Let's read the entire run

(un)reason · Jul 16, 2012

Dragon Issue 285: July 2001

part 4/7

Cities of the ages: Prague is their city of choice this time. And like London, it has a long and interesting history, with it's fair share of mythology grown out of it. So rather than go for historical realism, they concentrate on the fantastical side of it, painting a picture of a town filled with little folk, steampunk contraptions, towering gothic buildings, and deals with the devil. That sounds pretty cool to me, and not particularly overdone, either. I guess that once again shows the advantages organic accretion has over custom design. Everything won't be built around one stereotype or writer's vision, but living in the same place will inject some commonalities of mood and culture. Injecting a little more eastern europe into your fantasy would make a nice change from the pseudo british stuff.

Faiths of Faerun: A substantial step up from the debut for this column. Instead of trying to shoehorn this one into multiclass combinations, we get a prestige class. The silverstar of Selune. This actually seems like a very good one indeed, as they get full spellcasting, normal cleric BAB, and a new special power every single level. You may have to soak up a few cross-class skills to get into it without multiclassing, but this is a relatively minor sacrifice given the array and breadth of powers granted. I believe many people will be ready to make that sacrifice to get this stuff, particularly infected lycanthropes, which this is a huge advantage for. I think this definitely qualifies as one of the higher end prestige classes.

Elminster's guide to the realms: A shrine to Tempus gets the full visual treatment this month. While this is designed for defensibility, it also has an interesting sense of aesthetics, showing how weaponry can also be art. In the high-magic world of the Realms, any group that doesn't have an arsenal of magical protections on their base is going to be a sitting duck to a smart group of adventurers. Along with the site specific stuff, we see him attempt to standardise potion labelling, so there's fewer hassles with taste testing. I think that's one old school element most players are happy to leave behind, so you can see why that would catch on. The new corebook may be just out, but that doesn't mean the Realms is going to stop evolving and growing, even for a little while. So let the metaplot continue.

VS Pixies: What's even smaller than halflings? And more annoying too? Pixies! Invisible, flying, mind-reading, and full of magical tricks and the will to use them, until you have spellcasters able to counter their basic powers, you're likely screwed, and your best protection is being able to laugh along with the joke. The problem then becomes figuring out that they are pixies, and not some more malevolent form of hidden trickster that'll still fleece you for everything you've got if you do give up. That's the problem with things that can both hide and change shape. It's all too easy for one of them to disguise itself as another. It's no wonder they get less and less popular as the editions progress.

Nodwick uncovers the biggest conspiracy evar in D&D history. And is then paid handsomely to keep it under wraps. And we shall speak no more of it.

Chainmail: The end pages of the magazine get a visual revamp, discarding the dungeonpunk for a slightly more techno style, and introduce yet another new feature that looks like it might well become a regular. A D&D minis game? Set in Greyhawk? And featuring the same kind of over-the-top plot happenings as Warhammer Fantasy Battle? This has the potential to annoy the fanbase as much as From the Ashes. Well, probably not, as they're not changing existing things, but setting it in the uncovered continent to the west of the Flanaess, so it's still ignorable in your regular Greyhawk games.. And in typical wargame fashion, you have a whole mess of sides competing for supremacy. Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Goblinoids, Undead, and Demons (plus gnolls) are the teams, further reinforcing the WFB comparisons. So yeah, they obviously want some of those sweet wargaming dollars again. And to be honest, a little more variety in the stuff they're covering is always welcome. It'll be interesting to see if this crashes and burns like TSR's CCG's, or manages to carry on for a few years getting regular articles like Alternity.

Sanglorian · Jul 16, 2012

(un)reason said:
Dragon Issue 285: July 2001

120 pages. Hello to the halfling that sparked a thousand guilty fantasies. Yamara's bitchiness is visible from half a decade away. Yup, they're getting the themed issue all to themselves for the first time since 1982. And they're absolutely determined to degoofify them. If that means trying to sex them up, so be it. This could go so very very wrong. Will this issue get the pedobear seal of approval, or will it somehow manage to make this topic just another day at the office?

