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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5170225" data-attributes="member: 27780">Ok, It's a new month, let's start working myself back towards full speedDragon Magazine Issue 181: May 1992part 1/8124 pages. Once more with the magical crunchiness with no theme more focussed than that. It's getting so common as to be barely worth mentioning as a topic. And yet despite the frequency of submissions of this sort, they're all pretty firmly stuck in the standard D&D magic paradigm. One of those things that makes it very clear why the 90's were a troublesome time for them. If you stay the same while the world changes, you get left behind. Still, they do make one useful little format change this issue. The various review columns get grouped together in the contents page, making them easier to locate and reducing the recent tendency of this bit to turn into just another wall of text. (the .pdf formatting follows in it's wake, which is also nice. ) So they are moving forward, just not as much as they probably need to be. I shall not be so patient, however. I fully intend to push myself to get the second half of this trek done faster than the first half. In this issue:Letters: Timothy B. Brown complains about the picking apart of his Dark Sun spell frequency math. These flaws were intentional! You would ruin the game if you changed it! Ha and ha again. A letter praising their top quality fiction. Damn right. Haven't i been finding the same thing for years now, the average fiction quality is actually better than the average game material quality. Roger, of course, sends all the praise to his sub-editors. I'm sure they have to sift through a lot of crap to keep things this way. A letter telling people to send in the adventures they spend ages working on to Dungeon if they want financial recompensation. That isn't going to work as well as you think, I'm afraid. They already get a lot more submissions than they can publish. Welcome to reality, where earning money doing things you love is really hard. Editorial: Roger tries once again to push our gaming boundaries, proving as usual that he's a good deal more progressive than most of the material he gets. This time it's politics, and the lack of it in too many games that is his pet peeve. Once you get monsters of a certain power level, the impact they have upon the world automatically becomes a political issue, even if they themselves couldn't care less about the effect they're having on the puny humans. If your campaign lacks the epicness and emotional attachment of LotR, it may well be because you're neglecting that area, with people maintaining a nebulous status quo effortlessly despite all the monsters roaming around the world. He also exaggerates a little to demonstrate that personal power and political do not have to be linked, and you can do all sorts of clever things with long-term plans. (even if you have to retroactively make some of the details up to make the characters as intelligent as they should be. ) You can set your players at the centre of an epic and give them a decent amount of agency while still having an idea where the game will go in the long-term. He even makes it sound easy. Course I know from personal experience, it isn't quite that easy, but it's still a desirable goal to aim for. Nice to see him still aiming for the stars. Sorcery & Strategy: Recently, we've had an article that went into tactics as performed by fighters in a relatively realistic world. Course, in D&D, spellcasters provide the majority of the really interesting tactical and strategic options, and even one makes a huge difference to the battle flow. And it's not just in their ability to inflict large quantities of area damage with a good fireball or lightning bolt. Thomas M. Kane points out that the buffing and defensive powers are actually more useful, especially once you get to higher levels and the enemies are pretty likely to resist direct effects cast at them. If you know what you're doing, you should be using divinations and terrain effects to ensure you're stacking the odds in your favour before the enemy even knows you're there. Once again we see the advantages specialists have in finding a useful niche in larger society, as he gives us some sample characters, their spell lists and normal tactics. With a nice mix of very specific detail, and principles that are applicable to any system, this is another strong delivery from forumite Thomas M. Kane. It could definitely have gone into more detail on the combat applications of clerics though. They're even more useful to an army, as they have all the healing and food effects, and aren't so squishy. Guess once again the magazine might have good material, but it's still limited in it's range.</blockquote>

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