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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5428951" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 218: June 1995part 6/8Role-playing Reviews: Oh man. Rick gets sucked into doing a CCG special. THEY ARE NOT ROLE-PLAYING GAMES. Call the column something else if you're going to cover this kind of stuff regularly. Still, it looks like they're here to stay. Maybe you ought to start a new magazine focussing on them. Then that'd get them out of our hair and let the people who still prefer creating worlds enjoy that again. Star trek: The next generation CCG gets a 6 pip result, with great visuals on the cards, and the rules creating games that reflect a ST mission instead of being a straightforward battle like most other CCGs. The details of the setting are carefully adhered to. The only oddity in that respect is that you can wind up using the same character on both sides, which is kinda an inevitability in a CCG as compared to a limited deck game. Star of the guardians is from Margaret Weis, as mentioned in the Rumblings column a few months ago. As with Krynn, this CCG is also a novel line, and looks like being a nice little earner for her. It's fairly simple and fast, and has some loose mechanics, but hangs together well enough, and gets straight to the action. You'll have to get the novels to find out much about the setting and characters. Galactic empires brings warring alien races to the CCG arena. Like many a wargame that covers similar territory, you have to make huge complex logistical and tactical decisions, and do lots of bookkeeping. One for lovers of really crunchy games, it is quite fun if you can handle the rules, and the setting certainly seems cool. Guess they're going to make the same mistakes RPG designers did in the search to one-up M:tG. Illuminati: new world order sees this long running game adapted to the collectible craze. This of course allows things to be even more multilayered and convoluted. Which is exactly what the game needs, really. Rick gives it 6 pips, finding it thoroughly achieves it's design goals, even if it isn't particularly newbie friendly. I'll bet he was paid by the church of the zogonian ascension( using the FBI as an intermediary) to say that. Rifts goes underwater, and to japan. There will be appropriate PC classes and power creep, as you would expect. Fiction: The time of leaving by Ron Collins. A story about growing up seems appropriate for a birthday issue, especially as the magazine leaves it's teens behind. Still, these days it becomes increasingly difficult for children to leave the nest, for one reason and another. (mostly economic) And a lot of the time the parents feel the wrench as much as the kids do. So this is a story where the mentor figure thinks it's time for the student to leave, the student disagrees, and eventually, proves he has the right to stay as well as leave. Not the usual way these things go in stories. On the other hand, since in reality the balance of power shifts as the parents become increasingly frail and unable to keep up with changes in technology, it's one that happens more in reality than we'd like. So this makes for quite melancholy reading, but not in a bad way. Not all those big truths are pleasant ones, and stories can choose to reflect those as well.</blockquote>

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