The strangest place I have seen this picture show up is as part of the cover of the Fantasy Figure Modeller magazine that layabout Jez masturbates to in the terrific British comedy Peep Show. <Peep Show S01E02 P01 - YouTube> It shows that the picture has widespread appeal, if nothing else!

(un)reason said:
Dragon Issue 285: July 2001
The secret life of halflings: In the attempt to make halflings more exciting, it's time to completely rewrite the setting stuff. Gone are the good old tolkien style shires full of stay-at-home gossipy folks, replaced by semi-nomadic commonwealths where social class is largely irrelevant. There are still a fair amount of holdovers from the old representation, including Roger Moore's gods, and their love of riddles, so this doesn't feel like a total departure, but it does feel like changing things for the sake of change, or quite possibly a craving for greater commercial success, or just to make sure their IP is distinct from Tolkien's. Who knows for sure. But in any case, it's quite telling that I can think of more negative reasons for them to change things around than I can positive ones. And I'm reminded of the old adage that the harder you try to appear modern, the more dated you'll seem in a few years time. So I'm not sold on this at all.

It's such a long article I didn't re-read the whole thing, but the parts that I skimmed seemed like interesting touches. The halflings it describes are still fairly sedentary, more likely to roam within a small area than a large one. The riddles and the collecting things are nice touches.

Four in darkness: Ah yes, a tie-in article for their new product. Not a great surprise. The creatures of elemental evil aren't THE most iconic or expanded upon of D&D's creations, but they retain their own reasonably solid fanbase, thanks to the classic module. (and persistent eaten by a grue meme) This is definitely worth maintaining and building upon. So Monte updates their stats for the new edition, and also gives us a template for corrupted elementals, and 8 new spells giving elementalists lots of options to grief you, whatever your resistances and weaknesses are. So lots of useful material here, and a little bit of advice on how to use it. Evil creatures don't generally get along, so you can play one off against another, and maybe get a little extra profit for yourself into the bargain. A no-nonsense, well balanced article, providing some updated old stuff, some new stuff and some advice on how to use it? Sounds like a pretty decent combo to me.[/QUOTE]

I agree—the spells in particular are well-done, giving more options for low-level elementalists. At the time, the idea of elementals shaped like humanoid moles and humanoid flames really appealed to me—since then, I've seen elementals-shaped-like-other-things done to death!

(un)reason said:
Dragon Issue 285: July 2001
Class Acts: Monte takes an interesting tack to this month's theme. The lightbearer, bringer of the comforts of home, hearth and community to the dark places adventurers roam. Their abilities are primarily defensive, with all good saves, a bit of magical healing, a bit of ability to drive away evil creatures. If you want your halflings to feel LotRish, huddled in the wilderness and driving away nazgul by words rather than swords, this is actually a surprisingly appropriate prestige class to take. Obviously, in terms of combat power they're a bit weak, but they're so thematic that I can forgive them anyway. Perfect for that wandering NPC who doesn't get involved in the fighting, but still manages to save the day.

You can see that they had a lot to learn about prestige class design, with obnoxious requirements (Alertness!). A lot of harm was done by the rule that level could not be a prestige class requirement, but prestige classes shouldn't be available before about 5th or 6th level. The consequence of this is that prestige classes had high skill requirements, since that's one way of ensuring that characters are of a particular level. But the Lightbearer requiring 8 ranks in Knowledge (religion) makes it basically impossible for many characters to take it until a very high level—by which point, there are better options open to them.

(un)reason said:
The Bestiary: More new school Greyhawk creepies this month, courtesy of James Jacobs. This time, we head to the Gnarley forest and the temple of elemental evil. If you're at all surprised they went around creating corrupted elementals and domesticating whatever weird creatures they found, you don't know evil cultists very well.

It's the terrific Carlo Arellano illustrations that really make this article for me. The breathdrinker, in particular, is haunting and frightening. The singing underworld aberrations the Tralusk are another cool monster.

(un)reason said:
Elminster's guide to the realms: A shrine to Tempus gets the full visual treatment this month.

This was a really cool location.

(un)reason said:
Chainmail

I thought the felldrakes were so cute! Now I wonder if it might not be easier to just use real dinosaurs.

