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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5277725" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 196: August 1993part 2/6 Cultivating campaign cultures: Things step back down again, with a bit of random table stuff. We already have one for random personality quirks for people. Now we have one for random cultural mores for societies! If you stumble across some village in the middle of the jungle, you need to know what the trigger is that'll result in them driving the players out in disgrace or trying to put them in the cookpot. Yeah, I can see the use in that. I can also see the humour in it too. Most of the specific examples are ones from the real world, and don't seem too ridiculous though. Although it is a bit short. I guess you'll have to use it as a springboard to designing your own expanded tables with their own quirks and taboos. Cool idea, so-so implementation. The art of storytelling: Things step downwards again with this bit of basic listed roleplaying advice. With a rather substantial editing error which means that point number 6 is repeated twice, and then it continues from there. Tut tut. That loses quite a few marks, even beyond this advice being mostly rehashed. Very much half-assed filler. Organization is everything: Or once again I thank humanity for inventing laptops. Even a decade ago, most of my notes were on paper, and things tended to get seriously higgledy piggledy as things were scrawled down wherever was most convenient at the time. If you wanted to seriously sort out the organisation of your notes post-hoc you have to completely rewrite them on fresh bits of paper. And of course, the sheer volume of them seriously mounts up if your campaign continues for years. If you aren't gaming at your own home, there comes a point where you simply can't fit all the stuff you use into your backpack to take to the group. These days, hard drives are big enough that you can fit .pdfs of every D&D book ever released into them, and still only fill a fraction, so I don't think you're in any danger of filling them up with your own written notes. And in this format, you can copy effortlessly, and cut and shift stuff around or insert something in the middle of other notes with a tiny fraction of the time and work it would have taken then. As is often the case, they finish off the themed section with an article that's relatively short, but still full of handy advice. Which in this case seems a bit dated, but the principles are still sound. After all, it may take a fraction of the effort to search and organise your work on computer, but it still needs to be done, otherwise you'll have a ton of little post-it's littering your document folder and you have to open them up to see what's inside the obscure titles. So plenty to think about here. Better get to work. Forum: Pierre Lapalme agrees with earlier forumites that getting persuading new players to start can be tricky. Much of this is the fault of the rules. Choose wisely, and then be consistent, but don't let them straitjacket you. They should be a path to fun, not an obstacle. Erik Koppang also thinks that wise house-ruling is important. Neither the rules of the tabletop game or the computer games are perfect. You certainly shouldn't follow them blindly just because that's the easy path. Paul Bleiweis finds he's becoming more embarassed talking about gaming as he gets older. Yeah, probably need to tackle that, or you'll have great trouble putting a group together in adulthood. You need to be able to convince them it's a desirable thing to do, and shame will not help with that. And finally we get another Anonymous letter, from one of the female employees at TSR, who is part of the anti-cheesecake brigade. Anyone know who this was? Anne Brown? Barbara Young? In any case, they blame it on the people in marketing. If you want to convince them otherwise, write to that department. Sage advice is tiny this month. Do paladins still lose their powers if they commit evil acts in ravenloft (yes. The gods know, even if you don't. Ok, sometimes the dark powers'll take over, but that kind of cheatyness is for NPC's only.) Why aren't the new spheres from ToM used in Tales of the lance (Space. Writers always produce too much, then something has to be cut. Like Skip this month, it seems.)What kind of spellbooks does a multiclassed mage/minstrel have (Two of them, one for each class. Oh woes, for I have to have a big backpack. It's nothing compared to the amount of gear modern musicians have to lug around. )</blockquote>

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