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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4974330" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 151: November 1989part 4/5Role-playing reviews: Last month Ken decided to review a load of adventures from systems not particularly noted for them. This month, Jim is doing much the same thing, albeit with less preamble. Co-incidence or planned, I wonder?  Something rotten in Kislev is of course for WHFRP. Three linked adventures, in which the characters have to deal with undead, and the fact that they may be a lesser evil needed to hold off the forces of chaos. The adventures are a rich ground for tricky roleplaying, and the visual presentation is pretty good too. Plenty of scope for misinformation, moral greys, etc, here. Tournament of dreams is a pair of pendragon adventures. A fae tournament where the virtues of the characters are tested, and an adventure of questing and single combat, it seems admirably tailored to the themes and rules of the game.   Harkwood is a GURPS fantasy adventure. Set in a relatively low magic region, it's also designed primarily for fighters of the mounted armoured sort, with a tournament and plenty of intrigue taking place. To foil players who read ahead, it gives you 6 different villains to choose, so they'll still have to figure out who's really behind things. Once again, the visuals and setting-building are pretty good, and in general it's a very flexible adventure which the players can take all kinds of tacks to solve. Lords of darkness, on the other hand, gets a rather mediocre review. Many of the adventures are poorly labeled in terms of suggested levels, and others are so sketchy as to not really be much of a help. The attempt to make undead more scary is heavy handed and poorly integrated. It does have some good points, but it's definitely the weakest of this month's selection. The role of books: The outlaws of sherwood by Robin McKinley manages to put it's own distinctive spin on the Robin Hood legends. Not particularly historically accurate, it still tells an interesting story of a group of people becoming lifetimes in their own legends, or something. Catastrophe's spell by Mayer Alan Brenner makes the common mistake of trying to cram too much into a single book. Shoulda given each of the main characters and plotlines their own book, then you'd be getting critically acclaimed and filing a whole shelf on the bookstores. <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" /> The scholars of night by John M Ford combines spycraft with stagecraft, with moderate success. While there are a few flaws, on the whole it manages to be a distinctive and fairly satisfying delivery. Just go back and reread it, so you can spot the references you missed first time round. Shadow games by Glen Cook gets a rather tangental review, as he talks about why his books might be of high quality, but he finds them thoroughly unpleasant reading. Military brutality for it's own sake, and a world where it seems unlikely things will ever get better is not to his tastes. A dirge for sabis by C J Cherryh and Leslie Fish also gets a mixed review. The attempts to fuse magic and technology don't really work here, partially due to the design of the magic system, and partially due to the writers throwing too much stuff in the mix. Meharoonie.Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner manages to take the swashbuckling adventure tropes, and tell a story in a rather different style than is usual to the genre, with lots of depth and clever use of language. While there may not be overt supernatural elements, this is not a drawback. Gameplay by Kevin J Anderson, gets a pretty negative review. From the confusion of the last installment in the series, the reviewer's opinion turns to annoyance as the rules of the universe are revealed to be so far from the usual gaming setup as to break his suspension of disbelief. Unless the final book makes some fairly substantial changes, it's not going to hold any drama for him. The role of computers is fairly light on reviews this month, mostly comprised of previews and reader submitted stuff. They've been busy counting the votes for the awards or something. They're also eagerly looking forwards to 16, 32 bit and beyond systems becoming the norm. (They also announce the release of the Sega Genesis, woo.) Better graphics and more power are always good. Not gonna argue with you there. The problem, as ever, comes when the programmers try to use more power than the system has. And as we've found, that's still an issue decades later, with gigabytes of RAM to draw upon. Gotta live within your means. But anyway. Silpheed is a 3D arcade shoot-em-up. You need to both master dogfighting in space, and figure out which upgrades to get between missions to enable you to cope with the final showdown. The reviewers are still struggling with this one and give it 5 stars. Thud Ridge is a flight simulator game where you bomb the crap out of vietnam. It gets a fairly mediocre review, with a relatively simple control scheme, and another irritating copy protection scheme. I don't think we want to be reminded of this little bit of history. Strider is the NES version, which is rather different from the arcade game, with it's ability to tackle the levels in non-linear fashion and puzzles involving one way tubes and finding items. This combination of action and puzzles appeals to the reviewers, and if it was longer, they would have given it a 5 star mark. Guess they're just getting too good for these games.</blockquote>

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