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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5712556" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 251: September 1998part 4/8By any other name: Our elvish section ends with a short article on elven names, and how to create them. We already know to make them melodious and multisyllabic, but this gives us a bunch of sample elven words and the way they can be made to fit together to form a descriptive name.  The kind of article that's ok when taken in isolation, but frustrating when you try and plug it into a larger continuity, and makes me wish for a full length book on fantasy linguistics to do this definitively in a final way instead of messing around with little articles with minimal overlap. Dragonlance gets another calendar. People must keep buying them, otherwise they wouldn't keep making them. AD&D core rules 2.0 Sneak preview: Hmm. A straight up promotional article. I'd forgotten just how annoying I found them a few years ago. For all my frustration at their reduced variety of articles these days, that's one thing I don't regret them reducing the number of, instead going for more subtle tie-in articles. Of course, this is an exception, simply telling us about the new computer version of their rulebooks. It now contains all the info from 9 books, fully searchable, plus the character generator, mapmaker, and support for houseruling the game. In some ways, thats better than the official 4e DDI tools, all this time later. And of course, it's not dependent on being online or paying a regular subscription. It does make me wonder a little about their current direction. We've already seen evidence that pathfinder is outselling 4e. Is the attempt to grip their IP too tightly part of what's causing people to slip through their fingers at the moment? It is very worth thinking about. What lessons can the people running the show now learn from those taken in then? Fiction: The lizard shoppe by Neal Barrett, Jr. Hmm. This is a fairly complicated story with several layers, combining the magical, political and romantic. This makes it a little tricky for me to figure out what aspect to focus upon, as they interact with one-another. I'm not absolutely sure it's a good story, as they don't always mesh together perfectly, but it is a pretty interesting one, that I had to reread a few times to take in all the details. And like many of their writers, it's obvious that the author has thought about the world and built it up beyond what we see in the story. So it looks like although this isn't a regular writer, he fits in here and is probably a roleplayer. That's a decent use of their pages. It's nice to see they're still giving plenty of fiction despite variety dropping in other areas. Wyrms of the north: Music has the power to soothe the savage beast? Not that anyone but his typewriter would call Ed savage. But he's certainly shown an interest in music before. (issues 94, 115, 123) So here we have a dragon that's obsessed with music, and will spare the life of anyone who plays for him. Of course this being the Realms, this doesn't so much become a singular legend as a regular thing with established relationships with various Bards from around the realms being the majority of his social life, and his hoard filled with music boxes and magical instruments, many of which can play on command. So this isn't an original idea, but demonstrates that despite being a kitchen sink, the Realms retains a distinctive flavour, partly because it's original creator remains such a productive force for the world, and any ideas he steals will still wind up sounding like him once he's through with them. In the Realms, you won't be the first, you won't be the last, and you won't be the best. Just be thankful that you can play a part without getting abruptly eaten.</blockquote>

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