First up are some house rules for Diplomacy. Again this is a game I have heard about forever but never played. I think it is one of those games that really is the dividing line between the hard core board gamers and the the first RPG gamers that were solely RPGers.
Page 5 gives us something interesting and fairly unique. An obituary column for "dead" games. Obviously in today's market such a thing is self-defeating with so many games coming back. But still it is kind of interesting. The game in question is Pokol; which is described as a Scrabble-like game that uses cards instead of tiles.
A couple of chess variants are introduced such as "Random Chess" where the "Court" piece are drawn from a hat placed randomly on their row. "The Maharajah and the Sepoys" which one side is set up as normal, but the other only has a King (the Maharajah) and he can move like any piece on the board including a knight. Sounds interesting to be honest.
The second biggest shift is the inclusion of new D&D content. In this case O&W republishes the Ranger class that had appeared in the pages of the Strategic Review #2 from the Summer of 75. There is no mention of having permission to so that I can find, but I have not heard otherwise to be honest. There is a mention of "Joe Fischer © TSR" who was the author of the original.
Obviously D&D is still of interest to the guys at O&W but it is still relegated to the back of the zine. Though keep in mind, this is still just 1975. The Strategic Review is only 2-3 issues in and D&D is only a little more than a year old. We are also only 2/5ths through the O&W zines. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
