News — TSR

I really have no idea what the business concept behind TSR’s late-run science fiction RPG, Alternity, was.  Perhaps they’d long ago abandoned or lost the rights to Star Frontiers, but it seems incredibly odd not to do a revamp of that universe since it already had a strong fanbase and solid universe. Whatever the case, Alternity was created in 1998 and failed almost as quickly as TSR’s bottom line before being salvaged from the scrap heap by Wizards of the Coast.  Although the staff at TSR survived [roughly], Alternity did not, and the game has become more of an oddity...

The first thing that strikes me about Dragon #67 is the cover, which is a bit of a divergence from the standard stuff people were growing used to from Dragon.  Instead of the basic adventure fantasy and S&S images, we are greeted with a fantasy dinner party complete with sword-wielding Viking slicing a turkey down the center.   What exactly does this mean?  I guess you’d have to ask the artist, Jack Crane, or perhaps the Kim Mohan who was the Editor-in-Chief.  Whatever the case, I’ll accept it for face value, a bit of old school tongue-in-cheek humor for the...

I’m not sure how many of you out there ever tried the XSOLO series of modules from TSR, but there are a couple that are very fun.  I’m not really certain Lathan’s Gold is one of them, but still, it has some nice artwork in it and I’m tempted to take out my dice and give it a shot just to see. Written by Merle M. Rasmussen [is that a real name?] and produced in 1984, the module takes your character into the Sea of Dread [a favorite setting of mine and one that I’ve played in as recently as...

Someone back in 1982, my assumption being Jim Roslof, thought it would be a good idea to let a single artist handle all the art responsibilities for a single AD&D adventure module.  What came next was an inspirational series that helped define Jim Holloway’s career at TSR, either for better or for worse. To me, the creation of I3: Pharaoh, written by Tracy and Laura Hickman, is genre defining adventure that is the first step in distancing TSR from the 1970s module prototype, which I have to say is no easy task.  I3 has more polish, more maps, and yes,...

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...