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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5447245" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 220: August 1995part 7/8Dangerous ground: Last issue we had a good deal of talk about swashbuckling. Here we have a related topic, that of setting your fights on interesting terrain, and how to take advantage of that. After all, in movies people do often fight high on rooftops, along narrow cliffs, over balconies, swamp water, cramped basements, and all kinds of other interesting locations. All you need to do is apply a few mechanical effects, and make sure the party don't defy physics too egregiously in their positioning & movements. A little sketch or minis may help with this. So it's one of those bits of fairly basic advice that you may well have already figured out on your own, but it still does them good to spell out. After all, if people make their games exciting and dramatic, we're more likely to stick around. And if there's anyone who doesn't think that's a good idea, I pity their business model. Fiction: Hunt's end by Rudy Thauberger. Another Dark Sun story here that seems to have been picked to tie in with a recent splatbook, since we did get one on the thri-kreen a few months ago. Still, it's not by the same author as the book, and indeed not by a regular author at all, so it looks like it's more lucky co-incidence on the magazine's part that they got this submission. Still, it has an excellent handle on the general atmosphere of the setting, where life is harsh, psionics are omnipresent, and the only people with any moral conflicts are the protagonists. It also manages to deal with the fact that the giant insects are rather alien, and even if you live with them and they consider you part of the pack, you'll never entirely understand each other. So it's a pretty decent addition to the list of stuff for this setting, which has managed to run nicely for a good few years now. The combination of many small ways that it differs from standard fantasy is pretty well established, which means they don't have to spend half the story just making sure you understand what they're talking about and getting you to buy into the world, which is a definite issue with many of the standalone bits of short fiction. Do it on the cheap: Or how to save a big of money when convention going. A very short article, padded out with extra spacing, layout tricks and photos, this is one of those articles that feels like it was put in at the last moment to fill out space, but it does still have some useful information, especially for newbies. As a promotional article, it manages to remind us that convention season is upon us without being too intrusive. Overall, I think this warrants a meh, as it's not really consequential enough to have an opinion one way or another. Rumblings: Another fairly TSR centric rumours column this month. Since they're starting to draw back from the rest of the hobby, I suspect this will be another continuing trend. That great lost project Wildspace gets a good teasing. When will it come out? What will it look like? How an something that had so many prongs of attack planned just disappear with barely a trace? More successful, of course, is the return of Tracey & Margaret to do more Dragonlance books. Well, successfully released, anyway. In other annoying news,. Tim Beach is leaving. Now we'll never get sourcebooks expanding on the rest of the savage coast. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> And a company is going to try and release a home VR system costing $ 8,000. Yeah, I don't think that's going to be a commercial success. Although given computer's depreciation, something like that would cost, what, $60 today. If only VR had become a fad 10 years later, it might have actually lasted. On the other hand, there's a ton of MMO games coming out around this time, and they're cheap enough to play for hours these days. They're actually an idea who's time has come. So once again we see how high the ratio of hits to misses is in commercial ventures. The game wizards: Ooop. Speaking of Athas enjoying a healthy life, this is where it really started to go wrong for them. They lived by the metaplot, and then they died by the metaplot, as the changes made to the setting progressed so fast, and in many cases reduced adventure hooks because the good guys won regularly, that they alienated a lot of people. And this is where it really came to a head, as they released a new corebox, and it became near impossible for existing campaigns to ignore the effects, especially if you wanted to use the new geographical areas opened up. On top of that, they tried to fix the psionics system, but I found the new one more confusing than the old. And the answers to many of the things that were mysterious before weren't particularly brilliant. So in hindsight, we can chalk this up as another big fat misstep. How does something that has so many cool ideas put into it wind up becoming so much less than the sum of it's parts?</blockquote>

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