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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5811973" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 264: October 1999part 7/7Legacy of the dragon: Are Vampires getting everywhere again?! Not even Alternity is safe. I'm not really surprised, their popularity shows no signs of abating. Why shouldn't they try to get a small slice of that pie. The result owes more to WoD vampires than D&D ones, oddly enough, right down to terminology like ghouls and the kiss. I suppose that shows once again how they've captured the imagination of game designers and the public in general. And when you have a point buy system for powers, and need to present lots of options which individuals might or might not have, then of course it makes sense to mine the nearest reference material. So this is pretty derivative, but since they're actively trying to be generic, that's not too surprising. It does manage to squeeze in a few quirks in their specific settings, involving vampires of different species, and how the undead in general adapt to space travel. Overall though, I think this is just too predictable to be anything other than average. 7 of 9 gets to be on the cover of Amazing Stories. Pandering! Dragonmirth fails again. It'd be less funny if they didn't. KotDT goes full colour. Someone turned the contrast up a little too high in fact. And they're fighting amongst themselves again. What do they need a GM for anyway?TSR Previews: D&D gets another product designed to lure newbies in. The Diablo II Adventure game. Hee. Pregens, full rules and starting adventures based on the computer game. Ahh, joy. AD&D is fairly rehashed, with the priests spell compendium vol II. Still pretty handy, really. They do seem to be trying to make the vast amounts of things they've made over the past 10 years accessable. Greyhawk keeps trying to stay alive by feeding off nostalgia. White plume mountain gets a novelisation by Paul Kidd. The amusing group we've seen before in this magazine bicker their way through classic locations. Dragonlance is doing even worse, reprinting Murder in Tarsis by John Maddox Roberts. Since that's one of the more slated novels in the series, I'm very surprised it sold well enough to justify this. The Realms do their usual trick of having novels tied in with recent adventures. Under Fallen Stars by Mel Odom lets you see how the official metaplot events of the sea of fallen stars adventures will go. Once again, the setting details'll be out of date before you know it. Ravenloft reaches out it's misty tendrils with Carnival. Another way to bring horror into any campaign, and quite possibly turn the characters into monsters. Muahahahahaha!!!!! Just pray they don't bring you with them into the demiplane itself. Alternity gets another last ditch attempt to bring in more players before they cancel the line. Another fast-play set, with everything you need to get things going, but probably not enough to play a long term game. So you'll then have to spend extra for the actual corebooks. The writing's on the wall. Profiles: Brom! Yes, that is his real name. Hee. He looks like he should be in a nu-metal band. Anyway, he's one of this decade's iconic artists, doing tons of RPG stuff, and more than a few other things as well, including book covers, computer game design, CCG's, and film work. He's also writing his own novel on the side, as everyone does. <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=";)" /> For someone who creates such dark illustrations, he seems pretty cheery. Guess angst worked out is no longer a problem. And as long as there's an audience for being slightly unsettled in a safe environment, he'll have plenty of work to make a living from. Quite a few goofy bits in this issue, which i'm pretty sure was intentional. Some of them hit the mark, some of them didn't, but the quota of truly forgettable filler was fairly low at least. And the countdown definitely adds a certain frisson to the proceedings. Knowing exactly how long we have left will hopefully make people appreciate these issues all the more.</blockquote>

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