Ok, so the title is the name of a real arcade game Capcom released some years ago. But I’m co-opting here because of something I found this past weekend.
Through a secret source, I came into possession of two old issues of Dragon magazine, one from 1992 and one from 1986. Each are fascinating reads, an absorbing glimpse into the history of RPGs, and one into an era in which MMORPG’s (such as World Of Warcraft) hadn’t killed the industry.
< Dragon 117, January 1986
For those that have followed AD&D over the years (such as myself) these magazines are also an interesting look at how the game once was. More of a roll-playing game than a role-playing game, each issue is full of all sorts of charts and tables that allowed the GM to basically randomize everything (such as the wind speed and temperature of a cyclone...). Diehards back in those days seemed to embrace such an approach, perhaps even celebrate it. Therefore the following quiz, taken from the pages of Dragon 117, may very possibly have seemed a little less absurd to the readers of the day then it does to us now?
< Can you answer Q10?
I also obtained, from the same source, the rulebook (all 14 pages...) of a 1980 TSR sci-fi RPG named Star Frontiers:
< Is that Chewbacca on the right?
Believe me when I say it's as awful as it looks 🙂
It’s not a Wookiee, it’s a Yazirian. Either JH (who you know) or MD (who you don’t) owned that game and, for a brief period in the 80s, we played it instead of “D&D”. Characters were *supposed* to work for some goodie-goodie Federation-type organisation, but ours were always renegades 🙂
Back then, I could absolutely positively have answered Q. 10, which is either a trick question (in the sense that it couldn’t happen) or involves a stack of modifiers, not all of them obvious. If only I had the first-edition rulebooks to hand…
I’m sure I saw that Star Frontiers game for sale in Mainly Military or some other shop in the 80s. You don’t easily forget art like that.