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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5358156" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 207: July 1994part 1/6124 pages. Is that a boy or a girl on the cover? Hmm. The contents say the original model was a girl. It may be a trap. The topic of the magazine, on the other hand, is treasure. One that seems basic, but somehow they haven’t thought of doing it before. This seems likely to please the players in the audience in particular. Now, when are they going to do a special on wandering monsters? That seems like it could be fun for a DM. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  In this issue:Letters: This month’s letter page is devoted entirely to errata. From last issue to a good 7 month in the past, they’ve got plenty of little mistakes to report. Many of them were spotted by the writers themselves, albeit too late to fix them before printing. Allen Varney, Roger Moore, Steve Winter and Ed Greenwood all have a little egg on their face. Happens to the best of us. Dust yourself off and try not to make the same mistake again. Especially you Ed. If you’re going to do crossovers, you have to make sure you don’t mess up basic details of the other property, because that can be interpreted as dreadfully disrespectful.  Editorial: So people are complaining that their game isn't as much of a challenge as it used to be. Maybe that's because you're skipping over all the travel bits. We can't do that in real life. Even after years in the same office, the commute still takes approximately the same amount of time, and you'll regularly be faced with inconveniences such as traffic accidents, overenthusiastic evangelists, bums selling the big issue, and terrorist attacks. Or something. Anyway, this is another thing that's going out of fashion, along with wandering monsters, for more scripted storylines and metaplot stuff. And Dale is trying to fight against the tide, pretty vainly in this case. Rather surprised this lesson is being forgotten. But then, the old expert set is several years out of print by this point, and there is a new generation of gamers coming who are learning a very different set of starting lessons. Whether you prefer this way, or decry it as another sign of instant gratification culture not wanting to work for their fun or have the possibility of being thrown against impossible challenges and having to run away is your choice. Lawns, gitofa, etc. First quest: Zeb Cook is one of those designers who has enough cool credits over an extended period of time that it's hard to pick one over the others. The original expert set, Oriental adventures, Planescape. Each would be enough to seal his place in the hall of fame individually. The fact that he's been consistently producing other cool stuff for the past 15 years as well is icing on the cake. But it doesn't seem like his start was particularly auspicious. Like so many of us, his first characters didn't even have names, just numbers as they died repeatedly. Sophistication came gradually through trial and error. Which is you've got the time, is a more fun way to learn than being bossed around by a teacher being told that things are badwrongfun without explaining why. Even now, he's still learning and developing, which unfortunately means he's leaving us for the fast growing world of computer game design. Looking forward, it seems his credits there aren't so great, although they do include being lead designer for City of Villains. Oh well. We'll always have the forbidden city. Big-league magic: Yes, even 9th level spells are pretty puny on a cosmic scale. And even D&D artefacts rarely offer you sufficient power to take over or destroy the world. Course, there are several good reasons for this. First is that the original designers kinda expected you to stop somewhere in the teens, so they never bothered to do hard design beyond that. Second is that it's a lot harder to keep such power from ruining the whole story than it is in a narrative written by a single person. So you're put in a slightly awkward position when covering this topic. You're not sure if you should be encouraging it, because it can be a lot of fun to have phenomenal cosmic power, or warning people away from it. So this is an article that isn't quite sure what it wants to accomplish, and settles for sitting on the fence, being a serviceable bit of advice, but not really doing too much. One of those cases where I'm bemused why they put this first.</blockquote>

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