Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5211265" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 186: October 1992part 6/6Role-playing reviews II: The popularity of horror is once again reinforced. There's so much good stuff that Rick and Lester can both have decent columns full.  Horrifying, isn't it. <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=";)" /> Call of cthulhu 5th edition sees Rick give it a 5 star result as it continues to succeed against the odds. Characters are a little more competent this time round, but really, compared to the creatures they're facing, they're still going to be chow soon. Everything else is just the way you like it. BRP has pretty much reached maturity as a system, there's lots of great adventures and advice on making your own, and the presentation is still improving. Everyone should try it at least once. GURPS Horror 2nd edition, on the other hand gets the usual competent but dull result they give them round here. Pick your elements, and put them together. They're all there, it's just up to you to figure out what you want. You know the drill by now. The Apparitions, lycanthropes and vampires sourcebooks for Chill get mixed reviews. The interesting design makes them fun reads, but they aren't hugely innovative. Vampires gets the highest marks, with it's large quantity of individual named vampires tackled, while werewolves comes out the loser, with ridiculous amounts of whitespace. So it's not just TSR that's using that to pad out their books then. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Interestingly, we also see the first hint of backlash against the IC narrator device, with rick finding it unhelpful and distracting in Van Richten's guide to Ghosts. Just give us the crunch. Hmm. Sorry, I'm afraid that's going to get much more frequent before it starts going out of fashion. Guess you'll just have to be ahead of the times for a while. That's one for the notebooks. Dragonmirth has some ghostly romance. Some people just can't let go. What ever happened to till death do us part? Yamara gets rather swept along by events. This is what happens when the PC's are aware of the metagame. The twilight empire guys are still split up and not sure what to do either. Through the looking glass skips the introductions so as to fit more actual minis in. Unsurprisingly, many are horror themed. Werewolf, wereboar, wereape? (don't see many of them in D&D. Who's idea was that?) A whole undead army including boss, minions and standard bearer to serve your liches and necromancers. A wraith, a mummy, and for those of you who want something a little exotic, a two-headed zombie ogre. If this lot win, then you can make lots of use of the Impaled Victim mini too. If you'd prefer your horrors to be the stay at home sort, there's several that come with their own homes. A mysterious horror busting out from a tomb. A lich lurking under a mausoleum archway. A gravestone with amorphous spirits seeping out. You won't be short of spooky setpieces to lurk in your dungeon. Plus there's some more skeletons and zombies just to make sure you don't have too many duplicates, and some official ravenloft figures, including various darklords, and a vistani dancer. And finally, just to redress the balance a little, there's a mob of villagers. They're totally going to die, aren't they. Tee hee. It's not like in the movies. D&D is not merciful to the overconfident commoner. And that sure aint changing next year either. The reviews in this one are a bit weak, but otherwise, it's a very consistent issue, full of crunchy stuff that's useful for D&D, and advice bits that are handy for most games. Guess it's another instance of the regular topics getting lots of strong articles over the year for the editors to choose from when the time comes. Which means next year should be pretty decent too. You can always rely on horror to be a good seller, so you can always rely on them to produce it. Gotta keep making that money, after all.</blockquote>

Verification