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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6081933" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 307: May 2003 part 1/9116 pages. A Game of Thrones themed issue? Very interesting, and rather more welcome to me than the Shannara one. That bit of fiction a couple of issues ago has a genuine payoff then. I suppose it's even cooler because like the steampunk issue, it shows how good ideas can still gradually build and be even more popular when revisited a decade later, which is a definite relief when you spend too much time bombarded by pop culture ephemera that vanishes unmourned once it's 15 minutes is up. You can make a sustainable career in the entertainment business, but it takes putting as much attention to promotion as actually creating stuff, and regularly releasing new material to build a fanbase, and that's two full-time jobs in one if you don't have a team behind you. Will they be able to give us an exciting encapsulation of this enormous series and make it look like a fun world to adventure in, or will this just be a load of promotional junk to leave in the trunk? Scan Quality: Excellent, unindexed. In this issue:Neverwinter Nights, shadows of undrentide! Sweet. Computers might not be able to match real DM's, but they're definitely making progress. Wyrms turn: Our editorial, unsurprisingly, is selling us on the idea of adventuring in Westeros. Like Middle-Earth, the world gives the impression of being far larger than any single character's story, with tons of history stretching backwards to play with. This means PC's have room to do stuff without constantly being overshadowed by the stars of the novels. In fact, in that respect, Martin is probably even better than Tolkien, because he makes it very clear there's no one viewpoint character, and anyone can die at any time via treachery or arbitrary twists of fate, but the narrative as a whole will carry on. Which is a lesson many DM's should take to heart. The party is not an inviolable perfect circle of chosen ones, that the story cannot take place without, and if you've written everything in advance so that it is, a less, shall we say, dicey medium would work better. Being willing to let the players change history from the books if they're playing in an existing fictional world isn't a bad rule to learn either. So far, so incentivising. What region and time period captures your interest? Scale Mail: Our first letter this month, is a suggestion of how to speed along the mapping process with overlays on projection paper that fit together to make the full map without making hidden bits obvious. The main expense there'll be the projector then, unless you can "borrow" it from the office, which many people can do in their line of work. We follow with some fencing minutinae, reminding us that even swashbucklers can be obsessive and geeky too. Some really bad actual play story, heavily abbreviated. This really should have been in last issue, where we needed some risible letters to mock. Continuing praise for Robin Laws and his ideas about social contracts. More articles that aren't game specific would be nice too. And finally, linked to that, a reminder that you don't need to kill monsters to gain XP from overcoming them. Social conflict (as long as it's genuinely challenging social interaction, not just talking ) counts too. That's how all those Aristocrats and Experts get to level up. Haggling can be a cutthroat matter, and politics even moreso. Don't underestimate them because they haven't been on the front lines.</blockquote>

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