George.Fields's page

I'll second this one.
I was ready to give up RPGs in 2009, but this game saved me from that horrible fate.

Tome of horrors was my favorite monster book for D&D3.x.

It would be great if they'd get with Kenzer & C and do a version for the new HackMaster as I don't play S&W or PF.

Possibly because they felt that the "Fat ET" version of Zuggtmoy was underwhelming and not that scary and kind of silly looking. That's why I would have changed it, in any case.

Sometimes new is better than old.

ALSO

Part of what makes art ART is that not everyone will like any one particular piece of art.

I love the art itself - it's spectacular.

This is where the video game age fails in my opinion. Everything has to look cool or awesome to be considered good.
Zuggtmoy wasn't scary looking. She looked a bit silly because that's what she looks like. A few evil facial expressions would have done wonders without actually changing her appearance.

In Child's Play, Chucky didn't look scary at all until he got ticked off and started making facial expressions.

Not trying to troll here - just enjoying a good debate about one of my favorite adventures. :)

Actually, the REAL reason for the change was because this new look for Zuggtmoy was the one created by Troika Games for the videogame version of "Temple of Elemental Evil." Part of our job when we were doing the magazines was not only to support WotC, but to support WotC licenses... like the aforementioned game. So there WAS reasoning behind it.

And personally, as huge a fan as I am for nostalgia and the game's history, I like the new version of Zuggtmoy more than the older one anyway.

Having never played the video game, I was not aware of this.

Of course, this leads me to the question: Why did THEY change it?

When I got this issue, I remember thinking, "Who/what is that?"; and I immediately looked for the Zuggtmoy article only to find she was the cover.
Nothing previously published even hinted that "mushroom girl" wasn't her true form.

It seems her appearance was changed for the sake of change with no real reasoning behind it. IMO, that happened way too often in the offices of the IP holder.

It's one of the reasons I've moved on to other games by other companies.

Wow, Darin - you're pimping Twitter everywhere! How much are they paying you?

just kidding...

I agree. You can quickly drop stuff here for anyone here to read and respond to.

I think Paizo wants all of my money.

Operation Countdown to Zero

The gaming industry has been dominated by Wizards of the Coast for a long time, and every year the attitude of Wizards seems to be getting worse. The company's message boards reflect that attitude, and the community liaison, Mike Lescault (Gamer Zer0), is a good example of how Wizards thinks that customers can just be told what they like. Mike is also good at censoring any critical voices.

So why should you care about Wizards? Well, you don't have to care, ignoring them is a good way of making them feel the power of customers. However, we want to go a step further and make Wizards feel that gamers are not happy with the way the company is behaving. So today (Friday) we'll launch Operation Countdown to Zero, a strike against the message boards of Wizards. We'll start by putting up a nice, politely-worded post, and when Wizards starts deleting posts, we'll put them all over their message boards faster than they can take them down.

Details can be found here http://www.gleesux.synthasite.com and here http://www.freewebs.com/gleesux/ . We'd love to see many people join us this weekend and make Wizards sweat a little. Let's see if we can pull this off, I'm sure it will be fun.