(un)reason · Jul 16, 2012

Dragon Issue 285: July 2001

part 5/7

Forum gets a new blue, slightly gridded background. This is not a bad change, and less likely to suffer legibility problems than grey on black. I approve.

Jeff Wilder thinks rangers are front-loaded, but then rapidly become the weakest class in the game. Since they got one of the biggest changes in 3.5, I'm inclined to agree with that.

Douglas Macleod wants to bring back comeliness to represent physical attractiveness and how various races perceive it in each other. No thanks. That would require tables to crossreference and you know they're trying to move away from tables in this edition.

The Cobster describes his average gaming session. 6:15 til 9, lots of roleplaying, very little dice rolling, absentees apologise in advance. It seems to work.

Kenneth G. VanSell II thinks the new psionic rules are horribly underpowered, and the psionic combat in particular is unfair and outdated. As with Rangers, their 3.5 revision pretty much vindicates this view. Guess the forum still has a substantial role to play in future edition changes too.

Silicon Sorcery: Age of Empires is their pick this month. Similar to last time, they give us four new feats, and a new monster to make your game run more like the computer game. Two of these feats make you better at mounted combat, showing how important cavalry units are in the game. The other ones give you bonuses attacking inanimate objects, and enhance your bonus for attacking from higher ground. The new monster is Living Catapults. They can both run you over, and shoot rocks at long range to take out fortifications without any personnel. Thankfully they move slowly, so you can in theory outmaneuver them. So these are general enough that you can put them in your game without it seeming obviously computer-gamey, and not unbalancingly overpowered either. Those are the kind of options that they should be giving.

(un)reason · Jul 17, 2012

Dragon Issue 285: July 2001

part 6/7

Sage advice turns it's eye on the new psionics rules. Hopefully they won't be quite as much of a hassle as the last ones.

Are psionic AC boosts effective against touch attacks (depends what type the bonus is )

Does inertial armor block disintegrate (no)

Can you stack natural armour, inertial armour, shields, and bracers of armour (Mostly no. Type stacking rules apply as usual. )

Can you spend extra points on psionic fist for even more damage (No. Maybe we should.)

Can you combine stand still and hold the line to twinky effect (Oh yes)
And can you also stack stand still and combat reflexes (Yup. You are learning well, young padwan)

Where's the rule about nonpsionic characters being mostly immune to psionic attacks (page 42!)

Can you choose to not make a defense against psionic attacks (If you like. Isn't that a nice change from last edition. And then for an encore, you can hold your hand in a fire, you silly person. )

If you spend all your PP's, can you use the nonpsionic line for defense (no)

Is there a limit to the number of points you can blow on psychofeedback (No. Skip will consider if this is another thing that should go on the nerfing list. )
Can metaphysical weapon be used on unarmed attacks (No. Poor little multiclass monks. )

Can you use float on yourself. (As long as you're not too fat)

Can you do psychic chirurgery on yourself (Physician, heal thyself. Yes. )

How does inflict pain work (Erroneously. Cast Official Errata time! )

What level is the highest level psionicist in a community (Not as high as most classes)

Can psionic creatures without PSP's use items that require them. (No)

Can you use trigger power with metapsionics (yes)

I don't get the bonus power points table (Add it together. )

What power list do the prestige classes use ( Psion)

Do psionic attacks provoke attacks of opportunity (yes)

Does inner strength count towards meeting prestige class requirements (no)

There are powers that say psychic warriors can have them, but aren't on the main list (Cast Official Errata! Skip's really starting to enjoy that. Who's da sage, Who's da sage :snoopy dance: )

Does apopsi lock or remove powers. Can you learn new ones (It's verry brutal. They're gone until you get the special healing powers to restore them.)

Why can't undead use psychometabolism when that's based on strength. How do they use psychokinesis ( Because they have no metabolisms. Substitute Cha for Con, like you do with concentration. )

The play's the thing: Robin's advice this month skews rather more towards the well duh side than the mindblowing. If a character is just a stereotype, they can be all too boring and predictable. But creating a complete personality from scratch can take quite a while. A good compromise is to start with a stereotype, or archetype if you want to sound more dignified, and then add a twist or two, until they feel like 2 dimensional characters at least, if not quite full 3D. Doesn't that sound easy. And familiar as well. Sorry, not breaking any new ground this time. Next!

