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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5702472" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 249: July 1998part 8/8Previews finally realizes that as they are no longer owned by TSR, they shouldn't have their logo. They also take this opportunity to start covering other games companies as well. I strongly approve. However, they do stop covering stuff 2 months ahead. Since I'm not sure how long this lasts, I'll do everything new mentioned here, and then incremental updates. This does mean I won't be mentioning any TSR stuff this month, as they're not mentioning anything new there. Atlas games seems to be rehashing a bit, in the Festival of the Damned anniversary edition for Ars Magica. The town of Vezay is involved in dubious stuff again. Better get the inquisitors on the red courtesy phone and try not to be burned in the crossfire. Biohazard games release Wetware for Blue Planet. Cybernetics, genetic engineering, and other cool toys for both players and GM's. A perennial good seller.  Clockwork release Spookshow. Combining ghostly stuff with espionage. Now there's a pairing that go together pretty well, as Orpheus showed a bit later. Critical mass Studios are pretty busy, with the Soothsayer game out this month. The players guide, the usual reference sheet and GM screen pack, and two adventures, Set in Stone and Avogrado's number. Event Horizon seem to be trying to get into the magazine business. RolePaper issue 2 seems to have a whole bunch of articles on stuff useful for various systems. I don't remember this at all. FASA releases an updated corebook and a new novel for Battletech. Their ongoing plotlines advance, and the rules advances from various supplements get collated into one place for usefulness. Woo. Fractal Dimensions release SORD. The System of Role-Playing Development. A generic system that I've never heard of before. How long did this last? Gold rush Games are producing Sengoku: Chanbara roleplaying in feudal japan. Samuraiariffic. Well, I guess D&D has lost interest in that stuff at this point, and it's still fairly popular. Other people will move in to satisfy a demand. Heraldic Game Design release Steeltown for SOL. I don't remember this gameline at all either. Shrug. I guess I was mostly out of the loop at this point. Holistic release War in the heavens: Lifeweb for Fading Suns. They're obviously big enough to support an adventure trilogy at this point too. LUG seem to be the current users of the star trek license. Star trek: The next generation gets a corebook and a Narrator's Toolkit. Including an adventure involving Q? Oh boy. What was this incarnation of the game like? Pinnacle are busy bunnies, with 4 things upcoming in the next 2 months. Tales O' Terror: 1877 does for deadlands what the poor wizard's almanacs did for Mystara. Another year passing in the game, with more alternate history weirdness. Next month, they unleash Deadlands: Hell on Earth. And you thought the weird west was rough as it is. With both the core and the radiation (ie, GM's) screen, you'll be having a hell of a time in no time. And if that's not enough, there's also Worms!, their 7th dime novel/adventure. They've certainly managed a lot more supplements than boot hill ever did. Probably due to the supernatural elements, in the same way Shadowrun massively outsold Cyberpunk and is still going. Steve Jackson Games lets In Nomine's metaplot climax, with The Final Trumpet seeing the world in serious danger of ending. Go on, cancel it on a high note, you know you want too. They also release GURPS Traveller. Another big gameline gets a new form after quite a bit of inactivity. They really are the kings of system conversions. White wolf easily outpace everyone but WotC, showing that in terms of size and production values, they're already comfortably number two. Methinks their output needs dividing up into it's various gamelines. Dark ages gets Clanbook Baali! Read about the little boy raping and impregnating a priest! See the picture of a woman with maggots in her hoo-ha! Watch as we riff off cthulhu again! ZOMG we're so dark and edgy and mature. \m/ Not their finest hour. W:tA gets Hengeyokai: Shapeshifters of the East. Goblin spiders, Kitsune, all sorts of strange virtue requirements for different species, and a good excuse for crossover games. M:tSC gets Crusade Lore: The storytellers screen and book. A rather longwinded name for an ST's companion, but what's new, eh?W:tO takes us deep down with Doomslayers: Into the Labyrinth. Grimdark at it's finest, with tons of stuff for fighting spectres with, and more than a little to help playing them too. You can never truly beat oblivion, but maybe you can hold it off for a day longer. Just make sure you get regularly castigated for your angst level. They're even busier next month as well. V:tM gets War of Ages, a rehashed compilation of two old books. See the Anarchs and camarilla contrasted and trying to get the upper hand on each other like the sabbat is barely there. Silly vampires. Man, that seems dated as hell. W:tWW gets the Wild West Companion. They seem to be on a historical kick as well at the moment. See how wild the frontier is when angry native spirits are added to the mix. M:tA is also in a rehashy mood, with The Traditions Gathered. A compilation of the old Virtual Adepts, Sons of Ether and Order of Hermes splatbooks. See science get mangled as they try to persuade people to believe in it. I do not consent to this reality. C:tD gets it's storytellers guide. Actually, this has considerably less cool stuff than the players guide, but it's hardly terrible, and the intro fiction in particular has stayed in my mind. Trinity is right in the middle of it's big adventure arc. Darkness Revealed: Passage through shadow. They continue to singlehandedly provide colons with employment in this world and beyond. Course, from the perspective of the RPGPundit, they're providing colons with employment in a different sense, but I think the less said about that the better. Profiles: Having covered Gary last month, Dave Arneson is the logical next choice. After all, he might sue them if they don't. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> However, the shoddy researching for these articles continues, with several of the dates wrong (as I can personally prove from references earlier on in the magazine's run.  ) This makes me skeptical about the facts I can't substantiate as well. I get the impression these may have been dashed off in a very short amount of time, by someone who was busy with dozens of other things as well. Anyway, from this profile (and I know there have been some far less complementary ones from other industry people) he seems to be a likable dilettante, having been set up for life financially by royalties from the basic sets, he's free to experiment with things in all kinds of fields, reviews, making a computer game, interviewing people, and of course, doing guest spots on the convention circuit. Not a bad way to live. You don't have to constantly try and produce the next big thing after having one big hit if you don't want too. Another issue in which the articles are actually very good, overall. On the other hand, it's increasingly obvious that the reviews are on their last legs, and their editing and fact-checking is more than a little spotty. So at the moment, they're at their best when actually creating new stuff, not looking over other people's. Well, I guess giving the power back to the individual writers and line developers would have that effect. So once again it looks like this era is better to read in bits and pieces than to plough through in a linear fashion looking for the connections. Will that be enough to keep people reading? Not too far till the end of the year, where we can see the statistics again.</blockquote>

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