Imagine Magazine Issue 4

Imagine's first SF cover ties in with a general SF theme, rather than the usual fantasy D&D one. There's also obviously been some push-back about the amount of material targeted at absolute beginners, which is welcome.

The beginner's column is still there, but at least it has finally changed its text giving an example of how a game works (after three issues where it remained identical), albeit only to a SF equivalent in line with the theme of the issue. Amusingly, the example gaming group are clearly playing Traveller, but as it's a non-TSR game, it's never named. The "Adventures of Nic Novice" cartoon strip has moved on to explaining how to equip a character, though I find it very unlikely that even the most novice player really struggled with what was essentially the concept of shopping.

Stirge Corner has moved on to explain basic DMing - simple stuff, but at least it's practical advice rather than worrying about how one "wins" at an RPG.

The short story this issue is "Cinderella switch" by Anne McCaffrey, an SF take on a romantic encounter at a ball. McCaffrey isn't my preferred taste, being a trifle too soft and fluffy, but you can't say they weren't getting well known authors, since this was reasonably close to the peak of popularity for her "Dragonriders of Pern" series.

The issue's mini-module is "Aramax One" for Star Frontiers, which had just been released. It never seemed to take off in the UK, and I didn't know anyone who actually played it, but given it was intended as TSR's entry to the SF market, it's not surprising Imagine was supporting it.

It's interesting that a set-up of being told by a man you meet in a bar that he wants you to break into an industrial complex and destroy it, and the job needs to be done tonight, is apparently expected to be a perfectly valid proposition for the players; if they don't take the job, there's no adventure. While Traveller PC groups were also often stereotyped as being groups of space-travelling murder-hoboes, this seems unusually ethics-missing, as well as risky for the PCs who effectively have to trust that this isn't all a set-up.

Aside from that, it's a perfectly workmanlike module, though more complicated than the patron expects - conflicting agendas mean another group are trying to do exactly the same thing, arriving half an hour before the PCs, providing strong opposition for them to fight.

Dispel Confusion addresses an unusually philosophical question along side the usual rules Q&A (If devils, demons etc are as powerful and numerous as set out in various AD&D manuals, why haven't they already destroyed good?) and also includes the first Q&A about the Dragonquest game, which TSR acquired from SPI during their not-a-takeover-honest.

"Alternative gamestyles" looks at worthy attempts to make RPG campaigns educational (by using historical or alternate historical settings to teach players about history) or otherwise improving (by making players "experience" racism or confront their own prejudices etc). It's the sort of thing that teachers would love the idea of, but rather misses the point that making RPGs historically accurate requires more actual work than simply studying the history in the first place, and that RPGs are intended as fun.

"The Philosopher's Stone" is a three page puzzle (one page of text plus the centre double page for a picture) with a prize. As noted, I'm no fan of puzzles, though I appreciate others like them, so this wasn't for me. Worse, it is apparently the first in a series of four.

Reviews include 3 D&D / AD&D modules (including Blizzard Pass, the first "invisible ink" solo, which I had forgotten was so early), Sea Hawks (a board game of Carribean piracy) and Starstone, a system free semi-pro adventure that I've never seen for sale, but have always wanted to get hold of a copy of for some reason.

Film reviews cover The Dark Crystal (the Muppets do fantasy, and do it surprisingly well) and Q - the Feathered Serpent, which the column has a surprisingly good opinion of, but which sank without trace.

The usual PA stuff includes Don Turnbull talking about the conflict between realism and playability (he opts for playability) and an introduction to PBM games, which were an oddity of the period that few other magazines really covered, though adverts appeared in them regularly.

The usual cartoons still don't work for me - the single page Rubic gets is too short for any continuity between monthly issues, which is problematic since the author wants to do an on-going story rather than self-contained episodes, and while the three-page Sword of Alabron doesn't suffer as badly from this, it still doesn't justify its page count.

Overall, the magazine feels like it is slowly starting to mature, though I imagine the heavy SF content this issue might have left the mainstream D&D crowd feeling a little unloved.