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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5907258" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 277: November 2000 part 2/7PROfILES? Ok, Now I know they're messing with us deliberately. The format gets another messing around, appearing on alternate vertical columns on each page. This is not an improvement. Anyway, Kim Mohan is our subject this month. Long-time editor of the magazine, he's now managing editor of the whole goddamn R&D department, getting to look over and help make every book that comes out clear, consistent, and high in quality. A position that suits him well, as he's never been the most exiting writer in his own right (I found the wilderness survival guide a right snoozefest) but he seems good at getting the best out of others. Another case where people feed off each other's talents to create a greater whole. Try and do everything yourself, it won't be as much fun, or as good. Previews: Having finished rolling the D&D corebooks out, they get busy again, to capitalise on this. Forge of fury is this month's generic adventure. Looks like another back to basics dungeon crawl in an abandoned dwarf fortress full of squatters. A few months in, and the different approaches between editions are becoming very apparent. The Realms harks back to one of their classic computer games with Pool of Radiance: Attack on Myth Drannor seems rather more plot heavy. There's room for plenty of variety in the Realms. There's also the novelisation of said game, written by Carrie A. Bebris, and Shadow's Witness by Paul Kemp, another novel. Greyhawk moves solidly into the clutches of the RPGA. The Living Greyhawk Gazetteer helps you get even more into the setting than last month's offering, and includes lots of stuff that's been added or altered for the new edition. Whether the old fans will approve or not remains to be seen. Still, when you're going massively multiplayer, you need to make compromises for playability's sake. Dragonlance humanizes the Draconians a little more in Draconian Measures by Margaret Weis & Don Perrin. Before you know it, they'll be no more villains than the Klingons. Oh well, as long as it makes for fun stories.And it looks like once again, their all D&D, all the time policy gets bent a little for other d20 products. Star wars kicks off with a corebook, character record sheets, and an introductory game. Oh, and a magazine catering to Star wars gaming. I wonder how long that one'll last. In any case, it's nice to see a line start that'll actually stick around for a decent timescale for a change. See, you can have a sci-fi RPG that remains profitable, even if it is a license. Countdown to the forgotten realms introduces a ticker. This is currently set at 7 months. Guess with the success of the last one, they wanted to get the tension up again. Before you know it, they'll be running this trick into the ground. Anyway, they have a good deal of info to impart in a single page. Once again, quite a bit of emphasis is on slicing through the vast amounts of background detail and making sure this is a good jump on point, but there's also some on how the new rules will let you build characters closer to the ones in the stories. Prestige classes certainly make more sense when they're being designed with an existing setting in mind, and guys like the Harpers and Red Wizards will have more bite now there's a definite mechanical and social path to becoming one. Plus they introduce the idea of Regional Feats here, showing they're thinking about hard-coding the mechanics into the setting on quite a few levels. The Realms has always tended towards the game rules as universe physics school of thinking, and this is plenty of fuel for the simulationists among you. This is fairly informative of where their mindset is at at the moment. Having got a generally good reception for the new system, they're confident they can push it a bit further without losing people. Dork tower has it's enthusiasm for the game destroyed by other people's overenthusiasm. The age of steam: We kick off our Steampunk special with a bit of basic explanation, obviously aimed at newcomers to the idea. The hallmark of Steampunk is the combination of retro and futuristic pieces of technology, often including magic, or forms of technological development that never happened in reality (which might be physically impossible, and therefore essentially magic anyway. ) D&D magic applied frequently and in an organised and logical way to a setting can definitely qualify. And indeed, this article is pretty focussed on how you would twist D&D rules and settings to add steampunk elements, rather than general advice that would be useful for any system. (it is noted that Spelljammer is a particularly good fit, since it's physics are based on outdated victorian theories about celestial mechanics) The influences cited are a combination of novels written back then, with Jules Verne being the obvious king of steampunk ideas, and more modern ones by people like Alan Moore and William Gibson. This spends a little too long getting people up to speed to really play around with the idea, plus it has a fairly easy to spot mistake in it's references that the editors should have caught, so while interesting, it doesn't make it into the classic articles list. My best hope now is that the other articles in the section will build off it to make something better.</blockquote>

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