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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5075543" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 168: April 1991part 6/6Vampire! Man's darkest fear walks the earth! Now that's a good teaser. Soon the swine will stalk the land, bringing the dreaded plagues of narrativism and goth girls with them. Are you ready to become the monster? I find it interesting that the distributor, Esdevium, gets higher billing than White Wolf, the company making the game. What's all that about? Treasures more real: Following on from last month, we have another article that points out how broken D&D's economics are, and how much customizing stuff can add to the interest of your game. Where do all those thousands of GP monsters have come from? What is it's history? What condition is it in? Figuring that out for every item found would be a difficult and tedious process. What's a good solution for this? Random Tables! Say hello to another largely unconnected subsystem. Y-y-y-yawn. Using this will require quite a bit of rerouting of your campaign, especially if you try it midway through. And you'll still have to think up the specifics, even if this provides the generalities. So laudable intentions, but inadequate execution. Another bit of filler to make up the page count. Harpers bold: Ed Greenwood contributes a couple of twinked out Harpers this month. Jhastar Belnold and Talantra Bowgentle. Neither has a single ability score below 15, and both have met big names in the Realms history and engaged in heroics that have brought them a modest degree of notoriety of their own. Their magical item collections are rather boring and practical though, and they have ridiculously little money for characters of their level. They definitely feel like something that was whipped up to tell a story rather than actually generated through rolling dice and built up through actual play. He encourages you to have them show up randomly in the wilderness and /steal the thunder from/ help out your group. This showcases one of the worst aspects of the Realms, that it can be so chock-a-bloc with powerful good guys that there just doesn't seem to be room for your adventurers to make any difference. This does not make for very pleasing reading, and is one of the worst things he's ever contributed to the magazine, even more annoying than spellfire. I wash my hands of this. Why spy?: Espionage stuff has definitely been on the decline in here over the past couple of years. They haven't released any books for Top Secret for nearly a year now, and it doesn't look like any are on the schedule either. It's decade long run is winding down. And that people are forgetting about this is reinforced by an article aimed heavily at the newcomer, trying very hard to get more people to try out this fun little genre. It's actually a pretty good one, as well as being a full 7 pages long, taking you through the conventions of the genre and giving lots of advice helpful to both GM and players. Still, it doesn't change that all of this has been said before in the magazine, albeit not as well in many cases. If I'd started reading the magazine a few issues earlier, I would have loved this. But now, it stands as a stark reminder of the hard balancing act between providing material aimed at newbies and long time readers that they have to do. A problem that's only going to get worse for both me and them. 2 sided dice, courtesy of the US mint? Someone's taking the piss here. I really don't think your currency needs advertising. Ironically, Chill is also releasing a vampire sourcebook at the very same time. I find this amusing. Dragonmirth has more bloody jesters. Even an edition change can't shake them off. Yamara still hasn't realized her powers. Twilight empire has a total baba yaga rip-off. Through the looking glass: Having fulfilled his ridiculous quotient for the year last month, Robert keeps things serious this time. The lead bill is currently on hold due to the USA's current military ventures, so let's take advantage of this fact and get buying and painting. Responsibly of course, for we are a family friendly magazine. This month's minis are: A whole bunch of dwarves. A dragon holding a crystal ball. A rather drunk leprechaun (which leads Robert to once again stress to our young audience that Drinking Is Wrong in classic 80's cartoon conclusion stylee <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" /> ) A rather neat set of hex blocks that look good for constructing impromptu maps. And a bunch of officially licensed Drow. With everything getting between 4 and 5 stars, there's no great dirt dishing or other interesting stuff going on here, humorous asides apart. War law. Mass combat for rolemaster. It's a snappy name. I'll bet the contents aren't nearly so cool and easy to understand though. Another flawed but fascinating issue, with plenty of useful stuff, and a whole bunch of important historical markers which also trip my personal nostalgia buttons. V:tM, Mega man, the new Princess Ark, and plenty of familiar bits of goofy yet usable humour. The place really feels like home. Before long I'll have surpassed my original class levels with my new one, and be able to draw upon the powers of both classes freely. Pretty awesome, eh? I can't wait to get through these next few issues.</blockquote>

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