This one of the cooler WD covers. Brought to us by Alan Craddock I for years thought it was a Chris Achilleos.
Ian Livingstone talks about bring out some RPGs to play with the family this Christmas, wondering what Granny might think of Orc stomping.
Up first is Open Box with a ton of items. For AD&D we have UK1: Beyond the Crystal Cave, EX1: Dungeonland and EX2: The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror. For D&D X3: Curse of Xanathon. Jim Bambara likes the modules for the most part giving them 9/10, 9/10, 9/10 and 7/10 respectively. Andy Slack tackles the new version of the Traveller basic rules. This is the cover I remember most about the mid 80s. It is also the version of the Traveller I never tried having ended with the Blue Book. He gives it an 8/10 overall, but still states that neophytes are better served with one of the other sets. Jon Sutherland takes on the two Call of Cthulhu adventures (and they are called Adventures now, not Scenarios). Death in Dunwich and The Arkham Evil. He gives them 7/10 and 8/10 respectively saying these are not for fool hardy players used to hack and slash. Finally we have the Autoduel Champions and Car Wars Reference Screen. Autoduel gives us Car Wars for Champions. Marcus Rowland gives them 8/10 and 6/10.
The book reviews focus on the then recent batch of sci-fi/fantasy books. The Complete Book of SF and Fantasy is one that jumps out at me. I think I owned this at one point, but the title is so generic I could have owned something very similar. There is also a review of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, which I have not read. A couple of Trek books are also covered including what is likely to have been the first time I had ever heard of what is now known as Slashfic, called Kirk-Spocking here.
Lew Pulsipher's Lew's Views is back this month and covers Gods, Magic and FRP battles. He discusses the nature of Gods and Magic in fantasy battles.
Rick Priestly has an article on using Giants in Warhammer. There are some interesting and mostly game agnostic rules about giants getting drunk. I might try these out.
The Dark Brotherhood is an alternate system for Assassins in AD&D by Chris Felton. I remember reading this way back when and it influenced the assassin guilds I had made for my game. The Brotherhood (no relation I am sure since I was big into acronyms then and wanted it to spell out BEAST) and the Red Assassins were two rival guilds in my games. I never made characters in either guild sign contracts.
Counterpoint discusses boardgames derived from books. The big ones are discussed; LotR, Dune, Call of Cthulhu and Asimov's books and the varying degrees of success they achieved.
Ian Bailey has some RuneQuest crunch and fluff for us in the form of Crom Cruach, a Goblin Cult. It is interesting enough to use anywhere.
Tracing Errors is this issue's Microview article and Gareth Williams covers how to find and debug errors in your programming.
Letters covers level limits in AD&D, Marc Miller and Thomas Price praising the coverage of various Traveller articles.
Marcus Rowland covers computers in Traveller. By this time the concept of what a computer could do had changed in the world since Traveller had been published. Computers had always been one of Traveller's weakest area in terms of future tech. This article helps, but doesn't quite get it there. My smart phone laughs at the idea of 1 ton batteries powering a computer for only 12 hours.
RuneRites has a double feature for us today. Monsters and a new scenario. The monsters are listed (nothing jumps out at me), we break for a Thrud the Barbarian strip and head into the scenario. The Lone and Level Sands is dual stated for AD&D AND RuneQuest. New monsters are given both RuneQuest and AD&D stats (or at least where you can get them).
Fiend Factory returns the favor and converts the RQ demons from the last few issues into AD&D demons.
Treasure Chest follows with some demon related spells for D&D/AD&D.
The Travellers get into more trouble. And the Victoria Gazette is another attempt at a news article. No jokes this time, just straight news.
Classifieds and Small ads follow. Gobbledigook shows us how to handle Illusionists.
Ads end the issue including full page ones for James Bond, Games Fair 84, Games Workshop and TSR for the Monster Manual II.
In general I feel that once again the layout and general design of the magazine was turned up a bit. The page count is now up to 52 and still only 75p.
You can get a better look at that cover art here:
one of best 5 issues ever
ReplyDeleteIsn't she cold in that costume?
ReplyDelete(looks at larger version of picture)
Ah, yes, she is :)
And Synchronicity - ah, that brings back memories.
There was a high quotient of cheescake covers like this at the time, from the lass on Issue 44, and there are more coming up as well.
ReplyDeleteMust be an early 80s thing I guess. Artists like Achilleos and Boris Vallejo seemed to be popular at the time. I always preferred Rodney Matthews... despite being a teenager with hormones and everything.