Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5309346" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 199: November 1993part 8/8TSR Previews: As is often the case, christmas is a big one. The forgotten realms gets a full 3 products this month. Volo's guide to the north revisits another area they covered a few years ago from a different, more flavourful perspective. PG2: The player's guide to the forgotten realms also rehashes things in a crunch free, newbie friendly fashion with lots of IC moments. I think they're starting to go round in circles here. The Harpers series also fills up, with book 7, Soldiers of ice. Flawed heroes find redemption? Good for them. Dark sun sees gulg and nibenay still locked in persistent grinding conflict, in DSM3: Marauders of Nibenay. And the PC's are once again stuck in the middle, trying to make the best of things. How are you gonna profit from this one? Meanwhile, a fairly famous name joins the novel team. Simon Hawke! I remember when he was Nicholas Yermakov, and get a short story published in issue 94. He's kept at it and come quite a way with us. Anyway. Outcast is part one of the Tribe of one trilogy. Starring a half-elf/half halfling. Great. Now everyone'll want to play one. Brooding loners do tend to do well in these stories. Ravenloft gets a second Monstrous compendium appendix, MC16. This one is focussed on individual named creatures with full histories, just to make things more personal. Not every monster is a mook or a darklord. There's plenty of middle ground, and the creatures in that do quite a bit of ironically appropriate suffering as well. Put them out of their misery, one way or another. Dragonlance looks at Ariakus, our third villain to get the spotlight. This egotistical twat thinks he can take Takhisis' place as supreme lord of evil. That's not going to end well. Still, could be fun finding out how. The 1993 collector cards get a special limited edition factory set. See, if you just bide your time for a bit, you can get them all far more efficiently. Like a cobra, you should be silent, swift and deadly. Snipe like a veteran ebayer for great profit. D&D updates the setting to reflect that another year has passed in AC1011, the second poor wizards almanac. 240 pages of mystaraey goodness. Well, they haven't been doing much of that lately. Good to see it get a little more love, rather than patronising disconnected intro products. Buck Rogers High adventure cliffhangers gets it's only supplement. War against the Han. Good to see them being a little more cautious this time around. But it's still a big boxed set that possibly cost more to produce than they sold it for. They really are starting to lose touch on what the market wants. Course, standalone books are always a gamble, but you've gotta keep trying them, or you're definitely doomed to eventual obsolescence. Green Fire by Louise Titchener features war combined with sexual tension between a king and a water goddess. Although probably without the actual sex, given their current company policies. As this is the 4th issue in a row in which they lose a regular member of staff/column,  there is the very real feel that the magazine is fragmenting at this point. We lost most of the old guard in 86, now the second wave are largely replaced as well. And it feels like they're actively burning through the last of their basic D&D articles before they dump that as well. As with last issue, they manage some pretty cool articles, but it almost feels in spite of the organisation rather than because of it. They're too busy gearing up for the next issue, which is now going to be even more of an effort with the management changes. Let's hope they can pull off something at least as spectacular as issue 100, hopefully even better.</blockquote>

Verification