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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5074280" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 168: April 1991part 5/6TSR previews: First up, unsurprisingly, is the new D&D basic set. This time revised by Troy Denning. Even more than last time, when Frank Mentzer was in charge, it's designed to be newbie friendly. Have they gone too far into patronising territory? Are computer games now too big, shiny and distracting? In any case, you don't see as many people talking fondly about this version being their first experience as often as the Moldvay and Mentzer ones, despite Denning being a pretty big name. What's with that? Marvel superheroes also gets a new basic set this month. Jeff Grubb is still the guy in charge here, and he also wants to expand their gaming base. Lure those comics fans in. Lure, lure I say! Don't just read stories about superheroes, create your own! I suppose that's one of the biggest barriers to entry. This is not a hobby for the lazy, particularly on the DM's side. The forgotten realms heads up north to FA2: Nightmare Keep. Rick Swan takes us on a relatively traditional dungeon crawl. Treasure, guarded by monsters. What more could an adventure ask for? Do you really want to be like Drizzt, angsting over stuff as in Sojourn, the final book of his prequel trilogy. Dragonlance is also obsessed with elves. DLS2: Tree lords lets us see the Silvanesti, and save them as well. Mind you, given what wankers they've generally been in the books, I do not find myself particularly inclined to do so. Ravenloft gets their very own monstrous compendium. Yesss, preciouss, ssseee what horrors lie within the missstssess. Relatively few creatures here, but they get more descriptive depth than other world's ones, for extra creepiness. On the generic AD&D side, we have HR1: Vikings. Rune magic, longboats, and all kinds of Historically Accurate stuff. You just know there's more of these on the way to cover other periods. And Buck Roger's second trilogy comes to a close. Matrix Cubed sees the fate of the inner planets hang in the balance. So let's save them, and move onto the outer ones, already! Pretty obvious, really. Novel ideas: In another case of related stuff being close together, here we have some elaboration on Dragonlance's novel schedule for the year. Doing prequels is a particular headache, especially when you're not the original author. You have to work hard to maintain continuity and characterization, and still tell an interesting story. And of course, despite being fully aware of these dangers, more than a few of the novels of the next few years will fail at one or the other. Slightly more interesting  is psychoanalysing Krynn's approach to relationships. The tendency for drama and polarized divisions of good and evil means that relationships are simultaneously highly valued, and prone to tensions breaking them up for reasons that would seem stupid to most objective observers. And the good guys wind up enemies of other good guys over petty issues, just like the bad guys. I suppose healthy relationships are an enemy of the conditions that produce good stories. Still, it does differ very dramatically from my personal experiences in both gaming and reality, so I guess it's another reason dragonlance has never really resonated with me. I guess it's good to quantify things like that, rather than leaving it to gut reactions. Chessex realize that it makes more sense to put the number on a D4 on the top rather than the bottom of each side. Such an obvious refinement, and now tons of companies do it. Now that's progress. The marvel-phile: Some fairly substantial changes to the usual format here this month. This is where they start using this column as a regular airing ground for changes in existing characters. I'm vaguely surprised that this was only implemented so close to when I started reading, as it felt like a regular feature then.   Course, for this first one, they need to do a whole ton of catching up, trying to fill us in on most of the big events of the last couple of years. Entire superteams have been disbanded, or killed and brought back to life. Quite a few villains are also dead - for now. Ghost rider has a new host, The human torch & rogue have lost their powers, Hawkeye is a cyborg, some more old WWII characters have been released from suspension chambers, Dr Druid has hair, <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=":)" /> and the hulk is temporarily in control of himself. Looks like they've now got an active metaplot busy with regular worldshaking events and more averted apocalypses than healthy balanced breakfasts. The next few years are going to be interesting times for them, and it looks like we'll get quite a bit more second hand news than we have been. As with most features where they break or change format, this is rather more interesting than a standard entry, and in this case is also rather funny. As I've said before, you don't even have to try to see the funny side of comic worlds, especially when everything that happened is deconstructed and put together in one place like this. Get the image macros ready, and let's hope the hologram covers show up when scanned. Look sharp!: Hmm. For some reason they've decided to put a crossword in. That's a turnup for the books. Since Roger's also put a questionnaire in his editorial, I wonder if this'll become a regular occurrence. Well, they are a nice part of many people's everyday newspaper reading, and good mental exercise to boot, so it's not beyond the bounds of probability. Still, I have enough on my plate reviewing all this stuff. I don't feel the desire to solve it as well. I'm sure there are interesting insights to be derived from studying newspaper crosswords across the decades and analyzing them statistically, but I really don't have time for that.</blockquote>

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