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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5261959" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 194: June 1993part 1/6124 pages So we're up to year 17. Many of the magazine's readers are now younger than it, including me. Feel free to shake your stick and try get us offa your lawn. As you'd expect, there's a dragon on the cover trying to do just that. Because let's face it, we're all youngsters to a fully grown dragon, even the elves. But I guess the important question is if they've still got anything to teach us, or their age has left them out of date and baffled by this newfangled technology. Since we have not one but two Dragon Projects this month, they do seem to have some genuinely new stuff to offer us. But on the other hand, they also have two game wizards articles, which generally aren't particularly useful. Let's see what the ratio of good stuff, filler and crap is this issue. In this issue:Letters: Praise for the african articles. Yaaay! Roger points out further reading. Actually, he doesn't, but it's the thought that counts. Coverage of african history and mythology is still pretty damn sketchy. Uriah Heap? What have uriah heap got to do with D&D? A very good question that'll hopefully be filled in later. A letter from a multiclassed gamer/akidoer. As with army people writing in, Roger gives this extra attention due to personal investment. Seems like lots of the TSR staff actually try to become badass ninjas in real life, with mixed success. Why do I find that more funny than I should?A letter from someone who's found a misprinted trading card. Oooh. You can get more for them than the regular ones! Why do we even bother complaining about errata anyway when people fetishise it so. A letter from Ann Dupuis responding to Rick's review of GURPS Old West. Man, political correctness is getting out of hand these days. Such was the 90's. Can't talk about anything real without offending someone. This is one reason why we retreat into fantasy worlds in the first place. Editorial: From political correctness to more religious hysteria. Beauty and the beast promotes lycanthropy?! Ok, they're really really reaching for that one. I'm pretty certain some people just look for reasons to be offended by anything popular to get some attention. Roger treats this with the utter contempt it deserves. He really is getting more and more emotionally invested in this problem as the years go by. Still, it doesn't compare with the rage he feels at people trying to ban the diary of Anne Frank. That just says willfull eeeeeeevilness on a cartoonish level. Remember, a fairly reliable way of spotting who the good guy in a situation is the one who wants you to have access to information, and the freedom to make your own choices. It might not be perfect, but it'll be right far more often than not, until the bad guys wise up and feed you false info to make you make the wrong choices. And fighting censorship and government lies is something that remains incredibly relevant in the internet age. With video phones and instant uploads, we all have the ability to make a difference, ensure the actual truth on ugly events gets out. If that means we have to watch some poor quality, gruesome stuff, well, that's a price I'm willing to pay for freedom. Dragon dogfights: We kick this birthday off with quite a neat little number. A simplified system for fighting in the skies? It's not nearly as silly as clay-o-rama, but that may well be a good thing. It does have stuff in common with it in that you'll have to supply all the raw materials yourselves, and the whole thing was a little thrown-together, designed so people could have a laugh at last year's conventions. Of course, deadlines like that often wind up working in the favor of usability, as you really have to stick to the essentials needed to get the game working. And the stress testing it got then probably gave them a chance to iron off a few more rough edges. The whole thing is tremendously easy to get into, and the rules could well fit on a single sheet of doublesided paper if they shrank the font a bit. This qualifies as a definite success, even if it's not as impressive a package as the old centrefold games they used to put in the magazine. I do rather miss those. We want more variety! The details of the amazing engine and the way it will handle the core rules and settings is revealed. 32 page core rules and 128 page settings? Fight that bloat! Dexter & Cornelius: Our first Dragon Project is for GURPS. An adorably naive young dragon and the conman who's exploiting him to make his fortune. There's an idea that can be translated fairly easily to other systems, although it may be out of character for some worlds. It actually sounds more like the plot of one of their short stories than an article, but since the fiction in the magazine is one of my favourite parts, that's no bad thing. The crunch takes up a pretty tiny part of the article, showing GURPS doesn't have to degenerate into a morass of special case stuff, and the central idea seems pretty fun as an adventure seed. I think this is a pretty good success in balancing their various pressures.</blockquote>

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