News — Brom

Beginning in 1991, TSR really started to push a new wave of boxed set campaign worlds for their AD&D 2nd Edition, and one of these was Dark Sun. The brainchild of Troy Denning & Timothy B. Brown it was the anti-Greyhawk, a world of hard lines, wastelands, and finite resources.  Athas, the world that hosted the Dark Sun universe, was a dying world, a closed sphere [for all you Spelljammer folks out there] and players got to take part in a gritty setting where survival was the end result of adventuring, not treasure and magical items. I played this game...

I feel like, as I do a Dragon Magazine review each week, I’m getting too late in the magazine’s run for the bulk of my readers to remember them, as though, sometime around 1990, everyone stopped reading Dragon.  In truth, that is probably very true, but nonetheless, I’ll keep reviewing whatever random issue I pull out of my collection each week. This week brings Dragon #173 from September 1991.  It is a Dark Sun dedicated issue and therefore is chocked full of both Brom and Tom Baxa artwork.  Edited by Roger E. Moore, the top articles in this particular volume...

Sometime around the year 2000 I stumbled upon a computer game in the discount bin of a Software Etc [anyone remember those?].  Now normally I don’t go in for science fiction video games, but this one caught my eye because of the box cover.  At the time, I didn’t recognize it as a Brom, but nonetheless it was enough for me to shell out the $4.99 for Empire of the Fading Suns. When I tried to play it, no matter how dedicated I was to learning the mechanics, I just couldn’t find any rhyme or reason to how things worked...