PC Portraits: Halflings get a turn here, as you'd expect. They're all surprisingly skinny really, which ironically does not make them look short. Chalk that up to the way that our brains parse perspective when there aren't enough environmental cues. It doesn't dungeonpunkify them as much as some of these, but there are some attempts to make them gritty that don't quite work. Plus there's waay too much facial hair. So this is a bit awkward. You can't rewrite our conceptions as easily as that. Let's hope they do a little better when they get round to gnomes.

(un)reason · Jul 18, 2012

Dragon Issue 285: July 2001

part 7/7

Dungeoncraft: Homebase time again. Having spent quite a while discussing the larger scale stuff, Ray goes back to this topic, to give us somewhere halfway safe for our PC's to come from. And he goes for the classic route of making it a casablanca in a hostile world, a place where people of all tribes and races can meet up in an uneasy peace. Gotta have one of those in your world, even if it is a few orders of magnitude smaller than Sigil or Waterdeep. And has bloody high taxes too, charged each time you enter, which is designed to keep the players from just popping in and out every time they need a healbot. So here you see him juggling the essential needs of a game, with the desire to make his new world non-stereotypical. Which means this is different from the first time around, and probably a little better. You'll be able to assemble a decent set of equipment, but even once you've got a few levels up, you'll still have to work to get in and out of here, and uncover it's secrets. And the world outside will remain big and hostile. Let's try and get that challenge rating just right in the next instalment.

Role models: Most of this column is devoted to how you paint and otherwise customise the base of your minis. After all, we've covered people and creatures, but a good base really finishes a model off. Of course, it also makes them look stupid if you put a particular terrain type on the base, and then use the mini in a different context. But that's only a problem if you have a limited supply of minis and space. That's the advantage and disadvantage of specialisation. Varnishing, on the other hand, makes your minis look cooler and last longer, so it's kinda a no-brainer. So it's the part that's more likely to be a problem that gets the most attention. Which makes sense, I guess. This column is still building on it's previous instalments nicely, but talking about finishing up makes me wonder where it's going to head next. They've introduced a lot of new columns recently. Will this one be on the chopping block or retooled again?

DM's toolbox: Ah yes, shifting the focus from adventures, worlds, or campaigns to Encounters as the basic building block of your play. I was wondering when that was going to start. Here we kick off the process that would eventually lead to D&D Encounters being one of the cornerstones of their organised play. This does have advantages in that smaller blocks are more modular and able to be inserted into an existing game. The problem becomes when those blocks are almost exclusively combat encounters, and the DM doesn't put effort into building them into part of a larger continuity in their own campaign. So this article approaches adventure building from a different perspective than we're used to here, and is notable as a historical landmark. But I also have a sense of forboding about this. They've already reduced their coverage of settings by a fair chunk. And I'm quite aware that they can do a lot more on that front.

Dragonmirth applies real world analogies to fantasy tropes again. What's new gets JRR Tolkien in. Ya Srysly. Hilarity ensues.

Not one of their better issues, as halflings prove to be a tricky subject to build an entire issue around. While they have refined their art style in recent issues, they are probably still trying too hard to be cool and modern rather than timeless and classic. No matter how you try, halflings will never be as ubiquitous as elves and dwarves. Just accept it, and give us a good few years before you do this topic again. So, what's next? O_O Broooooooooooooooksssssssssssss! :shakes fist:

(un)reason · Jul 19, 2012

Dragon Issue 286: August 2001

part 1/7

114 (116) pages. :fingerclicks: Shananana na na na nara, shananana na na na nara. [/60's girl group] Oh yes, They're doing a themed issue on Terry Brooks' Shannara series. I wasn't expecting that. And I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Is this born of genuine admiration, or cynical marketing synergy? Will the characters work well under D&D rules? Once again, it's looking like it'll probably be easier to model their idiosyncrasies under 3e than previous editions. And it'll certainly be different. After all, it's even more specific than Robin Hood, and the writer is still alive. Still, next thing you know, they'll be doing a whole themed section on a video game instead of just a single column. That idea doesn't appeal to me at all. So I open this issue with considerably more trepidation than usual.

