Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5690162" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 247: May 1998part 7/8Roleplaying reviews welcomes Chris Pramas to the fold. What's with this rapid reviewer switching? When that happened to the computer column, it was just a year before they got cancelled. This does not make me confident. So let's see how his voice and opinions differ from our previous incumbents, and if they'll be swapping back in subsequent months. Unusually for a new reviewer, he doesn't bother introducing himself, and gets straight down to business. But they do take the time to revamp the appearance, and bring back the 1-6 pip rating system. The show must go on! Tribes of the heartless waste is a region expansion for Birthright, with a player and DM book. Obviously, it's off to the barbarian lands, to see if you can face down the gnoll hordes, take care of the Awnsheigh, and unify the squabbling domains. It has a pretty decent set of new crunch appropriate to the culture and climate, and enough adventure hooks and bits left open for a DM to spring plenty of surprises on the players over the course of a campaign. So that's most of the obvious bases covered for the line. Shall we move on? Earthforce sourcebook is for the Babylon Project, and improves quite a bit on the artwork of the corebook. The writing is still rather dry though, and the new crunch just makes the system even more complicated. Chris does thoroughly enjoy the ship & space combat rules though, which keep PC actions significant while scaling up nicely. Overall, he does recommend it, and hopes the line keeps improving.Lordly domains is for Pendragon, and of course is about managing any land your knight may own. If you do it right, you'll expand your holdings and pass it down from generation to generation, making it as important as the actual characters. As with most pendragon books, it gets an excellent review, and adds plenty of depth and setting detail to a game that can already span a pretty epic scope. It even includes a decent prefab adventure, which most domain management systems don't really manage. Once again they come up trumps. Libellus sanguinus 1: masters of the state is for Vampire: the Dark Ages. They don't think that the historical lines merit full splatbooks for every clan, so they're condensing them into 4 packs of 3, each clan getting 30-odd pages. It does suffer from the tendency to assign vampiric influence to many historical events, and Chris is uncomfortable with the idea of playing Tzimisce as represented here. They're all monsters, that's part of the fun. Let go of your humanity. Embrace the darkness. Crisis of faith is for Heavy Gear, and puts all the timeline advancement in a single book, instead of scattering metaplot gumph all over the place in unrelated sourcebooks, as has happened in AD&D settings. Now that is a sensible idea. The presentation is pretty good as well. Course, there is the usual question if this'll make the setting less accessible to newbies. Guess they'll just have to risk it, or the line won't survive anyway. The world of darkness kicks it's metaplot into high gear. The time of judgement is coming and the blood is growing thin. Soon ravnos will rise, and he will be ravenous. Re:Views: Stuper Powers! sees Lester tackle a game with a nonstandard format for a second month in a row. A simple comedic superhero game using a comic book format? With dubious and often scatalogical powers? Oh I can so see that working, although it might be hard to find a parody power that hasn't been used seriously at some point. The system is simple, easy, and gets out of the way, and there's enough adventure ideas to get you going for a few issues. Seems like a good one to introduce young boys to roleplaying with. <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" /> The knights of the dinner table are not in the same boat as bob marley. Hoody Hoo</blockquote>

Verification