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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5390034" data-attributes="member: 27780">As you may have noticed, I'm not enjoying doing this as much as I used to, and I'm fairly sure this time that it's the quality of what I'm reading rather than just tiredness on my part. So once again its time for me to take my foot off the gas a bit so I can do other things a bit more. No promises I won't slow down further, but as long as I can get through at least one article a day, I'll keep chipping away at this. Dragon Magazine Issue 213: January 1995part 1/8124 pages. A pretty awesome cover here this month, even if it is recycled (precycled) from one of their upcoming products. Not sure if that's good or bad overall of them, but it's definitely a cheap move. Still, we are getting a planescape themed issue. Unless they custom commission some artwork for that, they're unlikely to get something appropriate, for surrealism is not a hugely popular genre at the moment, and the planes do tend to be quite specific in how they differ from earth. So I'll forgive them this time. Let's move on to the inside and hope that's original material, and not just cut stuff from their recent books. In this issue:Letters: A letter praising Masque of the Red Death, and wondering if it'll get any more books. Thanks to considerably greater sales than expected, they've already commissioned one for next year. Buy lots of that one, and you might get even more!  Woo. An honest success story. A letter from someone who's been reading the Dragonlance novels and wants to move into the roleplaying side. Can you say hint hint. I think their motives for picking this one are not entirely due to the quality and interestingness of the writing. A letter complaining that they're doing fewer high level adventures lately. They're doing less adventures full stop, but yes, this is a real trend. Even the so-called high level adventures only seem to hold out to the mid teens, in contrast to the companion & master level adventures released in the mid 80's. As usual, Dale has to defend them by offering the best they have in that department, even if it isn't that brilliant in the overall scheme of things. And it does look like the pendulum is starting to swing back again this year. They do have quite a bit of stuff aimed specifically at experienced guys to show off. Editorial: Art director Larry Smith takes the editorial again. As is appropriate for the new year, he's thinking about making a few changes, to keep things from getting stale around here. A couple of years late, given the speed things have been changing around them, but better late than never. If anything, it feels like they've been changing too fast, and you're struggling to keep up. Yeah, I noticed that a while ago. Nice to see the people inside the magazine catch on. So this signals that we're reaching the end of the complacent years for the magazine, and entering the worry and panic phase, where they try a whole bunch of different things to turn sales around, but ultimately fail. As ever, I'll be interested in seeing how much the stress shows, and how much it gets glossed over and whitewashed. Happy new year. <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" /> First Quest: Regular reviewer and Bughunters designer Lester Smith takes his turn to dredge up his past. Appropriately enough, giant ticks attacking his character when he tried to loot a giant's body is one of the first things he remembers. He turns out to have quite a way with imagery that he really doesn't exploit enough in his reviews, describing several encounters in such a way that I can instantly put myself in them, without going overboard with the adjectives. And they make a loose narrative with a happy ending as well. I suppose that illustrates an important point. You only get a happy ending if you choose your cutoff point. If you hang onto a campaign, it will eventually cease being fun or just fall apart. So this is fun to read, and also has a few little lessons on how to make your game fun, despite all the odds. These definitely seem to be improving as time goes on.</blockquote>

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