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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6210942" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 342: April 2006part 2/6First watch: Splatbook time again. They've exhausted the core 4 roles, so now it's Psionics turn to get a Complete book adding to them. New classes make an all psionic party viable, new powers help, but still don't catch them up with spellcasters. Plus some slightly iffy errata, the joys of heritage feats, and the obligatory usual prestige classes. Eberron gets Voyage of the Golden Dragon. An airship's maiden voyage runs into a little trouble. A combination of sourcebook and adventures, this reminds me of the princess ark series, and looks pretty cool. Giving players control of their own flying vehicle always tips the game heavily into the awesomeometer. Another adventure plus a bunch of physical stuff this month. Fields of Ruin seems to feature a chimera, and other monsters from their new minis set, plus big maps for your minis to fight on. Tie it all together, and hopefully more people'll buy it. We've heard that line before. Green Ronin continues to be Dragon's most popular D20 company. Mansion of Shadows and the True20 Bestiary are their latest products. Seems like they're almost as prolific as WotC, if not with quite as high production values. Also on the D20 side, oddly, is the latest Dragonlance adventure. The price of Courage. Ahh, yes. The licensing business. Funny what it did to their 2e campaign worlds in this era. Also on a Dragonlance spin is another redoing of the original novels, this time in comic format. Didn't they already do graphic novels, back in the early 90's. Seems like people keep coming back to the beginning, in a way they don't with the Realms. Non D20 products that have grabbed their interest this month are BESM 3rd edition, and call of cthulhu's Malleus Monstrorum. Two more gamelines that have produced awesome work in the past, but are now hanging on, and not going anywhere fast. Damn shame really. On the minis side, we have Hordes, a new wargame from Privateer. Giant warbeasts and risk/reward tradeoff gambling. Interesting. It's all compatible with Warmachine too, so you can mix and match the creature types and their different ways of operating. Curiously, we also get Dracula minis from McFarlaine Toys, based upon the 1992 movie. What an odd conjunction. It's not as if that version was particularly popular. Another boardgame out now is Grand Tribunal. Loosely based on Ars Magica, the goal of the game is to invent the coolest and most powerful spells and items, and then decide who did the best. You can be backbiting politics will be involved, if I know the Hermetics. On the game aids side, we have an amusing little entry. D'oh dice. Dice, with the 1 replaced with a D'oh. A good example of how culturally ubiquitous the Simpsons has become. Amusing once, then I lose interest, so probably not worth the purchase. For computer games, they promote Heroes of Might and Magic V, and Horizons: Empire of Istaria. Both are RPG's and have fairly substantial internet multiplayer options. No change in their priorities there then. Another book this month is The Art of Ray Harryhausen. The old god of stop-motion gets a big coffee table book. Lots of colour stuff from the movies, plus sketches, and behind the scenes stuff. Sounds fairly neat. And finally, there's the GOBLIN podcasting network. The new cool thing, as adding Garageband to every mac and various advancements in computer recording and compression technology have made it accessible to the average person. Which means even a market as niche as ours has dozens of people doing it themselves. Just like punk, only with less safety pins. I very much approve. Domain power: It looks like the real theme this month is deities again, with 5 articles devoted to godly power, compared to just one joke article. Hang on a minute, didn't they do that just 4 years ago in issue 294. Repeating topics I can deal with. Rehashing exactly the same combo of topics when combinatoric theory says you should be able to pick and mix any two or three for hundreds of years without hitting exactly the same ones, that's just careless. I'm exceedingly unamused by this twist of events. My mood is not improved by reading the first article, as it's very much one of those ones where they have a single good idea (spending a feat to improve your domain powers) and then just crank the formula until it covers all the domains in the corebook. (and believe me, you'll have no trouble coming up with similar effects for the many others in supplements.) Booooooooooooooooooooring. Waiter! Next!</blockquote>

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