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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4943037" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 145: May 1989part 4/5The role of books cleans up it's formatting, making the titles easier to pick out. The planet builders trilogy by Robyn Tallis manages to sneak some obscure references into a fun set of young adult stories. And as the reviewer points out, you've gotta hook 'em young if you want to ensure a future generation of gamers. Hmm. Don't underestimate the intelligence of kids if you want to sell to them. The bristling wood by Katherine Kerr is set in the world of Dverry, her longstanding setting. It already has quite substantial amounts of mythos built up, and the reviewer recommends starting with the previous ones if you want to understand everything. He's also not sure about the attempt to combine celtic and chinese mysticism. Overall, he likes it, but he's certainly spending more time on it's flaws than it's good points. Svaha by Charles de Lint sees him push the envelope in terms of milieus covered, while maintaining his usual standard of fun and well crafted storytelling. Combining oriental and amerindian mythology successfully, the reviewer seems to like this rather more than the previous book. Vulcan's glory by D C Fontana gets a rather vicious review for blatantly violating existing trek canon and characterization. Spock doesn't act like that! This is highly illogical captain. I suspect the presence of an idiot ball. I recommend we pretend that this whole incident never happened. A spell of deceit by Laurie Goodman is another young adult one that also contains decidedly mature moral questions and character dynamics. Including the question of how you keep characters of very different alignments in the same team without killing each other. Which I suppose is a useful question to consider for gamers. The mirror maze by James P Hogan is an interesting but flawed piece of sci fi/espionage adventure. While there are plenty of interesting elements, the combination of omniscient viewpoint being in error, characters making expository speeches which are obviously intended for the reader, not the other characters, and a blatant real world political agenda, keeps them from recommending it. Those who hunt the night by Barbara Hambly is a vampire mystery novel. Someone's killing them all, and of course, being badass creatures of de niiight, they're rather worried and want to stop this. As it also goes into quite a bit of detail on their physiology and how they fit into the world, it looks like a good one to draw on to make a game setting. And it tells a pretty good story too. Was this part of the inspiration for Vampire: the Masquerade? Shadow world. A mysterious world plagued by the unlife, a force from beyond the dimensions. (Isn't that the plot of the neverending story? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) A new Rolemaster setting. Now with 200% more GRIMDARK!™. Well, it is nearly the 90's. And since plenty of writers still haven't got over that awkward phase, we'll probably see plenty of that in the future.</blockquote>

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