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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5242027" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 191: March 1993part 4/6The role of computers: Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen is the reviewer's new favourite RPG. With a familiar playstyle, but good graphics and sound, and plenty of challenges still to go, they've been spending many hours on this one. In addition to the review, they fill the entire hints column with highly detailed advice for getting through this, up to the 5th mine. I wouldn't be surprised to see this continued next month. Discovery: In the steps of Columbus, on the other hand, seems fairly mediocre. Trade, settle and kick native butt. With unskippable cut-scenes. Sounds like many a resource management game. Legend of Kyrandia is a point and click adventure game where you solve puzzles to defeat an evil clown. Another fairly good little challenge for you to get your teeth into. Ultima VII: The Black gate and Forge of Virtue get a rather more interesting and lengthy review. They've brought out an expansion pack for the game that serves as both an errata patch and a whole load of side quests, opening up new maps, and giving you access to powerful new items that'll make completing the main adventure easier. This is a decidedly interesting marketing strategy, but not without it's flaws. The new stuff doesn't appear to have been designed with quite the same care and attention, as is often the case for add-ons they know are going to sell less than the core. But despite these mechanical flaws, it's still a worthy addition to the series, and a laudable experiment in programming that'll become more popular over the years, with both neverwinter nights games getting add-ons in this style. Well worth noting from a historical perspective. Campaign journal: Oooh. Another attempt to start a regular column, focussing on expansions for their existing game worlds. Like the new kit stuff, this reads as a deliberate result of listening to their readership and trying to fill in the areas people said were lacking. It is nice when they do that. Course, stuff like this is dependent on getting good submissions, which will always be a problem. So it's no surprise that they start it off with a contribution from a staff writer. After all, even the ecologies took 3 kick-off articles from another magazine before they could stand on their own feet. So we start off with a primarily promotional piece from Carl Sargent to fill us in on the recent changes to Greyhawk. There are plenty of ways you can handle this. You can ignore it. You can play out the wars using the wargame, and use the result. You can play them through IC, but not let your players make any real difference on the larger scale of things, or you can do a timeskip. There's also plenty of room for different tones, from gritty and beleaguered to high-magic mystery. And of course, there's adversaries suitable for all levels. It all feels a lot more calculated than it used to. Greyhawk, like Mystara, started off as a bunch of adventures thrown together as Gary tried to stay one step ahead of his players. It never really got the same kind of primary company focus Krynn and Toril managed in different eras. So this does feel like a substantial shift in tone, an attempt to make it competitive and distinct in this era of fast developing, varied campaign settings. Well, he certainly succeeded in making it distinct. Competitive? Um, er, :shuffles away awkwardly: Maybe it would have worked better if they'd also rebooted the novels, given us some new characters experiencing the wars to get attached too. But no, they didn't even try. Man, Greyhawk's novel line was third rate. Even Ravenloft and Dark Sun did better in that department. Still, let's not disparage the usefulness of this article, which has both roleplaying advice not found in the book itself, and errata for it. It's actually quite good. It's just that the historical context surrounding this one lies so heavy it's hard to be cheerful about it. I guess it's up to us to take this turbulence and make fun games out of it somehow. White wolf rolls out the splatbooks with clanbook gangrel. Rawr, rawr, feel my claws. Don't use their clan weakness as an excuse for playing supa-kawaii catgirls. We have enough trouble with the fishmalks. Fiction: The barber, the thief and the smith by P Andrew Miller. Ironic comeuppance time here. Does that ever get old? Well, I'm asking the question now, so maybe it will eventually. I suppose like everything else, it's a question of not doing it too often. This is one of those stories which is the setup to a joke which seems obvious in retrospect, but good luck figuring it out beforehand. At only a page and a half in length, it doesn't bother much with fripperies and just gets straight to the point. Not terrible, but not brilliant either.</blockquote>

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