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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5256471" data-attributes="member: 27780">I do apologise for missing a day due to being temporarily internetlessDragon Magazine Issue 193: May 1993part 2/6Live statues and stone men: Or lets have a few more Golems. They don't need food and other regular maintenance, so they can hang around underground for ages just waiting for adventurers to turn up and kill them, and the DM need worry not about ecology and all that irritation. These three all turn up in later monstrous compendia, as monsters in the magazine are increasingly likely to do these days. Brain golems also get quite a few appearances in other books. I guess illithid's strong connection with the magazine continues. Brain Golems are ridiculously macho looking for something made entirely out of brains. They are rather smarter than the average golem, just like most illithid creations. And of course, they don't break out of control on an irregular basis like mind<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=":)" />ed members of other races. So they tend to get fairly good treatment for a slave. Hammer Golems are dwarven creations designed to crush their racial enemies with great prejudice. They also work pretty well as miners, making new tunnels almost as fast as a dwarf can walk down them. With one of these, you really could excavate a dungeon a day. Monte Cook would approve. Spiderstone Golems are Drow creations, unsurprisingly. With lots of limbs, climbing and web powers, they're well suited to taking on larger parties. Their chaotic evil origins make them one of the less reliable varieties of golem, prone to breaking free and killing their owner before going off to become a lurking tunnel predator. Still, they're neither as scary or unreliable as clay golems. They might well last a while as long as they're properly taken care of. And Lolth cares not that they'll turn on her own race, as her willingness to create things like Driders shows. These three are all pretty reasonable new creations. Role-playing reviews turns it's eye on small press games. This is interesting because they're the ones that benefit most from a review in a major magazine. A good one can boost their sales by several orders of magnitude, while even a bad one is better than no publicity for a tiny company, and gives them a level of legitimacy it can be hard to feel when you know them personally, and it's just a couple of guys laying things out in their basement in their spare time. Bloodbath is one of those simple but fun games with a few obvious holes in it's rules. Pure hack and slash, with setting entirely subordinated to that goal. Everything uses d6's, and you have an actual bloodlust stat which ha a significant effect on your actions. Perfect for if you want to play an all-barbarian game where life is cheap and limbs fly like confetti. Bloodchant introduces magic to Bloodbath. The spells are just as gruesome as the combat, and the descriptions are just as florid and technically dubious. It all sounds like it was written by a teenage boy who has too many heavy metal albums. Are you ready to breathe the miasma of DISPAIR! Advanced Phantasm Adventures is a translation of a fantasy game that's apparently big in japan. It gets a rather long review, explaining the rather crunchy system in detail. Unfortunately, despite it's high detail, it has rather slipshod editing, which is a bigger crime than in a rules light game it's easy to modify and hopefully fix. It does have some cool ideas, and is impressively open-ended, but doesn't really feel like a finished game. Maybe it lost something in translation, or maybe it was also problematic in it's original language. After all, Original D&D was pretty sketchy too ruleswise. I have to wonder how well that was translated into various languages. Duel seems to be trying to fill the gap left when The Fantasy Trip evolved into the insanely crunchy GURPS. At 36 pages, it's small, but pretty versatile, with 3 main stats and 5 magic aspects covering most of what you'll want to do. The main complaint of the reviewer, ironically, is the base dice system. Lester likes his bell curves, it seems. And there's the constant temptation to load it down with expansion crunch. Oh, woe is you. Toy war is even tinier, at a mere 12 pages. It gets a similarly tiny review. It works with nearly any toy, and has a mere 2 stats. It's actually surprisingly elegant really. You can have quite a bit of fun with it, especially if you have a big toy collection. Like clay-o-rama, this is barely a step up from let's pretend really. Critter commandos is another fun minis game, designed to evoke a cartoon atmosphere. This has obviously been quite successful actually, with a supplement, and conversion rules to bring Warhammer 40k characters over, quite possibly to get a good cream pieing. It also has it's own suitably silly setting. Like Toon, this is an entirely viable niche to carve out in the market, even if it'll never be huge. Palladium fantasy takes us to the island at the end of world. Now with extra metaplot. Everyones doing it. You don't have to copy them. Traveller the new era! Now compatible with Twilight:2000 and Dark Conspiracy. Another company making attempts at giving all their games a universal system, it seems.</blockquote>

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