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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5039681" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 162: October 1990part 6/6Role-playing reviews is taken over by Allen Varney. He starts us off with another entertaining little snapshot from this year's Gen Con, as a new edition of a certain popular game is unleashed upon the public. Always a tense time, when one of the major writers is late, it becomes even more so. I like him already. He's got plenty of cool credits (and a few bits of dreck) for me to look forward to reporting on. Champions is up to it's 4th edition, which is 350 pages long. It hasn't been an easy ride, but the HERO system has survived a decade and improved quite substantially over that period. Allen gives this a very context heavy review, drawing upon his insider knowledge of the game's history. It now has tons of powers, rules for adapting the overall nature of the campaign, and lots of other options. Course, it's far from unbreakable, simply due to the enormous breadth of powers covered, so GM oversight is essential. Man, that's a pretty familiar refrain. The HERO system rulesbook cuts out the superheroic setting stuff for just the rules. This brings it down to 220 pages, still substantial, but not bulky. Just the thing for when you're traveling. Classic enemies is their assembled and revised bestiary. Scott Bennie once again shows that stuff like histories and personal connections between NPC's add to the entertainment factor quite substantially. They even have an incompetent supervillain prison for your own game to take advantage of. Most amusing. Mind games is a much smaller book focussing on a group of psychic villains. It's mainly fuel for adventures rather than overall advice. Their equivalent of a module, presumably. Ninja hero sees Allen praise Aaron Allston profusely, the nepot. You want to bring oriental badassery to the HERO system, he's your guy. Ra ra ra! Give him more jobs! Hee. How very naughty. Dragonmirth is anachronistic again. Yamara fakes the macguffin. The twilight guys have multiple escape plans. One of them's bound to work. Through the looking glass: The advanced battletech modding is concluded this month. Last time, it was mainly add-ons, this time it's the alterations to the turn sequence that get worked upon. They do have to forbid some things to make it work, and there's a huge list of little technical modifications that look like they'll be a bit of a pain in the ass to remember. Exactly how many of them are essential, and how many of them are simply house rules for their idea of greater balance I'm not sure, but it does look like they've been busy with the playtesting and stuff. This seems like the kind of thing that won't get a huge number of users, but those that do will be very enthusiastic about it. I'm not going to begrudge them some nice stuff I can't use, as long as it also means more variety in RPG's. Bladestorm by I.C.E and grenadier. A fantasy miniature game of swords, sorcery and battle in a dark chaotic world? Looks like they're trying to rip off warhammer. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />A quite entertaining collection of articles this time round, along with some pretty telegraphed historical pointers. Playing vampires, video games ascending to dominance, drama, history, this is pretty interesting stuff. The fact that lots of people are doing it obviously means that they can pick the best articles for the magazine. So even if some of their editorial choices are still rather iffy, there's still lots of useful stuff here. Wonder what next month will bring us.</blockquote>

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