Scan Quality: Moderate, unindexed.

In this issue:

Wyrms turn: Well, at least one of the staff is a huge Shannara fan. That makes me more optimistic that this issue was done for the right reasons. And interestingly enough the important thing he's taken from it is that the heroes are all ordinary people, or at least start off that way. They don't set out looking for adventure; like Tolkien's protagonists, it comes to them, and they have to deal with it. Which I have no problem with as a concept, but it does require that the DM put a lot of effort in to keep the players engaged, or players who are willing to metagame a little to make sure their characters do wind up on the adventure despite their supposed reluctance. What works well in a novel might not be so easy to accomplish in a game. So this already tells us more than a little about how we'll be approaching this topic. That good ol' zero to hero journey is going to play a big part. I don't think you'll be getting many players taking NPC levels as a result of this though. Maybe if you just give them one free one at the start for flavour.

Scale Mail: We start with a letter of praise for the idea of using National Geographic for inspiration. it's hardly some obscure publication that'll really surprise or baffle people if you pull it out. Now, if you were using Playboy for the articles, that might be a little more … unique.

A good ol' errata complaint. James Wyatt still isn't the greatest crunch writer on the team, and needs a firm editorial hand to make the most of his talents.

An equally familiar bit of historical quibbling. THIIIISSS IIIS ACCURRRACY!!!!!

And let's not even get into the morality of the greek gods. The only reason Zeus gets a Good on the alignment scale is because he's enough of a bawss to bully the arbiters.

A whole bunch of gods they missed out also get statted here. Your egyptian pantheon just wouldn't be complete without them.

And the Realms proves popular, but also controversial, with one negative letter, but four positive ones filling out the end of this section with people's opinions on the new columns. If that ratio is representative of the overall volume of letters, it's no wonder they're going to keep giving Ed regular columns for years to come.

Nodwick spreads the word of his mighty and heroic deeds.

Previews: They change the format again, with another gimmicky column setup. Things are all compressed onto one page, as befits their shrinking number of releases. Heart of Nightfang Spire is this month's generic adventure. A year has passed, and it seems quite likely that more than a few groups have made it to 10th level, given the way the new XP system works. So let's get a-caterin.

The Realms continues to provide splatbooks above and beyond the generic ones, such is it's popularity. Magic of Faerun is another big load of power-creepy crunch. Sheer goob factor? What are the writers on? Well, I know Ed Greenwood is on another cocktease kick in Elminster in Hell. We know he's not going to really kill him off. You can watch him squirm for a bit though.

Dragonlance gets Brother of the Dragon by Tonya C. Cook. Off we go to see history sweep by again. Not that technology overall will advance, but at least some things change.

(un)reason · Jul 20, 2012

Dragon Issue 286: August 2001

part 2/7

Up on a soapbox: And so Gary concludes his series on what we want in our roleplaying by talking about all the other possible elements that people have said they want. Most can be filed as subdivisions of the categories that he already suggested, while the social rewards of playing RPG's can be applied to any game with multiple players. Having a system for character advancement in game, however, is an important one that definitely deserves it's own category, since nearly all RPG's have it, and most other games with less continuity don't. Roleplaying's great strength, and weakness, is the sheer amount of depth you can create with it, and how hard that can become to keep track of. To get the payoff, you need to invest. And to get lots of people involved, you need to diversify. Really, it's not that surprising it isn't a more mainstream hobby, especially when there's so much competition. The best thing we can do to attract new people is to keep the existing fanbase from going toxic. After all, D&D grew pretty rapidly the first time around. If it weren't for the reputation of the existing fanbase, it might be able to do it again. You think that might be a good idea?

The dork tower crew go conventioneering. Will they get back alive and intact? What terrible stories will they have to tell?

