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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6179926" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 334: August 2005part 2/7First watch: Stormwrack is our latest climatebook, an attempt to make sea adventuring sound as badass as it can be. Seems slightly more focussed on ship based stuff than underwater adventuring, which is a change from last time. Can you handle the ocean waves and not be swept away? Eberron releases the Explorers Handbook. New continents, new crunch, new shiny vehicles to get you from here to there. That was quicker than most of their previous worlds managed to do this. On the D20 side, we have Compleat Encounters. Paizo combine a whole bunch of elements to make a satsfying prefab adventure package, good for an evening. Oh, you're spoiling us, you really are. We also have the announcement of Ptolus. Ahh yes, they gave us a year's lead-in to this mammoth product, including the option of spreading your costs over that period if you preordered. That was a pretty neat move. And the final product was more than worth the cost. Rather late arriving is another RPG product. Mage: The Awakening finishes off the core 3 of the NWoD, albeit 6 months later than they said they would. And they continue to be the most controversial gameline too, with stuff like atlantis cheese, hard to read gold leaf, and enormous tedious rote lists. Man. What is with that? A whole bunch of card games get promoted this time. Berserker halflings from the Dungeon of Dragons, and the more prosaically named Dungeonville both turn the tables on fantasy gaming in tongue in cheek fashions. Meanwhile, Hecatomb has you bringing about the end of the world with 5 sided cards. Ew. Do you know how hard those things are to stack neatly? 6 is much neater if you're going nonstandard. Boardgames aren't doing badly either. World of Warcraft gets adapted to a boardgame, just as it did an RPG (which is also getting updated to 3.5. ) Seems a lot of work for a tiny amount of extra money. I guess they don't know what'll work until they try. And Avalon Hill get a half-page of general promotion. Seems like they're still going with products new and old. WotC continues to do other stuff to cash in on their properties. Both Drizzt and the Dragonlance chronicles are now getting comics based on the old books. They've become valuable IP semindependent of D&D. And finally, on the televisual side, we have The Gamers 2: Dorkness rising. Cheap and cheesy just got a little less cheap, and a lot more connected to the world it pays homage to, with designer cameos aplenty. Another consequence of cameras and video editing software becoming ever more accessible to normal people. Crimmor, city of Caravans: Ed Greenwood's may have been absent from the magazine over the past year, but that has evidently not stopped the flow of his creativity. In fact, it's given him time to produce some larger articles rather than the bite-sized chunks we mostly saw since 1996. 13 pages on the Amnian trading hub and the possibilities of adventure therein. Actually, a lot of the individual adventure hooks could be cut out and delivered to us independently as smaller packages, but that doesn't make them any less fun to read, although it does illuminate his work process and how he binds together little inspirations into a much larger whole. The illustrations aren't quite as good as his last regular column, but the writing continues to be top-notch, with Ed's distinct talent for names and amusing turns of phrase definitely something I've missed in these days of crap names like Wilden and Redspawn Berserkers. It's a pleasure to have him back, even if this still doesn't display the kind of ambition he did in the early days. Get your ass down there and follow up some of these threads, maybe he'll add a few more to replace them. Got to keep the world moving forward or it'll end up like all the rest.</blockquote>

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