Editorial I'm sorry to have to start off this editorial on a sad note but I expect you have all seen Kedenan's name in the contributors lists of each issue of SynTax. Sadly he died very suddenly on December 30th after a heart attack. I never met Ken Dean, for that was his real name, though we exchanged letters on a regular basis. In fact we had a running gag that we kept reusing the same padded bag. Ken had reinforced it with parcel tape and even done us a clear folder with a reversible card in it, his name and address on one side, mine on the other! We wrote which trip number the bag was taking each time we posted it. It did 65 trips and I reckon it would have done a lot more. Ken was a very keen adventurer and his son told me that he got a lot of pleasure from using his computer. He was certainly an enthusiastic contributor to both SynTax and Red Herring and I know we will miss him. After that, it seems hard to talk about such events as Christmas but I hope you all had a good time. We did though, as always, it went too quickly. To celebrate the start of a 1993, there's a competition linked to this issue, devised by Steve McLaren. He and Dave Barker have provided the Amiga and ST prizes, thanks to both of them, and I've found a prize for PCers. I was very pleased at the end of last year to not only win two third prizes in the 1992 Adventure Convention awards but also to be a runner-up in the 3D Construction Kit competition. To enter, you had to design an object connected with a house or garden; mine was a lawnmower and my prize was a copy of the new professional version of the Kit and all the winners were included on a disk of objects given with Kit 2. I'll try to review the package next issue; I've been too busy recently to even load it up! One thing that's kept me busy is finishing my AGT adventure, just in time to enter it for the 1992 AGT Adventure Writing Contest. The adventure is called Oklib's Revenge and is an enhanced conversion of a Spectrum game, Staff of Power, that I wrote some years ago. It's taken a long time to do but I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Dave Malmberg sent me a copy of the new Master's Edition of AGT as a thank-you for being a judge in the 1991 contest. Again, I'll review it some time soon. Now I'm back to the TADS game I'm working on which was written by Andrew and Tom Craig. There's a new version of TADS out too - see the Articles section for details. Someone else who has been busy writing an adventure is Matthew Pegg of Labyrinth Software. He's written a game called The Last Voyage of Sinbad for ST-owning SynTax readers, and you'll find it on this disk unless you've got a 5.25" PC disk. To run Sinbad, copy the CONTENTS of the Sinbad folder onto a blank formatted disk and boot it up in your ST (it needs to be in an AUTO folder, y'see.) I loved Camelot and Sinbad is every bit as good with some great touches of humour. I know many of you have STs even if you don't take the ST version of SynTax which is why I've included it for everyone. If you take the 5.25" version of SynTax and ALSO have an ST, just send me a blank 3.5" disk and I'll send you a copy of the game. I hope you'll enjoy it - the game is shareware so if you DO like it, I hope you'll consider registering; it isn't expensive and you'll get a copy of Camelot if you do, plus a coded hint sheet for Sinbad. I'd like to say a big 'thanks' to Matthew for writing Sinbad for us. He has suggested a game design competition to link with the adventure since the ending is pretty open for a sequel. More on that next issue but think about it while you're playing it. If you've sent in contributions for this issue and they haven't been used, don't worry. They'll be in Issue 23 which, as promised, is going to be a bumper issue, twice as big as usual. I've aimed to use at least one contribution from everyone who sent in and as a few of you have sent as many as 3 or 4 reviews there's quite a backlog. But with twice as much space to fill in Issue 23 they'll all be used then ... plus anything else that's sent in the meantime. Happy New Year! Sue