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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5434518" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 219: July 1995part 3/8Role-playing reviews: Ah yes, Al Qadim. A good example of a limited run series, started with the intention of doing a set number of supplements, and then wrapping things up neatly. After all, Oriental Adventures was highly successful initially, but then suffered quite considerably from diminishing returns in the follow-up modules before fading away in 1991. By contrast, Al Qadim actually exceeded expectations, getting a few more supplements than planned to round the setting out. And now it's finished, but not yet out of print, this seems a good time for a comprehensive themed review. Arabian Adventures gets quite a bit of ambivalence in it's review. Much of this is due to the conflicts between D&D's rules and setting tropes and those of the source materials. It's pretty, and handles the mechanical aspect of things quite well, but setting, adventure building and roleplaying advice isn't great. It all feels like they're laving stuff out so they can sell more supplements later. Plus a few of the decisions seem to have been made for political correctness, which is rarely particularly  entertaining. In hindsight, it's not the greatest implementation ever, but it's still fun reading. And quite a few of the kits and spells can be plundered for other settings as well. It's a valuable addition to 2nd edition's wide range of covered settings. Land of fate is of course the second thing you should get, as it actually gives you a decent overview of the continent. Of course, it is only an overview, setting things up for yet more supplements (gotta collect 'em all!) and often rather dry. They did have to set up a lot of places. What can you do? City of delights is where things actually start taking off. Like Waterdeep or Sigil, Huzuz is the obvious centre for a campaign. It has tons of plot hooks, locations, and colourful characters, and makes a suitable adventure location to take you from 1st to 20th level. You can then build up the wider world as much or as little as you want. We also get brief reviews of each of the little sourceboxes. Golden Voyages, Caravans and Secrets of the lamp get the best marks, while Corsairs of the great sea is the least liked. Most of them have at least something useful for a general campaign, even if the adventure bits don't all hold up without DM modification. The combination of setting and adventure in each box is interesting, and means that this setting was built up in the same kind of way as the original Known World stuff, only over a shorter period. GURPS Arabian nights on the other hand, does exactly what GURPS supplements usually do. Historically accurate as far as possible, careful and logical in the adjudication of the magic bits, and rather dry. The rules are taken care of, now it's up to you to make a fun campaign out of it. Or you could just nick the Al Qadim setting from earlier. <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" />Eye of the monitor: Warcraft: Orcs & Humans begins a series that is going to go on to take over the computer gaming world pretty effectively. At this point, it's a fairly standard wargame, with the two sides identical to each other save in the cosmetic aspects. Train up your minions, and set them against the enemy. There's tons of stuff to discover and unlock, and the difficulty curve is just about right to keep you coming back. They just wish the manual explained things a little more clearly, instead of repeating itself in gimmicky fashion by having one set of instructions for each side. 1830: Railroads & Robber Barons is a fairly straight conversion of the old Avalon Hill boardgame. The computer taking over the rules means things progress a lot faster, but the visual resolution is lower, making some things hard to make out. The manual is once again a pet peeve, although for a different reason, with the impression someone went mad with layout software, putting boxes, borders and garish colour schemes all over the place. What a thing to pick on for an issue. Citadel of the Dead gets nul points. In many ways, it's more primitive than games they played 10 years ago, yet it has the nerve to boast about it's complexity. And the manual is almost nonexistent. The only reason they reviewed it is so they could give something a good slating. Well, that is always fun, isn't it. Realms of Arkania: Star Trail, on the other hand, is a fairly decent CRPG, based on Germany's The Dark Eye. It is a pretty accurate conversion, highly crunchy, with tons of room to customise and equip your characters. This time, their main complaint is that as a sequel where you can load the characters from the previous game, it's incredibly hard with starting characters, and possibly too complicated and detailed in the nature of it's encounters. Most of us can do without treating tetanus infections in our escapism.</blockquote>

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