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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5545736" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 231: July 1996part 8/8The current clack: This month's news column is mostly concerned with revivals, which is actually quite pleasing. The battletech CCG is being rescued from limbo, Hero games are getting a new publisher, and so is The Whispering Vault. While companies may be experiencing financial problems, there's still plenty out there, and they want to keep cool properties alive. Of course, in some cases, this'll be just throwing good money after bad, but this is frequently the case in creative industries. You have to offer people all these different ideas so some can become breakout hits and support the other ones. The eras where everyone tries to follow the crowd in their attempts to succeed are the dullest to observe. Also amusing here is Allen cementing his place as the resident technophile. He jumped on the internet quickly a couple of years ago, and now he's sharing his wisdom on the matter of mailing lists and message boards. Yes, they do require adapting to a quite different style of conversation to face-to-face communications, and can branch and spiral in ways that aren't easy to follow to the uninitiated. It is interesting to speculate just how people's brains are being affected by regularly conversing in this fashion, and what implications it has for young people who don't remember any differently. In the long run, it just makes for another "kids these days, gitoffa my lawn" cultural gap for people to rail against. And there's not a lot we can do about that. It's not all bad here, but I can quite clearly identify the bits in the issue that made me decide I was getting sick of D&D at the time. Too many bits, pulling in different ways, too many mutually contradictory articles, too much dilution of theme, too much sloppiness in the writing and editing. And Dragon Dice just being annoying. It made me realise that I had enough to keep on playing for years as it was. Why bother with more if it was only going to make things worse? So that meant I pretty much missed their commercial nadir. This time, of course, I'm going to have to go all the way through it, try and give it a fair assessment. Tune in next time, as I once again venture into terra incognita. Only this time it's urban decay instead of virgin wilderness. Oh well, I'm sure there'll be plenty of opportunities for heroes here too.</blockquote>

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