Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5080710" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 169: May 1991part 4/6Fiction: Swordfish and saucery by Deborah Millitello. One of our occasional contributors manages to get another piece published. It's a rather clever little story too, both in terms of the IC plotting and the deliberate expectation shifting wordplay.  Rereading it, you can see all kinds of little details which are actually significant. One to draw upon if you want to write mysteries where the answer is in plain sight, but the players still probably won't get it until it's too late. Looks like the fiction department here is as strong and varied as ever. Role-playing reviews decides to have another round of covering various game's magic systems. Ever popular, and often quite complex, it's no surprise that supplements creating new ones and expanding on existing ones continue to come thick and fast. As with last time, before starting on the reviews, Ken talks a bit about the magic systems in various games. They have a history as long as roleplaying itself, and they continue to evolve. What interesting ideas have they come up with in the last couple of years? Elemental companion is a Rolemaster supplement. Unsurprisingly, this creates a variant upon the D&D elemental plane principle, and then details the spellcasters who draw their powers direct from the various elemental planes. Since they have lots of overarching effects that are applied to each element, this makes the spell system quite flexible and good for applying creatively. They also detail a whole bunch of monsters, and rules for creating hybrids of terrestrial and elemental creatures. Seems likely 3e was influenced by ideas like this. Unsurprisingly, the rules are rather more complex and table heavy than D&D, with their distinct approach to horrible ironic deaths fully present. Good luck playing one character long enough to get those awesome 50th level spells. The complete wizards handbook gets a fairly positive review. The new crunch is great, just what the doctor ordered. The roleplaying advice is less praised, with ken finding it a bit wishy-washy, and some bits feel like filler to pad out the page count. No great disagreements with you there. It's the crunch we remember and keep coming back too, because it's the stuff our characters are actually using again and again. Aysle is a worldbook for TORG, and it's associated magic system. The high fantasy genre region, it's a torus shaped world which has it's day/night cycle controlled by the sun bobbing up and down in the middle. This makes mapping pretty interesting. Everyone has at least basic spellcasting capabilities, which their economy revolves around. There is objective good and evil, and big chunks of advanced tech don't work. As with all the other realities in TORG, it's got people from it who are trying to take over the world, and impose their axioms of reality on ours, which makes for extra fun culture clashes. This makes for a great backdrop for spectacular plane spanning battles, but the worldbuilding rarely goes beyond that backdrop level. If you want to tone down the cinematicness and delve into the logical ramifications of their magic system on the development of societies there, you'll have to do it yourself. Dark Conspiracy. More modern day horror gaming coming out at around the same time as the WoD and Chill. Must have been something in the water. In harms way - at home!: A second superheroic article this month presents a rather interesting idea. Danger Rooms. A place where you can hone your skills against the most inventive traps and hazards your buds can come up with, with little danger of permanent death. Not an uncommon idea in the superheroic realm, and martial arts and fantasy stuff are also known to feature them, so it's a pretty widely applicable idea. This is one that will take a bit of design effort, but you can have tons of fun with it, involving the whole party in it's construction and testing. The way this article encourages you to do it is to have each tile on the floor with a separate hazard, which does look like it'll take quite a bit of work thinking up ideas (or stealing them from the comics. ) Fortunately, there are some random generation tables here, which should help you with the filler. So this is a very useful article if you're playing FASERIP, and mildly so if you aren't. Not a bad result, really.</blockquote>

Verification