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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5372425" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 209: September 1994part 5/6The dragon's bestiary: Fae last time, trolls before. Now it's Golems. Another fairly common occurrence in the magazine (see issues 44, 99, 119, 136, 156, 159) and gaming in general. And one that's relatively easy to create new variants for, just by picking a new material for them to be constructed out of, then adding a few appropriate powers. Thankfully, this writer doesn't take that lazy route, instead going to some effort to both reaffirm their horror story origins, and create some more inventive creatures. The brass minotaur is your classic terminator style pursuer with a couple of twists. Any damage it does is a bugger to heal (although not as much as clay golem's) and it can transport it's victim into an extradimensional maze and hunt them down without their friends being able to help. Run, run as fast as you can. If you're encumbered, shed the excess. It's better than losing your life. Phantom flyers are unusually clever and mysterious for constructs. They strike in the night, and disappear into the shadows in the daytime. They can serve as spies, retrieval, or just mothra-esque engines of destruction for their masters. Steal the magical whistle controlling them and you get some pretty awesome treasure instead of having to kill them. That sounds like a fun scenario to me. The burning man is even more likely to go psycho on it's creator than Clay Golems. Since it's also near indestructible, and has a malevolent intelligence, it really is a nuclear option for a battle. One of these is perfect for destroying an entire village and similar horrifying situations. Don't hesitate to run away if you don't have the tools to beat it. Yeah, all of these three are nicely scary, more so than most actual undead. Maybe they should have been saved for the october issue. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Rumblings: Hee. Kindred: the Embraced. White Wolf is about to learn the hard way what TSR learnt over a decade ago. Dealing with tv executives and coming away with a shred of artistic integrity and faithfulness to the original licence's vision is not an easy task. They're a bunch of coked up tosspots. At least most musicians have basic listening skills. The rest of this column is taken up by the origins awards winners. Dragon mountain, their minis line, and this magazine all get awards, while Traveller: the new era, GURPS Vampire: the Masquerade and Magic: the Gathering are among the other products making waves. Colons are the in thing in modern titles. People'll copy the silliest little things in the hope that some of the cool will rub off, while missing the things that really make them popular. ^~^ The game wizards: I've certainly been guilty of a little Ed Greenwood worship over the years. Here we see that even the other designers at TSR are in awe of his talents. Whatever you think about the quality of his work, his sheer prolificness is not in dispute. He produces writing more than twice as fast as most of their staff, despite also holding down a regular day job as well. Does he type faster, sleep less, or simply have so many ideas that he doesn't need to pause to think what to write next the way most of us do? Even the editors find him a joy to work with, which is not the case with many prolific but scattershot creators who have more ideas than they have time to properly develop, and struggle to decide which to work upon and complete properly.  And he seems to make an impression as a great eccentric on those who meet him personally as well. So while this is technically a promotional article for his new novel, Crown of Fire, it's more one extolling him personally, to make their superstar writer even more of a legend than he already is. Does he really need that? Probably not, but there you go. In any case, it reminds us there are very good reasons he rose to the top, rather than someone else, and sometimes you can meet your heroes without it shattering your illusions about them. There are far worse things to learn, really. The role of books:Weird tales from Shakespeare, edited by Katherine Kerr & Martin H Greenberg does the alternate takes thing with humour and aplomb. From musical comedy to satire about hollywood conversions, the fun variants are the best, while the ones which play it straight less so. If you want to make an adaption work for a new time you need to inject same of your own creativity. After all, shakespeare certainly ripped off older plots, but it's what he did with them that was important. Mordenheim by Chet Williamson is of course the story of Ravenloft's Frankensein analogue. It gets hit by the strong complaint that magic in D&D is a well known and codified thing, and Mordenheim's actions make no sense at all in light of that. That is a presumptuous assumption. Maybe in some other worlds, but Ravenloft is very much a place where each domain works on it's own little rules socially. Darkon might have plenty of wizards and clerics, but Lamordia certainly doesn't, and anyone openly showing occult knowledge would be another target for a good old lynch mob wielding burning torches. Yeah, it all falls apart if you look at it too hard, but when doing so will likely get you eaten by a creature of the night, you learn not to do that almost reflexively. Ahh, rationalising. There's not a lot you can't do with it. Caledon of the mists by Deborah Turner Harris is one of those stories that can't figure out if it wants to be Historically Accurate or fantastical, and suffers for the split in tone. Pick one or the other and stick with it! Less can be more. Mother of storms by John Barnes posits a near future in which global warming has destabilised the weather substantially, resulting in far more frequent and violent hurricanes. Meanwhile, virtual reality is really taking off as a form of entertainment. These two bits of unconnected relatively hard sci-fi premises interact in an interesting manner to create a story that seems fairly plausible, while not neglecting the characterisation either. This doesn't seem bad at all. A logical magician by Robert Weinberg is another novel applying scientific principles to magic, setting things in modern day chicago. It does have a streak of comedy running through it, but not to the extent that it could be defined as a comic novel. As is often the case these days, it leaves things unresolved so as to obviously set up a sequel. Shouldn't give away everything at once, should we? Wizard's first rule by Terry Goodkind is another book that's immediately recognised as a series chosen for major promotional push by the book company. And indeed, it does get a mostly positive review, standing out from the pack due to it's quite distinctive characters and setting. Course, those quirks will start to bug us over the course of an extended series, but hey ho, too late then.</blockquote>

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