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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5169579" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 180: April 1992part 6/6Wear your best suit: Great. They still haven't fixed the gadgeteer problem in FASERIP, despite it being rather noticable way back in issues 95 & 96, where they first covered Iron Man. Guess it's up to the magazine to post an unnofficial solution that probably won't make it into the next edition anyway. This is a rather limited solution too, only covering powered armour wearers rather than equipment in general. It also reminds us how glacially slow normal advancement is under the system, when upgrading your gear really shouldn't work like regular xp. Can't say I find this one very likable, or well constructed. Keep looking for a solution guys. The wanderers: They say "If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door." If you build a better wandering monster table, on the other hand, that means better monsters hanging around making a nuisance of themselves. Which might sound appealing to adventurers, but is a nuisance to people who actually have to live there. Although if the tables increase your odds of encountering a large variety of normal humans and animals, as these ones do, then they might welcome the change in their living environment. By making the encounter tables nested, you can fit a lot more in, and can also reuse them by having multiple terrain ones direct to the same other ones, only with different probabilities.  Like the solo tables a bit earlier this issue, (which this would combine well with) this is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but is a good deal more elegant than the d12 + d8 tables, with the probabilities easy to figure and adjust on the fly, and more able to throw up a variety of surprises that keep your game from getting stale. These little design tricks definitely deserve consideration. And it allows you to come close to including the entire ecology of an area in your random tables, which also means you could probably increase the frequency of your rolls without breaking the game by having the players face too many killer encounters. Applying this would have lots of little knock-on effects, probably for the better. I shall try to remember it when I next design random encounter tables. Dragonmirth is a bit creepy really. Yamara gets a new home courtesy of Ogrek. Twilight empire gets out of the fire and into the tentacle monster. Not really an improvement. Through the looking glass: SCUD missiles. Aka scary enemy boogeyman 1991 edition. Once again I say, what a complete letdown compared to the cold war. Still, it's not as pathetic as the supposed terrorists of the 00's (less than one successful attack a year worldwide is a joke to someone who grew up with the IRA around. ) The media really do have very little sense of proportion. Still, I'm sure it was scary for the soldiers involved. (even if more of them ended up with long-term problems from our own chemical crap than enemy attacks. ) Funny that the biggest reminders of the big world outside the magazine should be coming from the Mini's and computer game columns. Our minis this month go back to mixing fantasy and sci-fi. A wall of skulls, which I'd probably get more use out of than this reviewer. A ghostly skeleton, or skeletal ghost, however you want to play it. A dragon that should tower over standard sized minis nicely. A centaur archer. A cleric, a witch and a dwarf. (walk into a bar. The witch changes the bar into a frog as revenge, which causes the house to collapse. The cleric heals them, and the dwarf rebuilds the house. Everyone lives happily ever after. ) A futuristic hovercraft, and two battletech mechs. All get between 4 and 5 stars. He really isn't pushing himself in this respect. This time they actually remembered to scan the trading cards in. Which is nice. They're also using mostly original characters this time. However, this does result in a very noticeable drop in the artwork quality, as they don't spring the same kind of money as they do for the various book covers they recycled from for the previous set. Say hello to Foleas, Alvestar Jankins, Aurora, Guido del Confuso, Mellenea, Zinnabar Albbee, "Slipper Kindric", "Thallios", Chobin"the punkster", Darwell Tectite, Aruthir, Jastus, Hm-boye, Lady Wendolyn of Gaunt, Reptilla Half-elven, Phun Ach-mana Phun, and Delynn Rosabell. Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms are all represented. Many of them have kits, all alignments are represented, there's a psionicist, and they all have at least token attempts at personalities. Pretty decent demographic collection. I wonder how many of them are from games by the writers and how many are whipped up wholecloth. This series seems unlikely to end soon, but diminishing returns are starting to set in. They need to do something more than just trading to keep people interested. <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=";)" /> As befits the middle issue, this is indeed a very middling issue indeed, with a medium amount of april goofiness between the full specials and the ones that cut it out, an even mix of articles with cool developments and tedious rehashed ones, and a moderate amount of non RPGing diversions. As is often the case, they seem to have gone for the approach that they can't please everyone all the time, but by casting a broad net, at least one article each month should be pleasing to you. Hopefully that theory will continue to hold water for a while longer.</blockquote>

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