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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6277196" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 5part 1/482 pages. The pace of the best of's accelerates, as this one says May 1986, a mere year after the last one. While things may still be moving forward in the outside world, here, they're going back to the old school, leaving out the themes, and just picking the best articles still unrepeated from the magazine's past. Although it is very noticeable that where the first best of crammed 39 articles into 72 pages, this has only 20 in 80, showing how word counts have expanded in the last 7 years. If this series kept up, that would probably have changed even more in the long run, especially in the last few years when lengthy articles like the demonomicons increased in frequency quite a lot. But it was not to be. Let's see what they thought worth reiterating in the days just before Gary left for good and Lorraine took over, axing a whole bunch of things in her wake, including this series. Thrills and chills: Ice age adventuring still looks like a pretty neat idea, making everyday survival and resource accumulation a bigger challenge. One series of cheesy CGI movies certainly hasn't exhausted all the many options you have to tell stories in a world like that, and there's a wider range of fantastical monsters that fit the bill than when this was originally released. A larger campaign setting exploring the vagaries of a frigid world in the same way that Athas showed us different dry, hostile climates is very much an option. Maybe some day, I'll get to try it out. Mind of the monster: Getting inside monster's heads and playing them as smart as their stats dictate is also a good idea, one that's both been explored thoroughly since then, and equally often blatantly breached. So this bit of advice feels very familiar, as it's been built upon, and expanded in quite a few different directions, from the brutally tactical to the humorous. Don't mind being reminded of it at all. The oracle: They seem to be running low on classes to rehash, so they can't do a full section on them this time around, but there's still this one. The old school divination specialist, and also pretty decent secondary healer for some reason, with their lengthy list of different real world divination methods. They're weaker than regular wizards or clerics, but hardly useless, even if they're probably better suited as NPC's. Once again, the problem is that the regular spellcasting classes have such a versatile and reliable selection, so it's difficult to make new ones that use the same memorisation rules without them feeling redundant. And as we know, that's still a long way in their future. Definitely a pain the ass overall. Firearms: Some people want to present guns as a great world-beater, making other weapons and magic redundant. Ed Greenwood was smart enough to give us a more nuanced view back in the day, showing he's certainly not all overpowered cheesiness. Medieval guns were actually rather a pain in the ass, slow to reload, and prone to misfiring. They might be able to equal a fireball in damage-dealing potential, but they certainly aren't faster or cheaper than having a wizard on team in D&D. Which I think makes sense, otherwise introducing them ruins (or at least changes) the game dramatically. This still seems to strike the right balance between cool and challenging for long-term use. A second volley: Ed's sequel a year later does not suffer from power creep at all. If anything, the opposite, as it's focussed on smaller, handheld weapons rather than the siege weaponry of the last one. It covers fewer weapons, but can go into greater detail on each of them, reminding us that the reason Ed seems to be a neverending font of ideas is that he does his research, and knows good sources to draw from. (and being a librarian doesn't hurt with that) He may have been trapped into endless Realms expansions in later years, but in the 80's, he did plenty of other stuff as well, and this kind of article is a good reminder of how versatile he was.</blockquote>

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