewing. Always interesting to see how different people cope with it. When gods walk the earth: Runequest gets another article on it's magic, as seems to be common choice here. Do you really want to summon the avatar of a god? There always seems to be some idiot who wants too, even in games such as call of cthulhu, where success will result in huge amounts of death and insanity for everyone in the vicinity. Even the supposedly benign ones are arrogant and obsessive beings that will demand your absolute servitude and order you around with no regard to your human limitations. You have been warned. Don't come crying to me when your god of healing transforms the entire congregation into a fleshy amorphous amalgam that regenerates so fast that it's impossible to kill. Yeah, I'll still tell you how to do it. I'll even give you some pointers on how to get rid of the blighters as well. Obviously, this is primarily intended as a way for GM's to launch adventures, rather than a spell the players would cast. And it serves quite well in that role, both as something to foil before it happens, and deal with afterwards. Fairly pleasing.</blockquote>

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