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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5202834" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 185: September 1992part 3/6Magic in the evening: And then there were two wizards regularly visiting poor Ed. As part of the drive for increasing amounts of crossover between the worlds. Elminster invites Mordenkainen over for dinner, so they can discuss events, and exchange magical knowledge. Which means Ed gets to combine fiction with new game material in a manner quite different from Pages from the Mages. World spanning cosmic knowledge mixes with childlike glee at the culinary delights earth offers. Elminster has long ago put aside the fear of being underestimated or seen as immature. Mordenkainen is a little more cagey, but still has a sense of humour about recent events, and an appreciation of the finer things in life. Ed also uses this as an opportunity to comment on recent metaplot events in Toril, Krynn and Oerth. Lots of awesomeness, and more than a little silliness, and even he can't control it all. Not that they'd want to either. They both recognise that you need to keep minor bad guys around so the good guys have a target to healthily take out their aggressions on. (which neatly answers why he sets you quests that he could solve with a couple of judicious 9th level spells before breakfast) Even more than PftM, the spells in here are both quirky and well integrated into the setting, showing signs of people who are familiar with previous generations of spells and designing their ones specifically to counter or one-up them. Curse of the grinning skull is just perfect. Spelldream is both effective and evocative. Thundaerl's universal taster is a handy utility effect of the kind we could do with more of, and moonweb gives you a justice field which can be very handy indeed. Both enjoyable and useful, this is classic Ed material. He's still got both the touch and the power. Role-playing reviews I: The theme of this set of reviews is boxed sets. Another reminder how much more common they were back then. They're releasing enough on a regular basis that they can take them for granted, not every one is a big deal. If anything, they're about to reach their peak over the next year or two. We should be seeing this topic again. Dark sun boxed set sees Rick once again give 4 +1/2 stars where most other reviewers would comfortably award 5. It's not that he doesn't like it, but he is aware of it's shortcomings. These are mostly in the areas it doesn't go far enough. They should have got rid of alignment, put a bit more emphasis on the ecological disaster spin, and included more adventure seeds and NPC's. A few supplements'll sort those second two right out. Course, you may not be happy with the answers they give. Horror on the orient express is for Call of Cthulhu, and it DOES get 5 stars. It's as brutal on the investigators as a good CoC game should be, while maintaining a sense of fun about itself that should keep them from getting too pissed about their horrible deaths. If any game product can aspire to art, it's one like this. Solaris VII is a regional sourcebox for Battletech and Mechwarrior. It seems slightly more aspected towards providing a good backdrop for the human level interactions, but with both frontier and city underworld stuff, there's plenty of excuses for both mech duels and proper political conflicts. Once again, Rick thinks it needs some more specific supplements to fill things in, but it is a massive improvement on their previous attempts at setting building. You'll just have to hope enough people buy this to make supplements worth their while. The marvel-phile: Kree kree! Our second set of superpowered alien punching bags are back. And they've been copying other superheroes powers. Captain Atlas. Dr Minerva. Kordath the Pursuer. Shatterax. Supremor. And Ultimus. (methinks those last two are trying too hard) Most have energy manipulation abilities, and some degree of body armor, making them seem fairly standardised as antagonists go, but each has some trick that sets them apart from your run of the mill kree mook. They may be a genetically moribund race, but they're not dead yet by a longshot, no sir. This lot'll make good adversaries for a whole superhero team, and even if you beat them, you know there'll be more where they came from. More useful than some entries, this is nothertheless another rather dry collection of stats and histories I can't get too worked up about. Now what we need are a good bunch of Skrulls to put them up against. See you next month.</blockquote>

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