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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5414290" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 216: April 1995part 7/8Sage advice is here, despite being missed out on the contents page. Skip is gonna have to do some serious capping of asses for this snub.How do I deal with the huge XP needed disparities for dragons in council of wyrms (temporarily retire those characters. Make them play their human PC's more. Yes, the biggest problems are at 1st level, where you can't do that anyway. Is it Skip's job to solve all your problems?)Can planar races take Al-Qadim kits (no, but their kids can if they settle there)Do optional class awards supplement or replace the group ones (supplement. Otherwise slow advancement would be sloooooow.)Are racial save bonuses cumulative with the normal ones for high stats. (Yes, but 1 is still a failure. )What's the experience modifier for having psionics ( a mere +1-2 HD. Not very good differentiation given how much they can improve a character)Do you need to be able to read to use magical books (yes. But you don't have to be able to write to have your own private code)What does spellcraft let you do. (Tell if something's magical. Simple enough. )Can you stack bladesinging with regular specialization (And make elves even more twinked. Skip thinks not. )How many miles is it from the spire to the gate towns (Indefinite. Not all planes have euclidian geometry. The outlands, for example, has node and vector geometry with randomized travel times between nodes. 3-18 days travel to get to the next adjacent point location, no matter how fast or slow you are. This is a great pain in the ass when you want to be precise. It also means it takes 30-180 days to get to the middle from the gate towns, but only 24-144 to get to all the way to the other side by going round the circumference. Which means pi = .8 in that instance. Now that's alternate physics! ) How does lightning bolt work (with great brutality)Do allies lose a level when a card says everyone does (yes)Can you play cards before being forced to discard them (Immediate means immediate. Has you no memory at all)Which effect happens first if you play more than one (The one you played first. They cannot be done simultaneously)Curses, Dragonmirth is fooled again by those pesky do-gooders. All seems lost for yamara and co. From the forge: This month, Ken chooses to have a sci-fi special. It's currently approaching mainstream in terms of TV coverage, with Star trek right in the middle of it's multiple series at once zenith, and Babylon 5 making real waves in redefining how you can handle long running plots on a tv show; while oddly enough, starting to decline in terms of RPG market share. Life is complicated, and saying something as large as an entire genre is becoming more or less popular is not a straightforward thing, with all kinds of subtle demographic shifts within the larger population.We start out, of course, with the big boys. Games Workshop has a whole bunch of stuff for the familiar 40k universe, plus a new game, Titan Legions, which brings giant mecha combat to the grimdark future. That is indeed pretty heavy metal. Grenadier has competition for them though, with the Future Warriors line getting a game to go with it. It's different, with anticipating your opponent's moves crucial to winning, but whether it has longevity is another matter altogether. Global games also have four minis reviewed from their Legions of Steel game. Two rather sinister looking robots, one with four arms, and two heavily armed aliens. FASA get the best marks, with the Battletech Compendium and Tukayyid Scenario Pack filling in lots of setting and giving you sample scenarios to play out as well. Ral Partha has a couple more mechs for battletech, and also shows us how a minotaur and satyr look in Shadowrun. Pretty funky, really. Heartbreaker Hobbies have two dark legion officers for the Mutant Chronicles game, and two members of the Brotherhood determined to stamp them out. Pretty obvious who they're trying to imitate. Ground Zero Games get Full Thrust reviewed, which sounds vaguely pornographic, but is just a game of space combat. It's another one where you have to issue orders the turn before and guess what the opponent is going to do well, and also take momentum into account. It seems to strike the right balance between easy to learn and having emergent complexity, and has done well enough to get at least one supplement. And apropos of nothing, there's also a Tudor inn so fantasy fans don't feel completely left out, remember, there's plenty of crossover between the two.</blockquote>

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