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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5083378" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 170: June 1991part 1/6124 pages. Hel-lo funky fifteen!!! How DO you feel?! Looks like they feel pretty good about themselves actually. A spectacular battle of good vs evil on the cover, a ribbon proclaiming it's their 15th anniversary, and that there's a game inside. It might not be quite as big a number as 5, 10, 20, or 25, but they seem to be making just as much effort. Get ready for power, finesse, and possibly barrel-scraping if we're unlucky. On your marks, get set, LET'S UNWRAP THOSE PRESENTS! In this issue:Letters: A letter from Allen Varney about the nonexistance of his game company. He's quite happy being a freelancer, although thank you very much whoever organised this prank, because it's given his profile a nice little boost. Do I smell the twisty hand of reverse psychology at work here? A letter giving some more info about Dwight L. Moody. How very fascinating. A letter pointing out that they reused a Dragonmirth gag in issues 149 and 165. It's a hard life, being an editor. If you don't spot the problem, your readership probably will. Another letter pointing a whole bunch of interesting things about the history of D&D and the magazine. Like Roger has said before, independent invention happens, and the game is big enough that it's near impossible for one mortal to keep track of it. Another letter from someone craving some sweet AD&D style intarweb gaming on their mac. Roger is only mildly helpful this time. It's still an unstable realm out there, plus there are copyright issues to consider. We can't go giving publicity to unlicenced games, even if they aren't for profit. Editorial: Another 5 years have passed since they gave the magazine it's last big shake-up, and only slightly less since Roger became chief editor. This means that once again, it's time to look around, see what needs changing around to keep as much of the audience satisfied as possible. As with last time, it looks like a frustrating business, with the fanbase pulling in all directions. More AD&D stuff. More stuff for other games. More/less humour. More/less official rules and new crunch. And if you go all the way in the direction that has the majority, then you lose up to half your readership, and oh boy are you in trouble if that happens a few times on different axes. Plus the content of the magazine is still heavily influenced by what the freelancers send in. So once again, he's in a no-win situation, and has chosen to try and please all of the people enough of the time that they keep buying the magazine. Send in Stuff! The more you do, the greater the proportion of you we can reject, thus ensuring higher quality material in the magazine and greater choice of subjects! <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" /> This all seems pretty familiar, although getting to find out Roger's personal preferences (many of which aren't surprising considering what he contributed in his writing days. ) is nice. Carry on as you are. That'll do you nicely for a good few years yet. From hatchling to immortal guardian: Bruce Heard once again tries to push regular D&D to a more prominent place in the magazine singlehandedly. And in the process illustrates just how odd his ideas can be. It's not all anthropomorphic animals and direct rip-offs of real world cultures in the Known World. It's also cosmic beings who are intimately tied to the land and impact on the lives of everything there in blatant, large-scale ways that people don't realise the cause of, because we simply aren't conditioned to think in that way. So this creates a fairly complex life cycle and system for advancing through the size categories that looks like it'd be an almightily headache to play through, and which probably won't integrate with the known world's existing history. It all seems like the kind of stuff that'd be rather tricky to use in actual play, unless you were actually playing the dragons as PC's. Aside from the dragon souls and pocket dragons, which are adaptable to other ends, this does feel like a bit of a white elephant, pretty, detailed,  lovingly crafted and not very useful to me. :sigh:</blockquote>

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