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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5407098" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 215: March 1995part 5/8Fiction: Where thingies rush in by J Robert King. April comes early in the fiction department, with a thoroughly ridiculous and punsome little story. Stealing the piked head of an archmage to give your podunk town more prestige? People have come up with dumber plots when drunk, I suppose. With a whole load of footnotes, and some fast paced comical action, this is quite amusing, has a clever ending, and doesn't outstay it's welcome. It's certainly not the deepest story they've ever published, but it's not trying to be, and you don't want that every month anyway. This fish will never be a cat, so let's just fry it up and eat it, not try and stroke it. Role-playing reviews: This month is a Masterbook special. West End Games are finally trying their hand at a universal system, instead of building all new ones for each game. Unfortunately, the system chosen is TORG and Shatterzone's one, which scales well to all sorts of power levels, and has some very cool quirks in it's drama deck rules, but is also rather clunky and crunch heavy. Rick is rather dubious about it's ability to translate to any genre, despite TORG setting plenty of good examples. In any case, it's not standalone yet, so you have to buy a worldbook anyway. Hmm. Since their original RPG's, particularly Paranoia, are better remembered than this, this might not have been such a great move in hindsight. Too late to worry about now. The world of Indiana Jones draws upon not just the movies, but also the books, comics, TV series, etc in creating it's setting. This means there is a certain amount of low key supernatural weirdness, but it's mostly about the action. The PC's are souped up a bit, but things are still a lot crunchier than the old TSR books. Overall, it doesn't get particularly praised or slated. I guess it'll do the job. Raiders of the lost ark sourcebook, on the other hand, does get a 6 pip mark. All the locations, complete with NPC's and ideas for incorporating them into your own story. What more could you want? Well, the other movies as well, but all in good time. Indiana Jones  and the Rising sun sourcebook takes a sidetrack and shows us 1930's japan, with plenty of info on both the mundane and supernatural, plus an adventure. Again, it's workmanlike rather than brilliant. The farther away you get from the original movie, the less special it all seems. :/ The world of bloodshadows is not a WoD clone as I thought earlier, but a darkly humorous pulp noir meets horror movie mashup. PC's have abilities both subtly superhuman and downright bizarre, and the setting is highly imaginative and very different from mundane earth. If Raymond Chandler had preferred LSD to alcohol, then maybe we'd have more novels like this. Galitia is a city sourcebook for Bloodshadows. It gets a pretty cursory review, not distinguishing itself that well from the setting in general. Maybe the world part of the setting is a misnomer, and it doesn't really have enough to support more than a monoculture. This is why TSR rolled a whole bunch of setting lines into Toril, for example. Mean streets is the DM advice book. This gives you lots of bits and pieces to insert into your game, along with the usual GMing advice. As if often the case, this speeds up your adventure building quite a bit, especially if you're not familiar with the genre. Buying stuff like this'll keep the line going.</blockquote>

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