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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6265055" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 1part 1/672 pages. What? You honestly didn't think that after a performance as epic as this, I wouldn't have the energy for an encore? Think again! They did not just one, but five best of's between 1979 and 1986, back in the days when you couldn't just get back issues from the internet, so reprints actually mattered a good deal in helping new players to see the old material. And this gives me a chance to look back and see how my opinion has changed, several years and several tons of perspective later. What still holds up and deserves to be influential today, and what should have been forgotten, never to darken their printers again?Since we're dealing with old school articles, it's instantly notable that they're a lot smaller than the ones we've got used too, cramming 39 into 68 pages. Paper costs were obviously a bigger proportion of their budget, since they put so much more effort into cramming as much info into the room they had, with smaller typefaces and less art. Looking back over my old reviews, I notice I had a good deal less to say about each article as well. Let's see if that's because there's simply less to say, or it was just lack of experience first time around. Planes: Our first article is an excellent example of just how impenetrable Gary's prose could be. I know what the planes are, you know what the planes are, but trying to figure it out just from this article would be a far longer process than it should be for it's size. It has a particular obsession with magical weapons losing plusses as you move further away from their plane of origin, which is the kind of rule that just adds extra bookkeeping to the DM's job for the sole purpose of screwing over players. (especially since so many extraplanar monsters required certain numbers of plusses to hurt at all. ) While it may have been one of the first building blocks for the D&D cosmology, we're still a long way from a house that you can actually live in, and this bit of foundation isn't particularly exciting in itself. How green was my Mutant: Ah yes, a good old-fashioned bit of random character generation. How I have missed ye. Both metamorphosis alpha and gamma world revelled in making your character as weird as possible, and this is one early example, letting you give your character a wide range of colours and body shapes. Curiously, it's pretty much system free, (although, logically, having different numbers of fingers and toes would make a real difference to your capabilities) so you can easily use it for other games. This one still seems both amusing and usable. Some Ideas Missed in Metamorphosis Alpha: Jim Ward was full of cool ideas in the early days, but sometimes struggled with the mechanics, especially since he was one of the most prone to making overpowered stuff, and running monty haul campaigns. This article is a good example of that, as it provides errata for the items list, and some of it is indeed rather powerful, particularly the sensory intensifiers. It was a time before editors rose to power in the company, and it shows. Could do with more work. Alternate Beginning for Metamorphosis Alpha: Here's another article that still has lots of general applicability today. Starting your players off as clones who have basic skills but no knowledge of the setting is a good thing to do when it's their first time, and you don't want to waste time doing infodumps. You can do similar things in other fantasy/sci-fi settings by having them start as ignorant peasants who've never left their village, or people from the real world who've gone through a portal/been frozen and woken up in the future. After all, it's worked for stories as different as Narnia and Thomas Covenant. And for all that people can hide their knowledge and try to avoid metagaming, it's never truly the same second time around. Use this trick when it most makes sense. Funnily enough, you can rebuild the 4th wall later. Hints for D&D Judges: Joe Fischer was one of the people who never became a full writer for TSR, but still played a significant part in D&D's development. Someone was bound to introduce the ranger class eventually, but it might well have turned out very different. Similarly, being one of the first people to write about town and wilderness adventures gives him a little more influence than normal, as this three part article shows. He does put a fairly strong emphasis on mapping, wherever you are, that remained strong throughout the 80's, and has since fallen out of fashion. As with any clear step-by-step advice, this is excellent at helping you be creative when raw inspiration isn't with you, and much of this has fallen out of fashion enough that it feels fresh when reintroduced. There are good reasons to go back to the old school, and things like this are amongst them, because a clear picture of where everything is and why it's there still makes more sense than distorted close-up wide-angle shots and shakycam.</blockquote>

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