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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5400024" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 214: February 1995part 4/8For truth and justice: Hello again superheroics. It's been well over a year now since the Marvel-phile ended, and coverage of that genre fell off a cliff. And sadly, it looks like the return is starting again from scratch with basic advice, a pattern we've seen several times before, and not one that endears them to a long term reader. So yeah, here's another of those basic adventure checklists, this time slanted towards superheroics, but really, applicable to any game. Tailor your adventures to the PC's. Give the villains proper personalities, motives and plans. Give your adventure  a beginning, middle and end. Keep track of character positioning and stats in an efficient way. Nope, can't find any new advice in here. Not that it's bad advice at all, it's just not doing anything different or innovative. Role-playing reviews: Following on from last month, we have two more rather large reviews of games that differ substantially from the norm. As the centre weakens, these spring up, grabbing people's attention, as they consider trying something new, moving on to more interesting grounds. Course, none of them will displace D&D as the biggest game in the hobby, but it's theoretically possible they might have. Far stranger things have become huge hits on TV. Aria is a gobsmackingly huge game that tries to let you play entire nations, and their developments and conflicts. It also has human level stuff, but that isn't as impressive, and you may well be better off running that in another system and then overlaying this for the global scope. It does have some flaws, and takes a lot of work, but Rick is still highly impressed by the scope of their creativity and the degree the game can be customised. Castle Falkenstein gets even more effusive praise. Character creation is quick and different, Playing cards are used to resolve actions, magic is full of interesting quirks and potential backfires, and the setting is really rather cool. Mike Pondsmith has managed to come up with another winner, and he hopes it's commercial success will match it's critical reception. Rumblings: Where last month had a lot to say about White Wolf, this is closer to home, with a lot of attention on TSR's media properties. Wildspace TV show? I don't remember this at all. Sounds like an attempt to revive Spelljammer. And that's a lot of tie-in stuff planned too. And on top of that, the long on hold D&D movie has a new owner and staff and apears to be moving forward. What went wrong with these two? Development hell strikes again! The only thing I know actually did come out is the Blood Wars CCG, TSR's second shot at grabbing this market in quick succession. Shouldn't they wait so they can learn from the mistakes of the first one? Or are they rushing them to market so this has a rather shorter development lifespan than their regular product cycle. I must confess to quite a bit of curiosity on this issue. CCG's from other parties are also springing up like mushrooms as companies realise there's big money to make here. Highlander, Star of the Guardians, Doom Trooper. Big names and small, many from RPG's and other industries. Can you say talent drain? We are not amused. The ecology of the Neogi: Our first proper ecology in ages is also our first spelljammer one ever. And it's quite a neat one, making it clear that these are pretty darn alien creatures, and not very nice at all. With an inherently destructive reproductive process, a society built on enslavement, and equally nasty gods, they are pretty much forced to be evil by their biology. You'd feel sorry for them, if you weren't too busy being scared and grossed out and urgently KILLING THEM WITH FIRE! Curiously though, this is another one that makes them available as PC's, or at least classed NPCs, so you can make them even more challenging to your players. Anyway, I rather like this one, which is pretty decent in both fiction and mechanics, and does quite a bit to build them up as a race. A welcome return here.</blockquote>

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