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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4958362" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 148: August 1989part 5/5The role of computers: Prophecy is a fairly decent action-adventure game. Save the  land from the latest villain trying to take it over. The review section of this is fairly short, with lots of direct hints on how to get past certain obstacles and win the game. Seems like the clue corner is proving very popular, so they've decided to apply that approach to the actual reviews. Curious.  The magic candle gets a more conventional review, for a slightly less conventional game. Create a party, and send them off to save another kingdom. What's different is the way that play is handled, with party splitting, formalized training, and actions consuming energy, which then needs to be carefully managed. Does seem like it'll require quite a bit of character switching and learning to complete. Pool of radiance and Ultima V are our main subjects in the clue corner. Amusingly, they advise us to sleep spam low level creatures. Ahh, the joys of older editions. Overall, this one feels a bit shorter than usual. Oh well, plenty more stuff to see. Around the world in 36 levels: Basic D&D gets a straight promotional piece. Seems like far too many people look down on it, and are ignoring it in favour of going straight to AD&D. That's certainly the way it seems from the articles in the magazine. But recently, they have been doing some pretty extensive worldbuilding, filling in the various countries in ways that make them quite different from the base assumptions (apart from Karameikos of course, which is designed to satisfy them as no other) but still fun places to adventure in. This makes it much easier for you to get a campaign going, and keep it interesting, whatever your level. There's plenty of information, while at the same time not filling in so much that the DM has no freedom to fill things in further. There is a faint hint of desperation to this, and it does make me wonder just what the current state of affairs is in terms of sales, and the office politics surrounding it. Is it being kept on as a sinecure, is it in danger of being cancelled? In any case, I do find this a little worrying, as well as largely being a waste of space for me, as it's not introducing any new material. Let's hope this works, and brings round some new players, because it's not the kind of thing I'm very keen on seeing. Through the looking glass: Another battle report this issue. The old classic turnaround of the humanoids attacking the village sees a whole bunch of creatures, from kobolds to an umber hulk, teaming up to bring the devastation. Still, the good guys assemble fast, and thanks to a bit of wizardly artillery, the battle is nowhere near one sided. The battle is recounted in a very close to the ground way, with individual figures given lots of characterization. Using minis does not have to mean a lack of roleplaying. A rather quirky little entry here, that's interesting to read, but not particularly useful. I guess, like the fiction, it doesn't have to be, it just needs to be inspirational. Watch your step!: Top Secret gets it's first article this year. That really does illustrate just how much they've dropped the non D&D stuff recently, usually only having one token article on another TSR gameline per issue. And this little piece on landmines shows that they're continuing their focus on more military matters, and are unlikely to reverse either trend any time soon. With plenty of talk about the trigger mechanisms of these delightful little lumps of potential death, this is easily convertible to other games, including the making of D&D traps. If you want to play things tomb of horrors style, where player ingenuity is paramount over rolls, and one wrong step spells doom, this is a good one to incorporate. If not, well, you probably won't want to use these regularly. Still, either way, it's another pretty decent choice for you to take as a GM. Dragonmirth runs up against bureaucracy again. Yamara looks for a new job. We really need another comic to fill out this section. Ooh, pretty. Connecting with the deck of many things article earlier this issue, we have a selection of cards for you to cut out and use when your players encounter this item. Course, this is another thing that'll be somewhat inconvenient to construct from .pdf, because you'll need to print out both sides, and then stick them to cardstock, but that's not an insurmountable problem. The biggest danger is the artifacts from your assembly process allowing them to figure out which card is which and only pick the good ones. Guess I'll just have to be extra careful. Or use the tarot of many things from issue 77 instead. Now that was a nifty article. A rather quirky issue. With the combination of an unusually high level of whimsy, and the extensive look back on the old classes, it does stand out, although I'm not entirely sure if it's in a good or bad way. As usual when there's plenty of both good and bad elements, I shall have to return a cautious positive. It's certainly not a load of rehashed crap, despite drawing heavily from existing material.</blockquote>

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