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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5330526" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 201: January 1994part 5/6The ten commandments of tournament writing: This topic again. It's becoming one of the most regularly recurring highly specific topics over the years. There's plenty of demand for tournament modules now, and people are getting quite experienced at making them. Course, that means there's also going to be plenty of dross floating around. It also means things are quite different from the early modules in some ways. There's more emphasis on balanced encounters, and less on creating adventures that will kill the majority of parties, with the winner being who gets furthest before dying. There's also an emphasis on breaking the rules, or at least creating new ones, which is another huge sea change from the early 80's, where tournament stuff was supposed to be more standardised, and even though they did invent new rules, it was simply because there was no system in place to handle what they wanted to include. But many things remain the same, regardless of fashion shifts. You want good characters, good enemies, a good plot, and most of all, a good editor. For if your scenario doesn't add up, the only fun people will be having is MST3King you. Another article that's interesting in revealing the gradual changes in design theory over the years, but doesn't give us much advice we haven't seen before. Another article, a couple of xp more. Shadowrun gets a Germany sourcebook. Ha ha! Is that the cause or the effect? Fiction: The river children by Peni R Griffin. A fairytale within a fairytale here this month, which is rather amusing. It starts off by telling the original story, a classic ghost tale of betrayal and ironic punishment, and then jumps forward to centuries later, when the original tale is just a legend, and a child meets the characters from it. The result manages to be both cute and creepy, with definite shades of peter pan to it. I quite like this, and it also has the benefit of not resolving itself neatly, leaving the characters open to be used in further stories, or indeed, your game. So it's another story that's both quite good, and well targetted for the magazine. Libram X has a rather unpleasant bit of imagery that I'm vaguely surprised got past the censors. Undiscovered treasure troves: For a third time this issue, they remind us that reality has tons of interesting elements to plunder. Building a detailed setting is all about taking elements from reality, and remixing it sufficiently that people can't immediately say that it's a rip-off of a particular thing. Sure, if you can come up with a truly original idea or two, more power to you, but most of us are lucky to manage a few of those in our lifetimes, not enough to build a whole campaign world out of. So stop being embarrassed about having to do this, and focus your mental energy on hiding the sources you steal from and ways you remix them better. Methinks they're definitely descending into filler material again after the strong beginning. So much for this new year's resolution. Swordplay cheats on their taxes like any sane self-employed business would. Ogrek's plan does indeed pan out and save Yamara. Dragonmirth makes fighting seem like an unwise prospect. Twilight empire has an annoying deus ex machina come out of nowhere to save the day.</blockquote>

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