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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5396523" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 213: January 1995part 8/8Through the looking glass: Robert runs out of soapboxes, having been going through them quite a lot over the years. Since I've also been finding myself low on enthusiasm lately, I can quite understand that. Let's just do the job, shall we. First we have some buildings. A greek style temple with a removable roof, so you can fight around, inside and on top of it. Some tavern tables, if you want a little more worldly comforts in your adventuring. And some little houses, of late medieval extraction. Fairly mundane settings really. Rather more fantastical are the creatures. Two nasty mechanical mechanical units for the Legion of Steel game. A somewhat insubstantial looking fire elemental. A rather heavily dressed lich, with ambitions of being king of the undead. A very veiny looking beholder. He needs more shut-eye, methinks. A rather short orc standard bearer. Well, they get the job because they're not the best warriors. A barbarian cyclops, with requisite pot belly. He needs a bit of fixing up, I'm afraid. Some similarly sloppy marines by the same company. A tremendously amusing diorama of an apprentice sorcerer accidentally summoning a demon. He's going to have a scary time when he realises what's happening. And a mysterious bearded guy with a lantern. I suspect he may wind up being used as a wizard or druid. Well, someone has to be exposition guy. <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" /> TSR Previews: Mystara is our biggest deal this month. Paired Accessories, the players and dungeon masters survival kits give you yet more gimmicky bits and pieces that they hope will make your game run more smoothly and be more fun. Neh. Can't really say I got much use out of these, and unlike the Tavenloft tarroka deck, the cards weren't very tactilely pleasing and tended to get lost. Planescape has Planes of Law. Contrasting with planes of chaos, each of the 5 planes here get their own mini book. But just as with the last one, this seriously kicks ass, and has both cool descriptions and pretty maps. Just watch out for the metaplot, which intrudes even on the supposedly eternal and infinite universes. The Forgotten Realms figures out an area it hasn't done a splatbook on. The Moonsea. Extra incentive for you to go kick Zhentarim ass and liberate the miserable people beneath them.  Dragonlance also finds more little gaps in their history to fill, after much searching. Doug Niles gives us the story of the Kagonesti. They refused to fight. Which means when the war came to them, they were beaten easily and enslaved. See them suffer, muahahahaha!!! On the generic side, they realize that they've run out of existing classes to create splatbooks for, and do The Complete Barbarian. The start of my dissatisfaction with them, and the first complete book I chose not to buy, this gave me the first inkling that they were just making stuff for their benefit, rather than ours, back in the day. So much for innocence. Endless quest goes gamma world in American Knights. You get to save the world! Doesn't sound very in theme for the setting. Lots of cool articles in this issue, even if many of them have been or will be recycled in actual books. So it seems the problem this time is not quality, but quantity of ideas. By relying on a few staff writers too much, and having most of the people present in the same office, there's the constant temptation to reuse material to make deadlines and pad things out. This of course means people buy less in the long term, because they feel gypped and don't want to spend money again on basically the same thing. Just another small factor to fit into their overall issues. The irony there being that you can pay new freelancers less and move onto new ones when they start becoming demanding. Still, they are coming out with at least some great material, so I don't consider this issue a waste of money at all.</blockquote>

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