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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5525631" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 229: May 1996part 5/8The role of books: The perfect princess by Irene Radford gets a review that is almost entirely mockery for the stupid alphabet soup names. There is no cultural correlation, a whole bunch of dumb puns, and some random ones that just make him laugh. If you can ignore that the plot isn't too bad, but you'll have a hard time doing that. One for the morning glory by John Barnes, on the other hand, gets quite specific praise. He's managed to produce something quite different from his usual fare, but still just as high quality. That requires quite a bit of knowledge of craftsmanship and how to manipulate genre conventions. Which means he's a lot more likely to produce other good books in the future. And you know the book houses like their reliable sellers. Caverns of Socrates by Dennis L McKiernan is a trapped in virtual reality story that does the common thing involving the questioning the nature of reality and consciousness where highly sophisticated computers are involved. It avoids giving any hard answers to those questions, but you probably wouldn't want it too, given they're still ambiguous in the real world. The important thing is that the story is fun, after all. The spirit gate by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff draws on a pesudo polish backdrop for it's fantasy setting, which is mildly unusual. This is one of those books John likes because it's on the subtle, well thought out end of things, with an internally consistent magic system, and plenty of personal intrigue and character building. He seems to pick one of those most months, so how much drek does he have to wade through to find them and consider them unusual? The instrument of fate by Christie Golden is another attempt by a TSR author to strike out on their own with a new world. The big supernatural elements? Elves and music. How very froofy. Not that it's bad, mind you, just that the basic ideas are quite familiar. Still, that means you can compare them to other similar things, and he finds she's done her research and made sure things aren't too hackneyed. Survival of the smartest: A second article which illustrates it's lessons with in character speeches this month. They seem to have really decided to give them preferential treatment. I suppose it's not surprising, given that this approach seems to produce a lot of memorable articles, and if the writers (& their mouthpiece characters) are recurring it a good way to leverage into bigger things. But not everyone is Ed Greenwood. So it proves here, in an article which is pretty entertaining as a read, and has some nice tricks for your character to steal and incorporate but doesn't push the boundaries of wizard behaviour. Well, maybe apart from pointing out that they ought to be using darts more, and not hoarding their charged items like far too many characters do, and that's a playstyle issue. So this certainly isn't bad, and once again, the IC sections help reduce the feel that we've heard this topic before, but it's not quite as good as the illusionist article earlier in the issue. Guess the usual pattern of front-loading the best articles applies here. Magic doesn't always go Boom!: From clever uses of magic to subtle uses of magic? Yeah, we know this one too. We've been shown many times that utility magic has a far greater impact upon the game than offensive spells of the same level. Magic affecting your skills in particular is overlooked. Stuff that grants you basic skill in something you're ignorant of appeared in issue 181, but here we have a few more variants on that principle. It's not completely redundant, but it is pretty familiar. Neverrending pickle jars. Technology substitutions for hot & cold running water, quills that write on their own. I think this manages to justify itself by putting new variants on the idea, but it's a close one. Next time you probably won't be so lucky.</blockquote>

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