Saturday 25 April 2020

Adventures in the great shut in: Toys & Dragon Mag





So I have got a big model making assembly line to keep hands busy and gone through and assembled all my mars attacks and other miniatures.  Arachnids were awesome fun and should be a good start to paint point. Airfix astronauts and some space toys. Built a few snaplock Yamato space cruiser kits and want more. Good midsized ships. Got some old Atlantic fighters box sets and a few more online out there for fighters. So have a good pile of minis fora space opera RPG with fighters, warships and mecha and space archaeologists.  My next house I will get some custom shelving and a game table built. Foolishly played civilisation IV and Alpha Centauri and Temple of elemental evil and have gone nocturnal again.

Made a compilation up of my fave dragon stuff from about 50-170. I might dig through some later ones but the content thinned out and a bit over that I was over and TSR for 20years (except TSR marvel from 1984-2004 campaign. As I got into the end it was a real slog. Once sequences of issues went by I had little memory of It reminded me of why I quit. It probably influenced me quite a bit even design-wise and I liked lots of the clip art look which is pretty old school. But I made it mostly to read on my tablet and stuff relevant to campaigns and I keep remembering. It came out 200pages and reminded me of the best and worst of Dragon.

In my era, I loved design and layouts and art and illustration, especially in threads. The older stuff from only a few years before seemed amateurish between sets of BX although I'm fond of the older art versus slick now I'm not a 13-year-old fanboy. Later TSR and2nd ed and really lost me here. DnD and RQ and Cthulhu got me into history gaming and into history books and eventually three uni degrees. But I also lost interest in the newer more railroad high fantasy family-friendly settings. I regret not getting into Spelljammer and Dark Sun but I was more into my homebrew settings and over-detailed settings player fans knew way too hard.  The ads were great often but they increasingly replaced content and articles on products like computer games books and minis made me lose interest. I liked dnd known world setting but by time was called Mystara and the Princess Ark series I was over it. TheArc series of articles wasn't my thing and a vehicle for the good stuff and represented effort often the best in many issues but I was finding less and less and BRP was taking me away to gritty ultra-violence simulation land. The SF content was the best for years and noted at one time the mag was fullofSF RPGs despite TSR not having any at the time and had given up of its past settings and systems. Buck RogersRPG had great covers but interiors often had me feeling uninspired like Holloway art in many settings books had done. 

TSR and the DND brand made a huge impact on popularising the fantasy genre and the look of it ever since. I find the look of recent DnD or Pathfinder editions to put me off. It just Is not what I imagine which looks more like Don Laurence or Angus McBride history illustration. Id like an all Daniel R Horne and Tim Truman art version with a gritty setting and take but what would I know.

I accidentally learned some InDesign skills so the Dragon comp thing was good. Other than that I saw one person this week and killed some flies.


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