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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5040512" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 163: November 1990part 1/6<img src="http://paizo.com/image/product/magazine_issue/dragon/163/cover_500.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />122 pages. Larry Elmore once again reuses models for his cover. Even the model looks bored with this. That can't be a comfortable tree to sit in. She must have been posing for him for weeks of total time over the years. The subject is pretty reused too. Magic. Pretty vague really, you think by now they'd start livening it up by running more specific themes, such as necromancy, shapeshifting or mind control. Apparently not. Perhaps they ought to say they're planning doing a certain theme  6-12 months in advance, and would like articles on it. That'd certainly help with the maintaining variety problem. Oh well, let's see if the individual articles are any good. In this issue:Letters: Roger once again finds himself with too many ludicrous letters to hold on to until april. So once again he decides to give his snark and punnery muscles a major workout. Whatever keeps ya sane, dude. At least it's not Waldorf or female dwarven beards again. And once again we are strongly reminded of their bowdlerising editorial policy. Gotta keep the actual words kid friendly, even if we all know what they're talking about. Sigh. Let's hope they can slip some dirty stuff under the radar every now and then. Editorial: Ah yes, realism in gaming. And it's cousin who is often mistaken for realism, grimdark crapsack black and grey worlds where everything sucks and you've got no hope of ever making things better. (with thanks to tvtropes) Well, it's not too far from reality. <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" /> So Roger delegates to Dale this bit of moderate rehash, tempered with current events commentary. The difference between low and high fantasy, the change in media depictions of stuff. And of course how this impacts on the D&D morality debates. Dear god this feels like filler. They expanded the editorials to a designated size, and now they have to fill them every month. Bed, made, lie in it. Just as I have to. Still, it's another sign of the times. Welcome to the iron age. Take good care of your trenchcoat while here, because the rain falls heavy in darkened alleys. Have you seen this duck? Runequest advertises by juxtaposing the ludicrous with the deadly serious and hoping that'll draw people in. Back to school - Magic school: Ahh, this is one I knew they'd get round to at some point. An analysis to the various speciality wizard types, figuring out which is best, courtesy of Greg Detwiler. Abjuration is problematic, with limited utility stuff and the removal of the most versatile school. Alteration is pretty awesome, able to fill a whole load of roles even without bothering with other schools. Conjurers are pretty middle of the road, but do have to rely on others quite a bit, which has it's risks. Diviners are unglamorous, but pretty damn good actually, especially once you add a few supplements. Enchanters, like conjurers, need to rely on unreliable aid a lot, but can work around their issues. Illusionists are even more crappy, but still probably better off than they were in 1st edition, with the whole range of conjurations, alterations, etc open to them. Invokers are pretty decent, but again, have their issues, and find it a bit trickier to be team players to compensate for those. Necromancers are a bit crap until you get a decent load of supplements, especially in the low levels. He seems to have a pretty decent handle on things, not giving us any misleading advice. Remember, ironically, having two wizards specialized in opposing schools is one of the best ways to ensure you always have a wide range of spells useful for all eventualities. And that can lead to odd pairing bickering buddy movie fun. I think following this one will be beneficial to your game. Oops! Sorry!: Spell misfires. Muahahahaha. If anything is going to fill the players with dread, it's the prospect of things not simply failing, but going wrong in ironic and interesting fashion. After all, this is something with an incredibly long literary tradition behind it, frequently involving talented but impetuous apprentices who then have to spend whole books trying to sort out their cock-ups. Course, in D&D, you can't really go that far every time a spell gets disrupted, plus you may have problems thinking of something different to happen each time. You know what's perfectly designed for solving this? Random tables! Another instance where I'm vaguely surprised they haven't done this years ago. Guess even though the technology's been around for ages, there's still only so much room in each magazine. And since this is a pretty short article, that tries to keep it's various results applicable to the large variety of spells out there via vagueness, there's probably room for another, more comprehensive variant on this some time in the future. Not a hugely interesting read, this should nevertheless add a bit of sadistic fun to your play if used judiciously.</blockquote>

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