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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4948500" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 146: June 1989part 5/5Dangerous terrain: Gamma world's article this month is a few extra wilderness hazards. As if there aren't more than enough of those. But you know how those random encounter tables get stale and predictable after a few years of regular play. Like a long-married couple, adding some new toys to the games room is needed to keep a group together. One of those short, not particularly consequential articles that does what it does, neither too good or too bad. I suppose I should be pleased that it's still getting any coverage at all, since they haven't released any new supplements for the game in a while. The role of computers: Might and magic II gets a large and detailed review, as an epic adventure game should get here. This does require quite a lot of disks, and backing up your saves is a good idea. They give us plenty of advice on the various character classes and how to use them. There's plenty of cool new stuff to discover, including time travel stuff which means the same location will have different stuff in it at different points. They're generally pretty positive, with their only gripe being the endlessly respawning random encounters which seem to throw monsters together without rhyme or reason. Oh well. It's not as if that's uncommon in computer games. Hostage, on the other hand, gets a 5 star rating. While you don't get to negotiate with the terrorists, you do get tons of tactical choices, as you co-ordinate your team to take out the enemies with minimum loss of civilian life. Set up sharpshooters, lead your strike team in, and switch between characters rapidly. Think fast, because the terrorists are pretty smart too, and the whole thing maintains an impressively persistent environment. Arrows of the east: Oriental adventures continues to get attention. Not that alternate arrow types didn't appear in the west, but they only got codified for D&D in OA, so this falls under that aegis. This is a combination of errata and expansion, making armor-piercing arrows actually, y'know, better at penetrating armor, as well as adding several new tricks. Still, we had another one of these fairly recently (issue 133) which was more inventive in it's new tricks, so overall, this is a pretty unimpressive little article. When you've got to fill an exact page count every month, you're going to get padding, and this is another example of that. If you wish upon a star: Wish nerfing? Here we go again. Not a promising start. However, this manages to avoid the rehash problem by covering this topic with greater detail and methodicality than any of the previous articles managed. It isn't even too restrictive, since the massive array of options drawn from tales of all kinds will really help you choose just how restricted a wish from any particular source should be. With some fairly decent tables, tons of examples, and a decent bibliography for further reading, this is actually pretty good, and about as worthy a contribution on this topic as we're probably ever going to see. If you're going to do something ill-advised, do it in style, and you might be able to pull it off. The great khan game. Another amusingly illustrated creation from the fertile mind of Tom Wham. As ever, they would like it if you bought it. Dragonmirth really needs to tidy up. Yamara is well and truly defeated by dreadful dialogue. A strong start that then gradually peters out this issue. For all their statements that they're trying to look forward, this one does seem to be somewhat stuck in the past,  with lots of stuff dependent on products that are very much old news. Just how much more OA stuff can the market bear? When will they actually start publishing submissions using the 2e rules? Come on. You've been advertising this stuff for 2 years now. I want the new shinys already.</blockquote>

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