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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4969018" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 150: October 1989part 4/5TSR Previews: Our big release this month, slightly late, is the first campaign setting for 2nd edition. Spelljammer! Get up there, and get ready for crossovers. D&D is also trying something new, with PC1: Tall tales of the wee folk. Orcs of Thar seems to have proved popular enough to create a spin-off line focussed on making various races available as PC's. Very neat. Will they be horribly unbalanced? Confusingly, we have three books called Waterdeep this month. The avatar trilogy comes to an end, with Richard Awlinson completing this tale of gods losing their powers, dying, and being replaced. The module of the same events, FR3, also sees Midnight becoming the new god of magic, while you don't. Are you going to get off the train at this stop? And the trail map of the same name actually covers the whole of the western side of the Realms. Surely you can find somewhere nice to stay for a while until all the gods stop tromping around the place. And finally, we have the Art of the AD&D fantasy game. Hello again Mr Rehash. Enjoy your time on the coffee table. So this is the first month where every single one of their products are directly D&D focussed. Curious that this should happen just after the edition change. Wonder who made that managemental decision. Nobody lasts forever: Or do they? Superman and Batman certainly show no sign of dying for good, despite a few big plotlines putting them out of action temporarily. Even lesser superheroes have amazing capacities for making comebacks, through incredibly implausible plot twists. Any superhero RPG that wants to properly emulate it's source material needs to take account of that. This tackles that in a fairly oblique way though, trying to keep things purely in setting, rather than offering metagame manipulation methods. The way that they die, the things that happen if they do, and exactly how long people with enhanced lifespans live. Another solid bit of cataloguing, with a few amusing touches, but nothing that blows me away. Plus there's some more editing sloppiness that detracts a bit from it, although I can work out what's missing. Ho hum.  Fiction: the serpent of aledorn by John P Buentello. An evil wizard has cursed a village. The place needs a hero to save them! A typical scenario. But as is often the case, there is a twist. Two connected twists, in this case. The villagers are entirely deserving of their punishment, and the person called upon to rescue them figures this out and has some suitably ironic insurance to ensure their attempt to pull the same treachery on him gets what it deserves. Ok, so it's not quite in the same league as the pied piper of hamelin, but it's very much in the same spirit. Pretty neat, and another one with a strong scientific edge. They do seem to be doing that quite a bit this issue. Role-playing reviews: Ken takes HARN to task over it's lengthy hesitation about publishing modules. As a busy writer, he wants his adventures ready to run. Just having loads of setting details without a direction is akin to the kind of GM who has hundreds of pages on their game world but never lets people play it, because it's "not ready yet" Oookay then :backs off: But anyway, they've finally caved to public pressure and produced published prefab modules for peons like you. And since despite his gripes, he does like the line, he's going to give them a good reviewing. Araka-kalai is a fairly sketchy little book, halfway between an area supplement and a traditional D&D style module. Venture into the caverns of the spawner of monsters, and deal with the cult that worships him. With seven different scenarios in a 26 page book, it isn't going to win any awards for pure depth, but they do include plenty of background material applicable to all of them, and any other adventures set in the area you may concoct. And the adventures included do have some neat twists. Seems a fairly decent place to put a starting party in, their equivalent of keep on the borderlands. 100 bushels of rye is a rather more narrative focussed adventure. While the path of the adventure is fairly linear, the direction of the final resolution is very much in the players hands. Generic enough to be easily adaptable to other gritty medieval type systems, and the setting details can be used repeatedly. Once again, Ken recommends it.The staff of fanon (now that would be a scary power. Making fanfics into official parts of the continuity. The horrors that you could inflict on literature. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> ) is a rather more high magic, fantastical adventure. Still, it doesn't skimp on the detail or the integration into the game world, and the strange things the players will encounter along the way do have a reason and rhyme to them. The broken covenant of Calebais is an ARS Magica game. Mark Rein·Hagen's pretentious talk about roleplaying as art is already well in force, making Ken roll his eyes. But their talk about pushing the boundaries of gaming is more than backed up in the scenario, with the world, plot and character building being exemplary. On the other hand, the visual presentation, section organisation and editing are a bit slipshod. (no surprise there <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" />) Still, it's very distinctive indeed when compared to the current set of adventures. And we know what the future has in store for their ideas. Flight 13 is a GURPS module, combining the horror and space supplements to create a goofy 1950's style retro-futuristic adventure in which the PC's are captured by creatures from beyond the stars and put through a bunch of weird tests. It can be used in any vaguely modern game, but take care, for it may disrupt the tone of some.</blockquote>

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