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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5280415" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 196: August 1993part 4/6Novel ideas: How many Forgotten Realms books have TSR published in the past 6 years?! Jeez, maybe you should have started worrying about their continuity a little sooner. James Lowder takes on the job of figuring out what happened before and after various other things, and delivering it to us. The timeline starts off fairly sparse and sketchy, but them becomes very busy after DR 1350. It's pretty obvious where the prequels end and the bits written as present begin. With things stretching up to 1372, it seems that they've progressed forward at the rate of approximately 2-3 game years per real year, giving new adventurers plenty of chances to strut their stuff on the stage. This is interesting when contrasted with their other gameworlds. Mystara & Ravenloft tried to maintain a realtime, 1 game year per real year progression, while Krynn and Oerth have wound up progressing in fits and starts, due to their primary developers being absent for extended periods of time, and over-reliance on prequels, interquels and side stories. It's a good thing there aren't actually that many crossover stories between them, or this'd become an almighty headache. This stuff isn't too hard to handle as long as you have a good line editor, but take your eye off the ball, and before you know it, there are inconsistencies and continuity snarls everywhere and you have to deploy the dreaded blunt tools of retcon and reboot to get things working again. And it only gets harder the more stuff you add. So this is a sign that they're not quite at the point where continuity starts to strangle the line, but it's only a few years away. It also manages to be quite a good bit of subtle promotion, not only helping you know clearly all the stuff you might want to buy, but also some of the books they haven't released yet. It's certainly given me plenty to think and talk about, and something to reference back too. The game wizards: Hmm. A new adventure for Dragon Strike? That's an interesting one. I have been saying they need more useful stuff than straight promotion in these columns. Looks like someone else was saying so at the same time and they've listened. So in 2 pages we get a map, and a key, including a bunch of roleplaying notes. While still pretty basic to actual roleplayers, this still manages to have more depth to it's play than Heroquest, (which it is clearly influenced by) and is a good example of how you can fit a lot of play info into a tiny word count, which is a lesson the official AD&D adventures are increasingly forgetting to their detriment. While I'm still not too keen on boardgame stuff being promoted here, like this month's Novel Ideas, this is an interesting way of handling their duties, and one that gives me things to think about. You too can steal and make good use of this kind of adventure notating formula, and thereby fit a dozen scenarios in a 32 page booklet. In another amusing footnote, we also get an apology for their spate of cultural insensitivity last month. Research Moar! And remember folks, what is acceptable around the gaming table is not acceptable in an international magazine. Knowing is only half the battle. You also have to act upon that knowledge. Role-playing reviews: Rick picks some rather obscure licensed games this month. The kind of thing that are unlikely to make much money, and probably got commissioned because the original creator is a geek, or someone approached them and gave them a good spiel. Curious business. When gravity fails is a supplement for Cyberpunk 2020, giving us a vision of how islamic culture might interact with cyberpunk tropes. There's always going to be the stereotypical reactionaries, but this gives a far more nuanced portrayal than that, mixing olde world issues with modern solutions, and adding on a ton of cool personality modification rules as befits the original source material. If anything, it's too short to handle all the cool ideas it raises, with some bits left sketchy, but what there is is both interesting and genre expanding. Just as roleplaying games need to tackle cultures outside medieval europe more so too do cyberpunk stories. Dream Park is a rather odd little game from Mike Pondsmith, based on Larry Niven's story of the same name. (see issue 52) As you're playing a person playing a character inside a virtual reality game, things get a little meta, and you can shuffle your special abilities around between adventurers, and lose powers as often as you gain them. It also means the GM can worry far less about things such as plausibility and continuity, instead concentrating on delivering inventive one-shots while having an excuse for keeping the same underlying characters throughout. Like Toon, the system may be a bit simple to really support extended campaigns, but it should be fun for a change of pace if the regular GM is absent. Wizards is based on Ralf Bakshi's movie. This isn't quite as bad as the movie, in Rick's opinion, but still feels like a poorly edited, convoluted mess that needs some serious revision to get it's good ideas up and running. Why it ever got made in the first place is a mystery.</blockquote>

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