The world of Shannara: To get all of us who haven't read the books started, here's a little geography and history primer. Since this series already has quite a few books, and Brooks isn't afraid of going multigenerational with his story, this takes a fair sized article. And it soon becomes apparent that while it may have started out with much the same ingredients as Tolkien: elves, dwarves, reluctant heroes, terrifying wraiths, mysterious spellcasters and dangerous magical items, it soon took it's own direction. Since there are regular skips of centuries between the books, and quite a lot of dangerous locations, there's plenty of room for a GM to create a game without the players feeling overshadowed by constant encounters with book characters, and their deeds. So it seems that this world probably is quite suited to D&D gaming, certainly moreso than Robin Hood was, and doing a special on it wasn't a bad idea at all for the magazine or the author. My skepticism is being won over, and I'm interested in seeing what the subsequent articles make of the world.

Elder druid: As we found last article, most D&D classes map into Shannara reasonably well. Druids, on the other hand, are quite different. They do have a little in common with 1st edition hierophants in that they use hibernating sleep to extend their lifespan. But other than that, their special abilities are quite distinct. Speaking all languages and perfect memory make them able to step outside their culture and become universal diplomats, while their ability to use magical fire, charge weapons to smite things, and supercharge themselves at the cost of their lifespan means they make decent straight combatants. (if not quite as effective as shapeshifted D&D druids) So this is a fairly powerful prestige class, but still not quite as good as a straight CoDzilla, and it's quirks may trip players up in an interesting way in the long run. It seems like it could be used in another game world without too many problems.

Heroes & Villains: Next we have the dramatis personae. Because of the multigenerational nature of the stories, only the villains get full-sized writeups, while the heroes only get familial ones, talking about their general personality traits, with lots of abbreviated statblocks. This means I find myself more interested in the villains and what drives them. If so much of the heroes personality traits are hereditary, then what does that say about free will around here? Are people destined to keep on going through the same challenges, and making the same mistakes? That would be terribly depressing, even if individually they generally win them. That's one of the things I found most annoying reading the bible, seeing subsequent generations forgetting the lessons God taught the previous ones, forcing him to smite them all over again. It's not really the kind of thing I want in my escapism, true to reality as it is.

(un)reason · Jul 21, 2012

Dragon Issue 286: August 2001

part 3/7

Creatures of the four lands: Now we get to the meaty stuff that's most plunderable for use in other games. Monsters and items. Let's see if these are sufficiently different to add to your D&D game, or just reinventing the wheel with a different paintjob.

Skull Bearers are corrupted druids, although they've become outsiders rather than undead. They can fly, use a good selection of spells, generate terror, and are a bugger to detect magically. At low levels, they're big boss material, but there's also enough of them that you could wind up facing a whole team of them at higher level.

Mordwraiths seem suspiciously like ringwraith expys. They're cloaked so you can't see what's underneath, scary, can sense you without using sight, and use green fire in all sorts of unpleasant ways. Sounds fairly familiar, apart from the green fire bit. Why mess with a winning formula?

Moor Cats look suspiciously like Cringer from He-man, and can blur themselves to become even harder to spot and hit than regular cats. Like most cats in fiction, they're mysterious, smart, and may obey you if they feel like it, but can never truly be tamed. Good luck staying on their good side.

Rock Trolls fill the role of the big and tough looking, but ultimately dumb mook enemies a PC will soon be able to mow down as they level up. They're all about the honorable combat, which is pretty easy to exploit. You'd probably have better luck trying to maintain a friendly relationship with a tribe of them than you would orcs, and that's something.

Shadowen are another unpleasant supernatural beastie. They're the product of magical experimentation, possess people, drain their life-force, and are all-round unpleasant when they do take over. Since they have fast healing and incorporeality, it's near impossible to fight them without magic. So when they take over, they of course make magic illegal and promote witch-hunts against those who use it. That's a sensible evil plan if I ever heard one.

Mwellret are shapeshifting lizard men. While not stupid, they're one of those races that thinks they're inherently superior to everyone else, and this means they might not use their powers as smartly as they could. This is alway a flaw worth exploiting.

Relics and artifacts: While the monsters can fit into a D&D game and not feel out of place at all, the magical items of this series are a little trickier to incorporate. Most are artefact level by D&D standards, and even the weaker ones have dangerous side-effects. This makes it clear that it's not a place where you can just load up with an arsenal of bling and expect to solve your problems that way. Let the players beware if they encounter any of these in their game.

