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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5537168" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 230: June 1996part 8/8TSR Previews: Volo shows up again to give us a second perspective on the Forgotten Realms, with the Dalelands the area he's rehashing for us. Meanwhile, south in Cormyr, King Azoun's death is continuing to have big repercussions. Ed Greenwood and Jeff Grubb team up to handle this rather large metaplot event. Dark Sun sorts out a few issues with it's magic system, in Defilers and Preservers. The awkward retcon of when defilers defile is sorted out to my satisfaction, and there's lots of the usual splatbooky goodness, along with a bit of rehash from Dragon Kings. Gotta keep this stuff in print. Planescape releases something that's very much in theme with recent stuff. Hellbound: The blood war. See the Yugoloth's finest hour. See the writers attempt to fix the dreadful problem entire hordes of enemies with at will teleportation cause. See a rather pretty comic which will also come to the magazine shortly. Once again they pull out the spectacular even as the company falls apart. Ravenloft starts another big metaplot event. Fresh from killing Van Richten, now they're going to kill everyone in the biggest city in the entire demiplane. Death Unchained kicks off the module trilogy. Are you ready for the reaper to make his grim harvest? Dragonlance finishes off it's solamnic knights series, with Knights of the Rose, sensibly enough. Once again the order is becoming corrupt, and our protagonist has to make choices between the order and true honour.We start a series of stuff on beholders, interestingly. I, Tyrant may be a terrible pun, but it's a cool book. The beholder ecology over a decade ago wasn't that impressive, but this goes the distance. They supplement this with a trilogy of adventures. The first is Eye of Pain. Muahaha. Larry Elmore takes a break from art and ropes in his brother Robert to write a novel as well. Runes of Autumn. Any opinions on this one. We know he can write, because he did snarfquest for years. How good is this? And last but also first, Spellfire releases it's 4th edition. Already? It's been what, a year and a half. They've really been going at a breakneck speed with this one as well. The current Clack: Barbara Young is leaving Dragon. <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 this is put near the end of the article and not even given it's own header. Well, it's a perfect time for a mid-life crisis given what the company is going through, and that her job has been dramatically altered by the year's themed fiction. What has been happening to all the freelance fiction people sent in over the past 6 months? Are they keeping the good stuff back for later, or is it all going in the bin? And what is seeing nothing but in house stuff published doing for the rate of submissions? As with the departure of other long-timers, this feels like a bad omen for the future of the fiction department. Whoever replaces her will have some pretty big shoes to fill. The rest of the column is mostly concerned with licences. A new forgotten realms computer game, also incorporating elements from Dragon Dice. A Babylon 5 RPG. GURPS Discworld. But no M:tG RPG. Oh well. The fact that we don't always get what we want doesn't mean we don't get way more than we need if we try sometimes. Having been showing some signs of improvement in content recently, this issue has some of the clearest signs yet that things are going to crap for them behind the scenes, and staff are unhappy and jumping ship. What doesn't kill you may in theory make you stronger, but, um, yeah, so much for that saying. Whether their content will improve despite the pressures on them I'm not sure, but even compared to last year, this is a slight downward slide overall. And since the ones just after people left are often the most problematic, I doubt they'll be getting better next month. I'll have to keep looking ahead to the further future for hope then.</blockquote>

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