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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5001682" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 156: April 1990part 2/6Grenadier teams up with award winning artist Julie Guthrie to produce a whole set of dragons, and advertises them with a full colour double page spread. Drool. The supplement mill starts for spelljammer with Lost Ships. Razznarock: A pure joke piece with a serious moral in it. Beware the railroading DM. Beware the inconsistent worldbuilding. Beware the traps with no chances to resist. Beware the victory without effort. Basically a big how to not run your game, like the cheating pieces from last year, this is good for helping you spot these problems and fix them before they ruin your game. Pretty amusing, really. Definitely a better joke adventure than Nogard. Yet even more outrages from the mages: Which really ought to be Bazaar of the Bizarre, as it involves a load of joke magical items rather than spells this time, but obviously they couldn't think of a good way to twist that title around. Oh well. Anyway, this is another collection of stuff that is useless, actively a pain in the butt, or in some cases actually useful in a twisted kind of way. There are three sentient magical items that just will not shut up and are impossible to get rid of, a whole bunch of bad puns, references to yet more items that can only be found on imaginary pages of the magazine, and all that stuff that'll drive the more literal mind mad. Once again, this is rather better than last year's equivalent article, with plenty of stuff that a devious mind could turn to practical ends. I'd at least consider this, anyway. Now, what can you do with a thousand lead pieces? <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/ponder.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hmm:" title="Hmmm    :hmm:" data-shortname=":hmm:" /> The game wizards: Jim Ward once again tells us about what he's been up to in his role as liaison officer for the production of D&D related computer games. I suspect this involves a lot of ordering people around and leaving them to work out the technical details, which are frequently very hard to implement, as he admits to being rubbish with computers. Still, he knows what he likes, and is also happy to talk about his experiences with other people's games as well. So this is him very much writing in Gary's tradition, where he's technically promoting something, but the side-tracks and witticisms are the main focus. And if the games kill him loads of times, then is that a bad emulation of D&D campaigns? Somehow, he's managed to make a crap column fairly entertaining again. He may produce overpowered and poorly balanced games, but they certainly are fun. Novel ideas: Promotion time again, this time for their Forgotten Realms novels. Since the Realms have proven so popular over the past few years, they're expanding them outwards both east and west. To the east, as we've known for some time, is Kara-Tur. But there's plenty of stuff between here and there, and they're going to fill that in too. To the west is Maztica. Welcome to fantasy native america. Man, they aren't being very imaginative with their alternate worlds. Still, it's how you use the ingredients, not how original they are, and on that from they're doing pretty ........... uhm, no comment. Man, they're still being a bunch of corporate shills. In addition, another of their fairly original (but oft imitated) elements gets some more airtime. You ate up his first three adventures. Now you get to see Drizzt's backstory in detail. Looks like the realms is going to be a lot more filled out by the end of this year. Busy busy busy. Another fairly dull bit of promotion. Can you swim? Juggle? At the same time?: Vince Garcia steals liberally from Runequest to create an alternative skill system for the basic D&D game. With a % based chance of success, and fairly generous supplies of skill points, it's certainly a lot easier to reflect rudimentary knowledge in a whole bunch of things than the AD&D nonweapon proficiency system. The fact that further advancement is detached from regular level advancement, and stuff is differentiated by stuff that you roll for, and stuff you just purchase (with less valuable skills being cheaper) make it a fairly crunchy bit of work. While it doesn't feel very D&Dish, this is a pretty notable article, and looks like it might actually work better than the official one. This is one I'd be very interested in hearing about any actual play experiences for.</blockquote>

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