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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5069291" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 167: March 1991part 6/6The role of books: Never deal with a dragon by Robert N Charette takes us into the world of shadowrun, full of darkness, mystery, and obscenely powerful dragons machinating to advance their agenda. Looks like they've got off to a strong start in this department. Deryni magic by Katherine Kurtz gets a somewhat negative review for it's odd approach to deconstructing her own novels. There's surprisingly little behind the scenes information, and far too much verbatim quoting from the books. Not hugely insightful. Heart of valor by L J Smith takes the typical young adult formula of kids learning about magic while also facing mundane problems and combines it with a road trip story. This turns out to be pretty fun, and also full of decent worldbuilding & metaphysics. The road west by Gary Wright combines adventuring with serious Aaaaangst and psychological study as a serious brooding loner badass tries to get his groove back. Sounds like almost a parody of the stuff that makes Drizzt popular <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The shadow gate by Margaret Bail seems to break all the rules of good writing, and yet the reviewer still found himself carrying on reading. So it's like the worst form of literary junk food. Just be thankfull it isn't inexplicably selling millions. The forge of virtue by Lynn Abbey is a novel based upon the Ultima series. Like far too much gaming fiction, it reads like writing to a formula and making up page count. Even less worth it than the last one. Lifeline by Kevin J Anderson & Doug Beason gets a surprisingly good review, as a bit of hard sci-fi with serious questions about economics and ecology. A newly established moonbase is cut off from earth, and has to survive on it's wits and experimental technology. His novels do seem to be quite a mixed bag in terms of popularity.  Dragonmirth has more cynicism and naivette. Yamara has to figure out what to do with her worshippers. It's bad form to let them worship at someone else's church. Twilight empire focusses on the bad guy's camp this time. Through the looking glass: Robert gets ahead of himself a little, and does some reporting that would probably be more thematic for the april issue. Among the more standard wargames out there, there's also stuff involving toy dinosaurs, (as we saw last issue) stuffed animals, legos, blobs of clay, and whatever else may be lying around your house. And this can actually be more fun too. It's certainly more newbie friendly. And since wargames are a decade or two ahead of RPG's in their product cycle of commercial decline, and the people of this era rather want to change that fact, this isn't that surprising. We'll see this topic revisited a few times in the future. Anyway, in the actual minis reviews we have: A whole bunch of Talislanta stuff, Gnomekin, a trapsmith, and an engineer. Star wars continues it's strong efforts at encompassing all media with a set of rebel troopers. Stan Johansen Miniatures have a bunch of heavy weaponry for your sci-fi soldiers to equip. I. C. E. are also in a sci-fi mood with two space cruisers. Ral Partha is a little more present, with a set of modern day soldiers. While GHQ give Robert another chance to talk about his interest in historical ships, with minis of the LeSuperbe and the HMS Bellona. Very much business as usual here. They came from outer space! Spelljammer gets it's own monstrous compendium appendix. With a strong start, a tedious saggy middle, and a fairly good ending, this is a reasonable issue, with enough useful stuff to justify returning to it again. Seems like they're trying to increase the amount of crunch in the articles again, ensure that we have mechanical support for the various directions we are given to take the game in. Not a bad thing really. Steer the good ship Dragon on to ever more familiar terrain, Roger. Good luck.</blockquote>

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