The Sword of Shannara is the namesake of the series, bringing truth to all around it by detecting lies, piercing illusions, and forcing people to accept themselves for what they truly are. Which is ultimately a good thing, but not particularly pleasant for those who have to go through it. As a macguffin to drive stories, it seems quite a good one, as anyone who's even slightly morally ambiguous is going to have something they don't want made public, and be wary of it's wielder.

The Black Elfstone is another exceedingly powerful device, able to detect, absorb and reflect magic fairly reliably. However, gaining all a creature's magical powers is very bad for the sanity indeed, so a sensible user will skip that part. These items all look like they're going to be balanced primarily by danger, rather than limited in power like D&D ones would in the new edition. Giving them to your players may well take them out of play before too long.

Blue Elfstones come in trios, and only work with one of each, and even then they only work for elves, with a 50% chance of working for half-elves. They also have a fair chance of burning you out with repeated use. God, magic can be finicky. I find myself longing for the reliable touch of science.

The Mirrorshroud is exactly the kind of thing the sword of Shannara is designed to deal with. A cloak that lets you shapeshift into someone the target trusts and read minds to help you keep up the facade? Very little good and a lot of unpleasantness can come of giving someone the power to do that. Even knowing it exists and people are willing to use it will be corrosive to the trust that keeps a community together.

The Stiehl is one of those lovely intelligent weapons that takes over it's wielder, using them to fulfil it's perpetual bloodlust by sharing some of the lifeforce it drains in an addictive manner. Unless you're a skilled professional assassin, this is very unlikely to end well for you. But to the weapon? No biggie. There's always another sucker who thinks they can handle it.

The Sword of Leah is very similar, only working for the other side. It's special powers are all about kicking demon ass, but it's still addictive, and with a tendency to make you go berserk. If there's no-one to talk you down, you'll probably sacrifice yourself saving the world, or wind up killing your friends when you run out of enemies. Designing intrinsically good things is a lot harder than making evil ones around here, it seems.

(un)reason · Jul 22, 2012

Dragon Issue 286: August 2001

part 4/7

Fiction: Antrax by Terry Brooks. And so we finish off the themed section with an excerpt from the next novel in the series. Like many of the fiction pieces by WotC staff, this is primarily advertising, setting up the story and introducing you to some of the characters, but not resolving anything, so you have to spend more money if you want any satisfaction. And the writing is pretty annoying, telling rather than showing, and spending more time sketching out characters than actually having them do anything. Despite the cool stuff that the writers have plundered and converted from his world, I don't feel the desire to follow that up and read further. I'm left with rather mixed feelings about this theme.

Elminster's guide to the realms: Elminster comes up with a little something that feels like a holdover from the Wyrms of the North days this month. A dragon who schemes to control the economy of the Realms via cryptic clues and adventure hooks placed in the treasure caches she creates (while keeping the majority of her horde safely away from these plots, I presume) The map is of a good example one of them. While there is some treasure here, it's easily replaceable, and much of it is in the form of information, and magically enchanted so she can track it, and eventually retrieve and reuse it. This is another demonstration of how you can have dungeons that get visited and cleared out regularly, but still get replenished so other adventurers can use them, and why some powerful creature would go to the effort of maintaining and restocking them, while making sure that the challenges are set at a difficulty PC's have a good chance of overcoming. It illustrates how much of the adventurers life is a set-up, and how they can be tricked into fulfilling someone else's agenda without ever even speaking to them. Man, it can't be easy making a world both internally consistent, and able to sustain a high proportion of it's population being adventurers indefinitely. And Ed still does a better job of it than anyone else out there.

Cities of the ages: Venice! Now that is an interesting city. It's a great example of how humans can completely screw up their environment, yet adapt and survive to the changes. Massive subsidence as a result of industrial pumping sinking the city? We'll use canals instead of roads as our primary means of transportation. I don't think we're in any danger of extinction if we can pull tricks like that. Their history is pretty fascinating as well. The amount of adversity they faced both in building it and from their neighbours over the centuries results in more civic unity than the average town, but there's tons of room for politics, making money, and having fun here, and some spectacular architecture. It seems like another rather good choice for this column, as there's really no other city quite like it. Course, in your world, that might not be the case, particularly if the sea/land ratio is even higher than on earth, and stable building space is at a premium everywhere. Then you can have several dozen variants on the floating city theme.

