News

To be honest, I’m not completely ‘taken’ with Dragon Magazine #147.  Sure, it provides one of artist Clyde Caldwell’s trademark half-naked women, and she’s as lovely as can be expected, but somewhere along the way the issue tends to get lost and never recovers. Brought out in July 1989, I’m initially caught by the fact that for me the advertising seems ‘off’.  Now granted, my memory of the events of 1989 are a tad foggy by this point, but to feature an advertisement on the inside cover for the ‘All new 2nd Edition DMG’ that is available in June confuses...

What can I say about the 2nd Edition DMG that isn’t great… well, probably that I think the artwork selection is subpar.  I guess that question wasn’t so hard after all J This book, however, is perhaps the single most important text in my gaming library for the simple fact that it was what I used to hone and perfect my skills as a Dungeon Master.  Sure, I owned a copy of the AD&D 1E Dungeon Master’s Guide, but that book was like an unintelligible codex when I first started playing D&D, and since I’d begun with Basic and the...

Ok, of all the game mechanics I’ve ever played [and there are A LOT!] I’m going to say here, in print, for the very first time, that there is nothing I like better than Pinnacle Entertainment Groups Savage Worlds.  I once had the pleasure of a forty second conversation with creator Shane Hensley and he unabashedly admitted that he’d designed the system because he was a lazy DM.  Ah, a man after my own heart!  Seriously, the game is incredibly fast, SO EASY TO CREATE SCENARIOS AND ENEMIES ON THE FLY, and absolutely gitch in allowing players to use a...

Do you ever have one of those moments when you have to make a choice and it is nearly impossible to do so?  You know, like when someone asks your favorite movie and you can’t possibly answer, then you counter with ‘how about action movies, or horror movies, etc.’ and then when faced with that it is still almost impossible to answer?  Yeah, well sometimes choosing pieces of artwork from classic AD&D modules is just like that for me. It was no different for TSR’s I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City. Produced in 1981, the module is an interesting study...

In 1986 TSR came out with the 3rd Edition of Gamma World as they tried to drive sales of their new ACT [Action Table] combat system.   The effect, while dramatic in the box itself, falls incredibly flat when compared to say, The Red Box that helped revolutionize gaming just three years before. I have to wonder what happened during this period, as I can only assume TSR was at its absolute height here, and yet both this product, and Marvel Super Heroes, don’t really add anything artistically to the genre other than rehashing Marvel’s artwork or in the case of...