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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5078298" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 169: May 1991part 2/6Learn something new every day: More new nonweapon proficiencies. Even more than spells, they're easy to think up, as you just look around and draw direct from reality, little adaption needed. Although as mentioned before, you don't have nearly enough slots to buy even the ones essential to your concept if you have a complex job. Still, here's 10 more skills, that will eat up a total of 17 slots. Alchemy, Astronomy, Botany, Calligraphy, Cartography, Diplomacy, Geology, Orienteering, Street Fighting, and Street Sense. Not particularly bad on their own (apart from street fighting, which really should be a weapon proficiency, putting it in nonweapon stuff causes the same issue as Palladium's boxing skill in terms of giving advantages to people who powergame for combat potential over everything else. ) they once again rub in the fact that you just don't have enough skills in AD&D. Which means unlike new spells and items, who's appearance is frequently treated with glee, these will be far less likely to come in handy in your own games. Slightly dispiriting, really. The strategy of tactics: Ahh, now this is one that is pretty influential, and becomes standard next edition, as well as having equivalents in tons of other games. Unlike two previous articles that have introduced a bunch of special tricks that you need to buy to use well, this gives 4 basic tactics anyone can use. Fighting defensively, forgoing attack entirely for full defense, and attacking with two degrees of extra recklessness that increase your chances of hitting and being hit. A small addition that adds quite a bit to your feeling of choice in combat, without unbalancing things in particular, and lets player skill play a slightly larger part in determining the outcome of battles. This is one I strongly approve of. Every game where combat is a major part should involve a decent degree of valid choices in your combat options. Just trading blows back and forth until someone falls gets old all too soon. Incorporating something like this into your games is definitely one I recommend. TSR previews: The tome of magic! New spheres, Quest spells, Wild mages and elementalists. And shitloads of magic items and spells. Just the thing to have all your spellcasters salivating over the cool new stuff they can do. Future products reference this one a lot, so like Legends and Lore, get ready to have to buy it and treat it as a de facto corebook to keep up with the joneses. Far less essential are the TSR collectors cards. Buy tons of packs and trade the duplicates with your friends to get a full set. Gotta catch 'em all! Bleah. Keep it away. For those of you who couldn't be bothered with getting every novel and module last year, FR12: Horde campaign gives you the big picture, plus more info on their lifestyles and environment in general. You probably want the boxed set first to make sense of this though. Spelljammer has an interesting premise this month. SJ4: Under the dark fist. An entire crystal sphere has fallen to the forces of evil, and they're planing to do some major exporting of their primary produce. High level adventurers are needed to foil them before they flood the universe with cut price mass produced evil overlords driving the home grown ones out of business. Or something. <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=";)" /> Marvel Superheroes are still in an X-menish mood with MSL1: X-terminate. It's those stupid great death robot squads, isn't it. Never build intelligent death robots. It's just asking for trouble. And finally, Buck Rogers gives us his third module. 25CS3: A matter of Gravitol. Well, artificial gravity is pretty critical to every sci-fi series, simply due to the prohibitive cost of filming zero gee regularly. So in a logical universe, controlling the resources responsible for it would be a very profitable business. This doesn't sound too bad, actually. I must be getting used to these guys.  The voyage of the princess ark: Haldemar starts to realize the more awkward side of his awesome new ship. Now she has a personality, and isn't afraid to show it, often being stroppy and gainsaying his commands. On the other hand, this probably also saves his life. When he winds up being captured again, this time by the Rajah of Jaibul, she senses this and homes in on him even though the crew don't know what do do. Seems like we have an obvious india analogue in this month's travelogue section. Sind has a jungle section, some deserty badlands, and mountains in the north. This is next to the eastern europe analogue, for no apparent reason. Ahh, Mystara, where Immortal meddling means nations are just placed on the map like Sims houses, with weather and sociopolitics forced into unnatural shapes by the constant meddling from above. It's still considerably more realistic than ravenloft, where the things in charge barely even pretend there's an underlying world beyond the psychodrama prisons made for their amusement. Still, as long as it's a fun adventure, what does it matter if the world-building's a little sketchy.</blockquote>

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