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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5335196" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 202: February 1994part 4/6Rifts world book 5. Looks like they're also covering germany at the moment. What a co-incidence.Fiction: Thieves justice by David J Schwartz. What is it with rogues and cats? Nahh, that's a dumb question really. Ok, what is it with wizards and biting off more than you can chew? Nope, I've got a pretty good idea why that happens too. Why do people feel the need for the punishment to be ironically appropriate, especially when they also have magic powers? Once again, I think I understand the dynamics of human nature well enough that this one is pretty clear too. Man, I'm running short on big rhetorical questions to ask. Still, you should be able to get an idea of what kind of story we're dealing with here. Like issue 188's story involving a kid of the cat lord, which it bears several stylistic similarities too, this melds the mundane and magical sides of larceny pretty well, and the comeuppance of the villain feels deserved, but not completely without ambiguity. Nice to see they can still pick an entertaining story, even if I can spot the threads that weave it a little too easily these days. Role-playing reviews: Mage: the Ascension arrives, with a pretty heavy foreshadowing having preceded it. White Wolf are now the company on everyone's lips, so this gets a good long review. Course, this is the point where their doom and gloom onslaught starts to soften a little, with mages being a somewhat more familiar and less inherently screwed archetype as PC's than vampires, werewolves and mummies. If they have the right spheres, they can do just about anything, and the mechanical process for doing so is somewhat less time consuming and onerous both IC and OOC than the old one in Ars Magica. Not that it's simple or risk free, and Rick certainly finds it a challenge to put everything together, especially as like most WW first editions, the editing and organisation isn't great. It is still pretty ground-breaking, and has a long, if controversial history ahead of it. For to have the will to reshape the world, you must be prepared to endure the mockery and opposition of others with calm certitude, accepting that you may be called wrong or pretentious for daring to take a definite stand, rather than following the crowd or doing what is convenient! Gotta love the way the fanbases of the old WW games mirrored their in game content. Earthdawn isn't nearly as innovative, especially when compared to it's far future parallel Shadowrun. It also has some seriously clunky crunch, involving matrix tables of the sort that went out of fashion in the late 80's. But then, Shadowrun managed to be a success with some serious mechanical cruft of it's own, so who's to say it can't be a success as well. Earthdawn gamemaster pack is the usual GM screen plus miscellaneous other nonessential bits and pieces, plus some errata for the corebook. This formula seems to be pretty proven and universal from company to company now, and as usual, this is for completists. Mists of betrayal is the first adventure for the setting. It gets a quite positive response, even if it is pretty close to a regular AD&D adventure. But at least in this world there's a good reason for all the dungeons. We also get a reminder of how good the princess ark stuff was, especially in showing you how to handle really cool, wide ranging high level adventures and still challenge the PC's. D&D can take you a long way, and you shouldn't give up just because you've got a little world-shaking power. Elminsters notebook: Even our great sage doesn't know everything. Sometimes he comes across things which defy even the strongest of divination magics. Of course, this is another demonstration of how he managed to survive and get to that level. Here's a hint, it's not by leaping in and checking things out himself, when it looks like everyone who did so before died howwibly howwibly. Instead, he sets a triggered divination so he can find out via the next dumb adventurers to come across this, and hopefully save them via seeming deus ex machina in the process. (but if not, meh, adventurers are a dime a dozen in the realms) So this is another bit of cool mythology, made all the more distinctive by the unique viewpoint and narration style of it's IC and real world writers. It's not as easy as it seems, both being this awesome, and setting things up so the world views you as such. So this is cool both as an adventure hook, and as a view of the hard paddling feet underneath the swan, which helps give you ideas of how to operate your own Machiavellian high level characters in your own campaigns, so they can be awesome as well without resorting to fiat. Once again he shows us how he's several leagues above everyone else as a designer. My only real complaint here is that the scan of the illustration is poorly contrasted, making it hard to make out some of the bits.</blockquote>

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