Again we are graced with another rather "Heavy Metal"-esque style cover. It is another Frank Brunner cover, this time from 1982.
Mike Brunton tells us that there are more changes coming to WD in the future. Including a 16 page adventure format that was introduced previously with the RuneQuest adventure.
Open Box covers the new and cheaper RuneQuest rules. The rules do not have a "proper" GM section according to the reviewer Peter Green. The change would be regarded as a "money grab" in today's circles. But other games seemed to be immune to the edition wars that plague D&D and it's clones.
Green and Pleasant Land is the long awaited British source book for England and Great Britain.
The other interesting tidbit here are the reviews for the AD&D adventure modules "Day of Al'Akbar" and "Ravenloft: House on Gryphon Hill" two adventures I went through then and have run since. The reviewer, Carl Sargent, makes note of Jeff Easley's cover of DaAA, calling sexploitation and "soft core". er. ok. Frankly my biggest issue with the image was would harem girls have 80s hair? He also thinks Gryphon Hill is a worth successor to the original Ravenloft. It is fun, but not quite up to the same quality in my mind.
Open Box X-tra goes into detail on Warhammer Fantasy. Similar to what they did last time with the Dragonlance modules. The article would have been more interesting if it hadn't been full of "this is the way D&D does it and its wrong! we do it like this!" Yeah, ok, it is not as bad as that and comparisons are inevitable, but the game should stand on it's own.
The comics are next, the new acquisition, Derek the Troll and Thrud the Barbarian.
The highlight for me is the treatise on Zombies in Call of Cthulhu. A bunch of different zombie types are covered including the common one found in D&D, the "voodoo" zombie and parasitic infection. We are still few years out yet from GURPS Voodoo or Eden's "All Flesh Must Be Eaten" but this works very well.
We get three adventures up next.
Night of Blood for Warhammer Fantasy, Taurefanto for MERP and Happiness is Laser Shaped for Paranoia. All in all a lot of pages devoted to adventures.
We wrap it all up with letters, ads and some coming attractions in the various Warhammer lines.
The Call of Cthulhu bit on Zombies is neat and there are still a number of games still be supported, but the issue itself leaves me feeling a bit flat to be honest.
This issue contains something I hadn't seen before or since: speculative details in Taurefanto of what happened to the Entwives in MERP and their attempt to return to the Brown Lands. It's a high level adventure, and one with a pretty linear plotline as well - but imagine if this had been two-three pages of speculative background on the Entwives return to Middle-Earth in the Fourth Age. I can see reconciliations with the Ents, recriminations of the current inhabitants of the Brown Lands, etc. Plus the land ship (the Taurefanto itself) they travel in is deserving in itself of this piece. Sadly their WD of the late eighties wouldn't ever have dwelt much on the usefulness of background presented to gamers, regardless of whether it would have been used in gameplay or not.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize this. I knew that the adventures for other systems were dropping off soon, but I guess I figured that some of this was covered in the later MERP books.
ReplyDeleteCool.