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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5273620" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 195: July 1993part 5/6The role of books: The boggart by Susan Cooper sees an ancient scottish fairy transplanted to modern day Toronto. Hilarity ensues, with electricity and the like giving it a whole new avenue for pranks. Both the creature and it's new victims PoV are explored. This seems like good fodder for a movie conversion. Burning Bright by Melissa Scott depicts a future in which a single MMORPG has taken over the entire galaxy and become the primary form of entertainment. Amusingly, this has not eliminated the active participation of GM's (unlike in reality <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> ) This premise stretches the reviewer's suspension of disbelief quite a bit. You'd think people would get bored, and monopolies naturally get complacent and bloated, setting themselves up for a fall. If you can swallow that bit, the rest of the plot is quite good, mixing real world and in game stuff quite well. Remember, it's science fiction. It doesn't have to be plausible. Danger of the sixth by Michelle Shirey Crean gets a pretty negative result. Poor pacing, poor focus, iffy morality, uncertain ending. Work on all of these for the next one! :wags finger:The dragon's tomb by D J Heinrich gets quite a good review, making interesting use of D&D's Immortal based cosmology, and giving the monsters proper characterisation as well as the humans. The plot doesn't play it too safe either, with mystara in genuine danger throughout the novel. Well, it is the first series. It's only when you have half a dozen authors writing semi-independently at once that you have to take care not to tread on other people's toes. The starship trap by Mel Gilden is a star trek novel with a nice concept, but clunky characterisation and writing. We know who Kirk and Spock are! Get on with the story! To green angel tower by Tad Williams is one of the more successful Tolkien imitations the reviewer has seen, managing to capture the scope without copying the details too much. They're always looking for a real epic, and this is one they can reccomend. Palladium once again boasts about their amazing rifts sales. No-one else gives concrete numbers. What's all that about? Overcoming obstacles: Another rather interesting superheroic article this month. Heroes with some kind of handicap as well as their special abilities are actually surprisingly common. Be it mundane stuff that they have to compensate for, like Daredevil's blindness, or more complicated issues deriving from their powers, like Cyclop's danger of destroying everything he sees, the best characters are ones defined by their weaknesses as much as their strengths. But as in D&D, it seems far too many FASERIP players don't believe in that maxim, and want everything to be average or better. Looks like it's time for one of those short filler articles that encourage you to make a well-rounded character and play them properly, for it will result in more interesting games. The mundane difficulties they'll face can be a big source of roleplaying, and the way they use their powers to mitigate their limitations  will hopefully be interesting. Have you got that into your thick heads yet, bloody powergamers? Fiction: The end of trading season by Daniel Hood. Ooh. An unhappy ending! Not often you see those around here. Merchant fails to heed the native traditions, things go horribly wrong for him, and he winds up being a sacrifice to an undead monster posing as their god. Not hugely surprising, apart from the ending, where we can be pretty sure he didn't get saved at the last minute, but full of neat worldbuilding details nonetheless. The whole scenario looks perfect for an RPG module, as there's plenty of points where you could do things differently, and still get interesting results. That makes this a very strong bit of fiction for the magazine on multiple levels. Not just entertainment, but also helpful too. Campaign Journal: We return to Greyhawk again, courtesy of Carl Sargent. And he's starting to feel the backlash from people who aren't at all happy with the major changes the war made to the world. They can't exactly reverse this stuff, but they can certainly mitigate it. A lot of this is a reminder that the books do not have to be adhered strictly to for your own campaign, and things can be rearranged, transplanted, adapted, or simply ignored if they contradict stuff built up in your own game. Which you probably know already, but it's still annoying when a world goes in a different direction to the one you want it too. One reason it can be easier to play in a setting that doesn't have a constantly churning active supplement mill. So I guess we're seeing the first signs of backlash against metaplot here. It's still going to get bigger before it goes away, but it's no longer the fresh young thing that can do no wrong, and everyone has to have. Welcome to the bloated arena rock days. Feel the gated reverb on that drumkit. Get ready for lightshows, costume changes, and guitar solos longer than ZZ Top's beards. Not my favourite environment. So this says nothing I don't know, and reminds me that there's a storm a comin'. Bleah. KULT! The darkness continues to spread. Death is only the beginning.</blockquote>

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