Faiths of faerun gives us another prestige class, the Nightcloak of Shar. Another one that seems pretty badass. Take a single level of Rogue (preferably the 1st one, given the way 3e multiclassing rewards that) and enjoy your substantially increased powers of deception and spells that manipulate darkness. They do have one minor issue, in that like blackguards, they have some required skills that they then don't get as class skills. But still, once again, I think this will be one that turns out an overall positive compared to straight clerics, and gives you lots of flavorful abilities as well. As usual, the Realms gets the best toys to play with.

(un)reason · Jul 23, 2012

Dragon Issue 286: August 2001

part 5/7

VS Vampires: Since vampires have some very well known and distinctive weaknesses, they're an obvious target for one of these articles. Stack up on your crosses, holy water and garlic, and make sure you do your hunting during the daytime if at all possible. And never ever ever split the party. If you do that you deserve absolutely everything you get. No surprises here, making this feel pretty redundant. We already have tons of movies and books showing you how to succeed or fail at this. A single page article isn't going to be able to add much insight.

Nodwick gets seriously trippy. Must be all those slug fumes.

Chainmail: We get a little more elaboration on the backstory this month. Why are there undead hordes ravaging the land? Because a dead warlord was impaled with a god's spear, and the energy he got from that eventually raised him as a really powerful skeletal warrior. I've seen far worse origin stories in comic books, it has to be said. Similarly, the new crunch, zombie gnolls with extra limbs and heads grafted onto them, is a bit wahoo, but I've seen far worse here as well. Once again, it does look like they're doing some fun worldbuilding here, and only the setting it on Oerth makes it a bit jarring. And the fact that they're keeping the game compatible with regular D&D means you can scale down to the personal level and run campaigns here easily enough, so it's essentially sneaking another setting in through the back door. This continues to hold my interest and not annoy me like the CCG stuff did back in the day. Let's hope it can keep on adding both setting and mechanics detail in a consistent manner.

Forum: Alexander F. Simkin thinks that there is a political agenda in D&D's recent pursuit of gender equality. Women are fundamentally different from men! They aren't interested in playing games!

Trying to reach out to them is a waste of time and WotC secretly knows it. So there must be a hidden agenda at work! He then tries to deflect criticism by playing the race card. I'm going to back away slowly. Thank you for your contribution.

J. Ormond points out that the real strength of wizards, even more than before, is not in their damage output, but their ability to cast spells that win the whole encounter, like charm or sleep. And if you do want to fight, you'll get more milage from buffs than fireballs. Learn basic tactics dude. And scribe scrolls. You get it for free, so for gods sake use it.

Jason Wright wonders how the hell Robert Kloeckner got such high damage scores for his 8th level fighter. Dual handed power attack and critical damage, I presume. Which does mean they won't be nearly as reliable as wizards still. The underlying point holds.

Jim Castlebury praises JLA and the wheel of time for their worldbuilding inspirations to him. Slightly odd choices, but that doesn't make them bad ones.

Sandra Salla thinks roleplaying has become more acceptable in recent years, simply because decent fantasy & sci-fi shows are now more common on TV. And this makes people less likely to knee-jerk. We're not out of the woods yet, but it's looking achievable.

Scott Sloan thoroughly approves of introducing your kids to roleplaying. His dad did so for him, and he looks back fondly upon it. Do it right, and your kids will do the same, even if they don't carry on playing into adulthood.

Alex Strother jokingly distracts us from sexism to consider the plight of the poor weasel. They're even weedier than Kobolds and that's saying something! This will not do!

Silicon sorcery: Our crunch this month is a bunch of backgrounds based on Arcanum. Having been introduced by the Forgotten Realms book, it's obvious other designers want to jump on the idea. And just as the Realms has already had a bit of power creep compared to the corebook, they want to push the envelope even further. Still, they do put an explicit warning on the material, showing that they are fully aware of this fact, and are only including it for groups that don't mind that. Plus they include a Steve Irwin reference, and I love them for that. So yeah, this is a short burst of wahoo that stands out a bit and amuses me. I quite approve of that.