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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5588250" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 236: December 1996part 8/8Role-playing reviews: Deadlands gets moderately praised by Rick. The character generation and combat systems are pretty interesting and suitable for the game's wild west flavour, but the setting is still very sketchy. It does read very much like they want to produce lots of supplements to fill in various bits and pieces in upcoming years. (which will be the case, thankfully) Better get ready to spend that disposable income. <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" /> Neverworld gets praised for it's character generation system, which again is full of flavour and detail. But the rest is either boring or confusing to him. In the end, that probably doesn't make it worth playing. You want something to do after finishing your character, unless you're a charop wonk who's more enamoured of theoretical number crunching than actual play. Infinite domains is another one with an excellent character generation system, and simple but effective mechanics, but the rest could do with some development. Mind you, it is an attempt at a universal system. Those do need a good deal of supplements to really prove their versatility. Even if the corebook shows potential, you can't truly cover every genre without adding some serious page count. We have rather a lot of interesting short reviews this month as well. Mage: the Ascension & Star Wars get new editions. Mage justifies the repurchase with the improvements it makes, SW doesn't. Meanwhile, I Tyrant, GURPS Goblins and The Planewalkers Handbook all keep Rick interested with their idiosyncratic approaches to their topics. TSR is still putting out some pretty interesting stuff even though sales are dropping. TSR Previews: Another fairly light month next time. We finish the beholder trilogy of adventures, with Eye to Eye. Do you have what it takes to win a war against them? Actually, they may be individually deadly, but it seems to me that multiple ones in an engagement would be rather less than the sum of their parts, as one's anti magic eye would be where another one wanted to shoot, and more than one would try and kill the same enemy in the same round, resulting in powers going to waste. And they've never been that good at co-operating without the spelljammer variants to glue things together. Dragonlance takes us to Wayreth in The last tower: The legacy of Raistlin. He may be gone, but we can still learn about the new magic using his methods. For those of you unhappy with the 5th age, the novel this month is prequelariffc yet again. Vinas Solamnus by J Robert King tells the story of the founding of the knights. The Forgotten realms completes it's 5th visit to undermountain. Stardock sees the PC's asked to save Halaster! Better the evil you know, I guess. And he does play a vital part in ensuring more adventurers get to reach high level and save the world. Their novel this month is also magic related. Realms of the Arcane is a collection of short stories, many of them set back in Netheril. Is time travelling going to become the new continent exploring? And Dragon Dice gets their second novel as well. Army of the dead ties in with the recent expansions, as they often do. Is there any real setting behind this latest money grab? The current clack: Allen talks quite a lot about licenced games this month, asking some interesting questions. Does the value of a licence in terms of sale outweigh the costs and inconvenience of getting it? Quite possibly. Actually, in these tough times, it seems like the proportion of licenced games is increasing, because they're a lot more likely to get proper distribution in stores. This can of course lead to accusations of creative moribundity. It's the same problem as hollywood in microcosm. It's not that there aren't plenty of cool new ideas out there, it's just that the sequels, remakes and spinoffs of proven successes are more likely to get greenlit, even if they're obviously crap to a discerning eye. Name value is important, and this is yet another annoying reality that has to be dealt with. Our other big bit of news is the attempt by HERO games & R .Talsorian to merge their systems and create the Fuzion system, easily compatible with both and appearing in both company's books. Another amusing experiment that would eventually fall apart, while the original systems survived. It's like a big comics crossover in game mechanics form. <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" /> I actually like a pretty high proportion of the articles in this issue, and once again, the bad bits are often bad in interesting ways. So despite some rocky bits, I am forced to conclude 1996 has been a better year overall than 1995. And they've finally got rid of the annoying 5th age stories. Course, it's not over yet. They've now added an annual onto their workload. That could turn out all sorts of ways, maybe good, maybe bad. Let's hope that either way, it's not more of the same, as that would just be boring.</blockquote>

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