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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5222118" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 188: December 1992part 4/6Fiction: Something familiar by Eliza Erskine. Another tale of wizardly hubris and comeuppance this month. You try and steal from a thief, and who knows what they'll do to get revenge. Well, the same applies to stealing from wizards, as we've seen before, so the results are usually interesting whichever side wins. As usual where magic is involved, the punishment is suitably ironic and quite mean. About average for fiction around here, which still means it's reasonably entertaining. This year's statement of ownership shows another steady year. With an average of 93,371, and a last month of 93,545, it looks from a casual inspection have a consistent fanbase at the moment. Delve closer, though, and the number of subscriptions has declined by more than a thousand and a half, while the number of newsstand sales is down by over 800, and the surplus is a large number of undistributed copies. This is interesting statistically, if not that pleasing. They'll probably sell those eventually as back issues, but in the meantime they're hanging around eating up warehouse space. Another subtle sign of slow decline. Role-playing reviews: Rick once again diverts our attention to the various board gamers out there. It is christmas after all, and we might want a little light entertainment for the kids. Whether you're a normal parent sneaking a look at your kid's magazine for ideas, or a gamer parent looking to subtly corrupt your offspring, I can see the marketing sense in putting this in here. The Xanth boardgame brings his much-loved paedophillic punnery to a new arena.  Pick a character, each of which has distinctive abilities, draw a hand of cards, roll the dice and head around the board. The number of options you have to choose from and random events that can happen keep it replayable for quite a while, even if it can be rather unfair and swingy. Yeah, sounds about right as an emulation of the source material. <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" /> Minion hunter is a board game based on Dark Conspiracy. As with the Warhammer minis games and RPG's, players are substantially more empowered in this, with a decent chance of actually taking on the monsters and no actual character death. It's another one that's pretty simplistic, and seems more intended to snag newbies than cater to existing players. Get it to corrupt your kids. Greyhawk Wars gets the same marks, but a slightly more positive review. A war game for people who hate war games? Hmm. Trouble with this one is that it has so much hate built up over what it represents historically, it's hard to judge it for what it actually is. There do seem to be some wonky rules bits, but they make heroes more important than they otherwise would be, which is probably good from a dramatic point of view. It may have it's flaws, but it's probably better to play this and apply it's results to your game than to simply use the default timeline advance. Battlemasters appears to be another highly stripped down game set in the warhammer universe, like Heroquest. Rick isn't very keen on this one, finding it far too simple and lacking in tactical decisions, but realises that his tastes are a good deal more refined than the average 8 year old. And it's cheap too. Perfectly positioned to appeal to the lowest common denominator and make millions. Novel ideas: Christmas has certainly come for R. A. Salvadore. Drizzt is a runaway success, and he's about to release his 10th Forgotten Realms novel, with several more already scheduled for next year. This is a pretty cool situation for any writer to be in, but it has it's dangers. You risk burnout, ( Writing a whole book in two months, yikes!) and there is the persistent danger of your character becoming an obscenely powerful mary-sue who's near impossible to seriously challenge and impossible to kill off due to fan demand. But he does seem commendably aware of the dangers and unfazed by the challenges, putting him in a good position to remain one of their primary cash cows for some time, and also making him a likable interviewee. It's so much more pleasant seeing people live the dream when they're not smug superior <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />s. Another relatively good performance from this column. They seem more likely to produce useful information when not splitting it up into too many tiny chunks.</blockquote>

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