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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5021719" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 159: July 1990part 4/6Fiction: The waiting woman by Peni R Griffin. Another sad one in this department this month. An interesting spin is put upon the once and future king theme, as an ordinary man falls in love with the immortal guardian of the sleeping warriors. This can of course only end in tears and heartbreak. Unless he can join them, to sleep until the final battle, and then after that, who knows. If you survive that, all the rules may change. Well, it sure beats watching yourself gradually get old and dying, that's for sure. Roll on workable suspended animation technology. Anyway, this is another one that does what it sets out to do nicely, putting a bit more romance in the magazine. Keep leading by example. Pulling a "con" job: Convention season is upon us again, and this year they're giving us the advice on how to participate in one constructively better before rather than after. Yay. Thomas M Kane takes great pains to point out that you really really can't do this alone. You need a good name. You need a venue. You need people to run events. Big names who actually work for the various companies would be very helpful. You need booths, ticket sales organizers, stuff to show, and above all, you need attending members of joe public. Oh, and don't forget to tidy up properly afterwards if you want to use the same venue again next year. This looks like the kind of advice that would be good for organizing any kind of big event, so it's another one to place in the general life lessons category, like the one on formal letter writing. Just remember, even if you know all the tricks, it's still going to take tons of effort and more than a bit of set-up costs to make a success of things. Makes me wonder what else | could have achieved if I'd focussed all the energy I have on the magazine over the past couple of years on something else. Oh well, nearly halfway through. I'd feel even worse if I left it unfinished after getting this far. On we trudge. The marvel-phile: The second marvel article this month is more conventional. Just another vaguely themed collection of characters they haven't found the space to stat before. Topaz and Rintrah are apprentices of Dr Strange. Both have pretty powerful, if not always fully controlled magical abilities, and obviously he feels that tutoring them would be mutually beneficial, with some justification. Even a cosmic being needs someone around to protect their back in a fight and save their ass when down. Plus there's the whole keeping you grounded, not turning into some cackling hubris infected maniac thing, which does seem to be important for powerful heroes. Once again, this seems fairly standard stuff for this column. Maybe next year they'll get to go in the gamers handbook with the big boys and girls. But for now, they're yet more bit part players in a universe teeming with them. Rhythm warriors: Another new martial art focussed class follows on from the sumo duo. But it's not an oriental one, no siree bob. Instead, it's one specialising in Capoeira, the one that in reality was developed by African slaves in South America, and has quite a bit in common with breakdancing and hip-hop music. Like monks, they get an odd grab bag of special powers, have a limited number of top level characters that need to compete for position, and frequently operate as self-contained units. Unlike them, they aren't particularly bothered with the whole seclusion, celibacy and honour things, and like to stick around and benefit their community. So you get to kick butt, play music, dance, and engage in spectacular acrobatics. Doesn't seem like a bad gig, even if the stats are stuck back in the 1st edition. They can certainly find a place in my little homebrew, and hopefully, we'll see how they do someday. The role of books: Redwall by Brian Jacques is the start of his series starring anthropomorphic animals. Due to it's spanning the gap between child friendly and adult reading, it manages to be popular with both, and thus assure it's consistently good sales. Well, you've got to have some furry stuff that isn't yiff-tastic, to get the next generation in. <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" /> Sunrunners fire by Melanie Rawn is notable for it's good depiction of a hero becoming a villain. Unfortunately, this means wading through two previous books and a bunch of interconnected subplots. One for the lovers of epic potboilers. Wolfwalker by Tara K Harper sees our reviewer getting context heavy as people he knows succeed. Now, if only the novel would fill in it's linguistic and geographical context. This is why you need to put maps in your fantasy world's books. Other than that, he seems to like it. Into the shadows, edited by Jordan K Weisman is a Shadowrun anthology. As usual for gaming fiction, it's a mixed bag, and it doesn't explain the lingo either, so it's probably best to have the corebook first. Still, it's pretty good as these things go, with several illustrations and lots of setting building. Good to see another game line flourishing. Cromm by Kenneth C Flint sees our reviewer give him a second chance, and continue to not be impressed. Bland and forgettable, not even worthy of a good rant. Dragondoom by Dennis L McKiernan sees him stretch his Tolkien pasticheing a little, so he's merely writing a story in the same kind of world instead of stealing plots wholesale. This is still not enough to recommend him to the more discriminating reader. Bloodlist (sic) by P N Elrod sees her writing about what she does best. Vampres! In this case combined with Holmes-esque mystery. With a strangely vague historical setting that seems to steal from all through the first half of the century, it won't please any accuracy buffs. But her plotting and character building is already pretty good. See you again soon.</blockquote>

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