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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5120187" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 175: November 1991part 5/6Role-playing reviews: Horror time again, a little late. Busy magazine, people miss deadlines, not enough room, whatever excuse, here it is now, let's rock. Dark conspiracy gets a fairly good review. It's clearly written, has great artwork, a system with simple base mechanics but lots of crunch on top of it, and a fairly well designed and versatile setting. On the other hand, it's humourless, uses complicated math, and doesn't put much emphasis on the actual horror aspect, instead just focussing on the killing stuff. So it's good for if you want to play modern dungeon delves, or know how to run horror without mechanical support, but not too great for new players. Vampire: the masquerade gets a fairly prompt review. And oh yes, the pretentiousness is looked upon somewhat askance. The rules and presentation may be a bit rough compared to later editions, but, oh, the ideas, and the way they emphasise their themes. Artwork may not be perfect, but the way they use it to tell a story throughout the book is genius. (and one thing they really could do again these days) The way they handle the stuff you have and encourage you to play your character's personality via mechanical carrots and sticks is indeed damn innovative. The amount of advice on roleplaying and campaign construction is orders of magnitude greater than other games at this point, and the whole thing comes with plenty of prepackaged conflicts, both external and internal. What monstrous things will you wind up doing to avoid becoming a monster permanently? Oh yeah. They've arrived with a bang, as we also saw at the conventions, and soon the roleplaying landscape will be very different. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to put on The Cure's greatest hits and bounce around to Let's go to Bed. Blood brothers is a Call of Cthulhu supplement that brings schlock horror to BRP, with a bunch of short adventures based on classic movies. This may of course piss off purists, but it is fun if you're in the right mood. One for both april and october then. Rhyme & reason: My oh my? 15 years of a fantasy magazine and we never had an article on riddles before. That does seem like a rather surprising omission, considering their significance in the hobbit, and frequency they've shown up in other books in their reviews section, sometimes even being the centre of the entire story. Course, that may be because they're a pain in the butt which depend heavily on DM preparation, and player skill over character stats. This article uses some quite interesting formatting, with the relatively short expository bit on the top, 8 sample riddles in the middle, and the answers at the bottom, along with quite a bit of varicoloured artwork. It doesn't go into that much detail, actually, a tiny amount on the RL history of riddles, and a similarly small amount on actually using them in your game. It's all a bit insubstantial really, and doesn't help much with either constructing your own, or overcoming the problems of using them in your game. Rather an odd duck really. Still, they've done it now. There's a reasonable chance we won't see it again for another decade or so, which is fine by me. Delivered by breath, scares heroes to death: Egads. Two riddle articles in one issue. Yeah, this is pretty scary. Shoulda put these in last month's issue and moved the ioun stone pair to here. This one has less new riddles, and more stuff on making your own and putting them into your campaign effectively. It is rather encouraging, perhaps even a little too so, demystifying the riddlecrafting process pretty well. It's really no harder than writing poetry & music, and uses a lot of the same brain areas, along with the crossword solving one. Once again, the primary problem with including them in your game isn't mentioned, (never make a situation dependent on your players making a single particular choice. ) but it's a pretty decent article taken on it's own terms. I guess with story gaming making it's big uprising, people have to make a whole bunch of new mistakes while exploring and learn from them. Oh, if only we could have hindsight without having to go through all the crap first. Best we can do is learn from the mistakes of others.</blockquote>

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