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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5118630" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 175: November 1991part 3/6The voyage of the princess ark: As the Ark heads south along the Savage coast, they find themselves invited to a formal ball in Saragon. An excellent chance for Haldemar to get some dance practice in, and a chance to show events from lady Abovombe's point of view as well. Of course, things can't go smoothly for them, and they find themselves in the middle of palace intrigue, with spies, assassins and gnoll ninjas ( <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />) turning the evening into a combination of farce and grand guignol. An unusually funny episode, as we get to see romance (sorta, oh woe for the bowdlerising company policy. ) peer bonding, (over fried gnoll) and overdramatic death scenes. Bruce is obviously experimenting with what he can do in this series, and this is a definite hit. It really ought to be a TV series, because I can visualize this episode clearly now, and it would be really rather amusing. Our OOC section fills us in on another 4 of the Savage baronies. Almarron, the deeply unstable new dictatorship. Gargona, the switzerland of the savage baronies with it's policy of neutrality and encouraging artists. Guadalante, aka cowboy country. And the aforementioned Saragon, with it's wizardly ruler, magical artefact shielding it's borders, and general magic-heaviness. Once again we see how we've gone from sorta medieval stuff to sorta colonial americas. The letters touch on this point as well, with some people vaguely dissatisfied at how far they've drifted from the low-magic, feudal style of play. They have to differentiate their three generic fantasy settings somehow, and Mystara got to be the one with really common magic that's fully integrated into everyday life. Go to Greyhawk if you want gritty, and leave us to enjoy our weird, and often rather amusing adventures around here. Fiction: Uktena's quest by Kit Wesler. Oooh. Native american stuff. And a timely reminder that now Vampire: the Masquerade is out, Werewolf: The Apocalypse will be following in quick succession. Get ready for descriptive names based on animals and achievements, often rather silly, to become a lot more common in the near future. Anyway, this combines the "young boy sets out to prove himself" and "Kill the dragon" plot seeds and puts them into a native american milieu. It uses the same method of killing said big monster as The Hobbit, features irritating and enigmatic little fairy creatures and is otherwise deconstructable to the point of absolute predictability. I really can't say I'm impressed by this one at all. Such is the nature of formulaic filler. The role of computers shakes up it's format some more, putting a whole bunch of preamble before the reviews. Upgrades, protcol, news and requests. Oh, and recursive joke acromyns. It does feel a touch niggly, as they try and solve some little problems, but are still doing basically the same things. I can't work up much enthusiasm about this. Castles is a typical top-down sim game where you build your settlement and engage in violence with rival settlements. You can play it as regular medieval kingdoms or add on fantasy elements. While no sim city beater, it's not bad either. This genre isn't going away any time soon. Dragon Crystal is a roguelike adventure for the Game Gear. Make your way through 30 randomly generated levels, find food, defeat monsters, and raise a baby dragon from an egg. It's easy and simple enough to be fun to start, but hard to complete, as a good game should be. Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective is of course a puzzle-centric rpg game where you have to solve crimes with the finesse of the fictional detective. It's one of the first games to use actual video cutscenes using real actors, so even if the picture quality is a bit grainy, it definitely stands out. The clue hunting process is pretty interesting sounding as well. Good to see someone really taking advantage of the massive memory increase moving from floppies to CD's grants you. The clue corner is tiny this month. However, we do have another substantial conversions collection. The faery tale Adventure, King's Bounty & Might and Magic  all get new versions on the Genesis. This generally entails a certain amount of simplification, due to the lack of a keyboard, but also improvements in the graphics and sound. Consoles are rapidly overtaking computers in terms of fun for your time and money ratio, and it's a long time before they'll start turning into multimedia centres themselves, bringing the streams back together again. Growing pains aplenty in this industry to come.</blockquote>

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