Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5004810" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 156: April 1990part 5/6Role-playing reviews: Ken once again helps us decide if his reviews are useful by talking about his criteria before getting on to the actual reviews. Which as ever, is fairly nice to see. It not only shows he takes the time to sit down and codify his though processes, it also helps us figure out if we're on the same level as him. I don't think I'm quite there yet, but then, I've only been doing this for 18 months, while he's been going a good 8 years now. Anyway. This month, he returns to the idea of cities. What makes a good description of one for gamers? Stuff useful for getting into adventures, mainly. Floor plans, personages with stats and defined goals, overarching tensions and potential conflicts. Seems fairly obvious, really. Lets see how the new crop have done. Minas Trith gets a mostly positive review with a bunch of little nitpicks. It might not be totally faithful to tolkien's tone and design, but it does seem to be quite gameable, with a good mix of high and low fantasy. Mind the whitewashed ghetto through. Tredroy is a city book for GURPS Fantasy. While the visual presentation isn't very appealing, on a closer read, he's fairly positive about the writing. It focusses well on stuff that's useful for adventurers, and isn't too cliched in it's design. Looks like they can do settings as well as solid rules. Warhammer city expands on Middenheim. It gets a rather middling review. While initially impressive looking and full of mood establishing flavour, it seems the editing is rather poor, and the information is less substantial than would first seem. He also isn't too keen on Warhammer's tendency towards puns. It's not as grim as they pretend it is, you know. The city of Greyhawk sees Ken play the company shill, giving it top marks in all areas. It's just what the AD&D system needs, and full of nostalgic references. Oh, if only it had been released 10 years ago! <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" /> Ok then. Still, it is a boxed set where the others are single books, so the greater detail and visual stuff isn't surprising. There are still plenty of people in the company that love greyhawk and want to see it succeed, in the face of the more crap products. City system gets a rather less impressive review, trying to do too much with too small a page count, and being dependent on the previous Waterdeep supplement. Seems like Ken would prefer his cities too small to technically be called cities in the real world, rather than trying to actually do things on the multimillion population scale. Still, once again, the production values are great, and the various bits and pieces are easily recycled for using in your own city layouts. Just don't expect it to be useful without any work. Cities of mystery also falls for the pretty visuals & high production values, but lackluster writing and poor examples, which contradict the worldbuilding advice that they give you in the same book. Once again, it's mainly useful for the pieces, which makes it especially unattractive to me, unlikely to be able to get hold of a hardcopy. TSR is churning out quite a bit of marginal crap at this time. Also notable is a minireview of GURPS Riverworld, which is also pretty positive. Riverworld has always seemed like a brilliant world for gaming in, particularly one-on-one play, and apparently this does it justice. I find myself tempted. Quite an interesting set of reviews, overall.</blockquote>

Verification