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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4975178" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 151: November 1989part 5/5West end games gives us a decidedly pretentious teaser. Revolutionising the definition of RPG's? I'll believe it when I see it.Through the looking glass: Robert takes the time to promote his other job, being vice president of the Historical Miniature Gaming Society, and their recent conventions. Minis are still pretty popular, and there's several new games of note this year. Limeys and Slimeys? Sounds amusing. More formally, he gives Tactica a fairly harsh slating, giving it 1+1/2 stars. Shiny presentation masks absolutely terrible editing and rules assumptions. It might work if given a complete reworking and new edition, but for now, you really don't want to bother with this one. On the other hand, Featherstone's complete Wargaming gets 5 stars. One of the great old men of wargaming provides his wisdom on wargaming and real history in an accessable manner. You can find out quite a lot about the hobby from this, and it even includes a game inside of it's own. The rest of the column is fairly standard minis reviews. A Tank. A bunch of magic-users, both human and elf. A set of dwarves, and their natural enemy, an orc with a spear. Once again, the photo quality is not particularly great, with way too much black making details tricky to discern. So the usual mix of interesting and dull bits here. At close quarters: Top Secret's article this time is a bunch of optional rules for those of you who would prefer a bit more realism in your games. Curiously, these actually make the game more cinematic. Quick drawing rules. Using guns at HtH range. Multiple action rules. Letting you use luck points to succeed at actions. They have a rather idiosyncratic idea of "reality rules" Well, anything the players can do, the enemies can too. If you use these little optional rules, you know exactly what you're getting yourself into. They did mention them in the previews. Nice to see the magazine catering to the toolkit approach. Let's hope it won't be a year before it does so again. Paranoia has metaplot as well in the crash course manual. The computer is dead? Happiness is no longer mandatory? Hit the reset button quick! And never mention this again. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> The gamers choice: Another set of awards here. Voted for primarily by Polyhedron readers (damnitt, we still don't have a reading thread for that magazine, and I can't find downloads for it anywhere, legal or not.), and administered by the RPGA, we saw our evil overlord :Organ music, wolves howl: step into the spotlight to present them this year. Mertwig's maze, Macho women with guns, GURPS 3rd ed, Cyberpunk, and Rocky & Bullwinkle do well for themselves. Buck Rogers ties for best sci-fi strategy game with Merchants of venus, which can be interpreted as good or bad, when you consider the vastly greater amounts of promotion it got. Polyhedron itself wins best gaming magazine, which seems mildly iffy. And Pool of Radiance proves popular with this crowd as well. Oh, if only the awards were being run by people not connected with the companies, so we could be a little more sure of their impartiality. Once again, not sure what to make of this. Any opinions? Son of the ultimate addenda: Errata, errata, you keep sending in letters about it. Once more, unto the breach, as we try and fill some more little rules holes in the Marvel superheroes system. What happens if someone with Internal Limbo captures someone else with internal limbo (If you put someone's b hole in your a hole, it gets rather tricky to find anything inside there. Just the way to escape that dick Sarda.) Can you combine super leaping with atomic gain? (yes, but not very well. Square-Cube law strikes again! It's much better if you shrink instead.) What happens if you have hyper speed without travel powers. (you go faster, but don't get any further without getting tired. Pretty lame, really. )What happens if you combine hyper speed and hyper running. (You go very fast indeed. ) What are the stats of an energy doppelganger  (Generally the same as the copied person. Such is the nature of being an imitation) Yamara has yet more communication problems in the course of her adventures. Dragonmirth is very ironic indeed. A bit of a clunker of an issue, really. The Oriental theme does seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel rather, the ecologies are unexpectedly weak, and apart from the awards, the rest of the issue is pretty much business as usual, with little to distinguish it. Hungover from the big celebrations, or something. Let's hope they've recovered in time for another blowout at christmas.</blockquote>

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