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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5292217" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 198: October 1993part 1/6124 pages. Horror elements on this month's cover, but combined in amusingly goofy fashion. Goes to show, it's a tiny change from genuinely creepy uncanny valley stuff to harmlessly weird and back. Just the kind of melding of serious and playful Roger has got rather good at over the years. Lets see if the april spirit persists at the other end of the year this time. In this issue:Letters: Three letters from people having trouble getting hold of some of the smaller company games reviewed in the magazine. It's an object lesson in how much power the main distributors still wield in controlling what becomes big or not. Another letter from someone who wants to become an Officially Qualified DM. That little rumour will not die, for some reason. I suspect some creepy gamers perpetuate it to gull the gullible. A couple of questions about bonded weapons from issue 194. They aren't quite that special. A letter asking for the sources used as references by the artists. We do have a lot of artists with different influences, but a few names do turn up again and again. A letter wondering why they don't do more fiction. We tried that around issue 2. 1 piece of fiction per month has turned out about the optimum to minimise complaints from both sides of the fence. We are primarily a gaming magazine, you know. Editorial: Well, Cons are still a growth industry, anyway. As has become habit over the years, it's time for Roger to recount our tales of Gen Con wackiness. TSR has increased the size of their booths, but they still look proportionately smaller when you account for all the other companies blowing up around this time. Once again Margaret and Tracey are right in the middle of any trouble that crops up, being captured by Klingons and then setting them on the rest of the TSR staff. (all for charity, of course. Jurassic park stuff was huge, George Takei guest starred with aplomb, and Roger consumed FAR too many M&M's over the three days. As usual, the whole thing was exhausting but fun. They've somehow retained enough immaturity and sense of wonder to really take advantage of events like that, despite this being a job to them for well over a decade. As is often the case, I am full of envy. It does get very tiring being the serious one all the time, but I just don't seem to be able to unwind enough to enjoy that kind of mischief anymore. Too much time spent writing alone, too little direct feedback for what I do leaves me perpetually insecure as to my value. It drives me forward, but it's not healthy by any yardstick. I wish I got to have more fun. Pin back their ears: Lycanthropes get first place this year, unusually. However, it is not exactly to get more toys for the DM or players. It's actually mostly nerfs, with some optional clarifications as well. Handy for a low magic game where you have to figure out how to defeat them without the easy solutions, and especially if you've somehow wound up with a lycanthrope PC with a degree of control over their actions, and they've tried to run rough-shod over bit chunks of your campaign. A bit of mixed bag really in terms of opinions, but it does have some nice adventure seeds. They've done better, they've done worse. This doesn't set my world alight either way. The false undead: Pseudo-undead were one of the more vague and irritating creatures of 1e, and for whatever reason, they never got converted over to 2e. But the idea of monsters that fake out the players is a well-established one, and always useful in dealing with overconfident players. Still, a surprise is only a surprise once, before you have to find a new one, so here's another instalment of things that look creepy, but you can't actually turn. Bunch of cheek really. Skullriders are arachnoid creatures with a shell that looks very much like a human skull. They can attach themselves to a dead body and animate it temporarily, but are more a nuisance than a real danger to prepared adventurers. Just another strange add-on to D&D's dungeon ecology. Goop ghouls are oozes that also like to use someone else's remains as a means of facilitating their mobility and ability to manipulate objects. They flow over a skeleton and animate it, looking like regular undead at a distance as they're semitransparent.  Sounds like the kind of thing a Slithering Tracker might evolve into, given the right level of underground radiation. Both of these are pretty cool monsters, both from a conceptual and design point of view.</blockquote>

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