Let's read the entire run

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 179: March 1992

part 2/6


Magic by candlelight: Another themed collection of magic items here. Looks like this issue is a bit more focussed than the contents page indicated. And since these are generally limited-use devices, you can be relatively generous with them as treasure. With 22 items in 3 pages, this is a dense little entry that I don't feel like individually listing everything in. Few are hugely powerful, but most are useful, with quite a few which can be hazardous to an incautious user, just like fireworks. As with potions, a good identification spell will come in handy. They also give you some guidance in what materials are needed to make them, which can be applied easily to potions, perfumes, oils, and other topically applied limited use items. Scavenger hunts eat up a good amount of time, and making magical items like this is a nice starter for them at mid levels. Plenty of good material to draw upon here then. This issue is looking up.


Mutants in orbit! A crossover supplement for Rifts and After the bomb. Seems a bit weird to have two different post apocalyptic settings mix like this.


Something completely different: Looks like it's not just new toys in the special this month, it's advice about properly applying them as well. We have all these weird and wonderful items built up over years of the magazine, and plenty of room for more obscure mundane items to be given their own magical powers. What do you do if you find a magical wardrobe in a villains collection, or a sentient spork? Large items may have cool powers, but transporting them can be a nightmare. And there's plenty of unusual nonmagical valuables you could use as well. Perhaps some customised random generation tables would be good. They often produce more interesting results than personal choice could. Curiously, this also manages to fit in 14 new items, each adding a quirk to an existing item family, although the descriptions are even shorter than in the last article. Another good example of their strong base of submissions around this time. Roger may be looking for more variety in his themes, but when people submit good material for previously covered topics he's hardly going to turn it down because of that.


Seven Enlightening lanterns: Once again, the influence of Ed Greenwood on the magazine is felt strongly here. Even when he's not contributing personally, he's done so much, and inspired so many that it's surprising we don't see more blatant copycats like this one. Still, once again you can enjoy a big collection of magical variants for an atmospheric but oft-neglected item. Let's see if we can play pinpoint the source material with this lot.

Bashal's Tendrilight sends out black quivering tentacles. Hmm. Have the Lasombra been aded to Vampire: the Masquerade yet? I guess Evard was already leading the way in hentai action. With paralysis and immunity to lots of weapons, these'll be a right bugger to fight.

Goldmane's Dazzler provides free light indefinitely, and also has two cool semi-connected tricks that make it seem even more Greenwoodesque. The history stuff is quite good too. So I guess the Realms grows ever more able to surprise it's creator in a good way.

Illag's Abominable Beacon is a skull-headed lamp of Eeeevil that projects undead summoning darkness. Better be able to see in that then to direct them properly, and make sure you don't stub your toe on a milling zombie.

Krillus's Blazer is electrified, and can unleash that power in a fashion akin to those pretty globes you see at every science fair. That'll do rather more than making your hair stand on end.

Malthrox's Shadowcaster also messes with darkness, in this case producing a shadowy clone of a person illuminated. This isn't as perfect a copy as an evil mirror clone, but is controllable at least. Have fun with it while it lasts, and don't hesitate to tease as well as fight. Making out with someone's shadow clone can drive them to rash acts.

Messakk's Eye can paralyze people looking into it Once again it looks like they're falling back on obvious ideas to finish the collection off. Still, an encounter-ender is not to be sneezed at, formulaic as it may be.

Thessall's Wayguider is incredibly handy for any dungeoneer. Instant illumination of secret doors & traps? Retracing your step effortlessly? True seeing? That'll cut your exploration time massively. No more tedious inching along mapping all the way and testing every flagstone. Now that's convenience for you. Awesome.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 179: March 1992

part 3/6


Fiction: Moonlight by Heather Lynn Sarik. Another quite amusing little story here. So you have a macguffin that produces a rare and valuable material. This stuff could make you a fortune! Trouble is, no-one can figure out what to do with it. And you keep on producing it. This is not a stable situation, and will lead to fast devaluations unless you pull some slippery snake-oil shenanigans. And the result is rather amusing, and reminds me quite a bit of "The two best thieves in Lankhmar" as the protagonists bicker their way through what they thought would be an easy job and wind up the fools, with unusually strong language for these family friendly days. As it's also moderately fitting for the theme of the issue, I definitely have to pronounce this one a success, subverting expectations quite nicely.


The voyage of the princess ark: Another year, another attack of surreality for the princess ark, as they find themselves in Renardy, home of the dog-like lupins. Who also happen to be French. (Someone's been watching Dogtanian and the three muskethounds ) And determine prestige amongst the noble families by wine-making contests :double rolleyes: And someone has stolen this year's best vintage Guess who has to retrieve them and save the king from dishonor However, they can't get through the fields of sleep inducing flowers to catch the goblins responsible. But it's alright, because they get saved by ninja tortles They solve the mystery, honor is satisfied, and everyone ends up happy. Apart from the goblins. The cheese quotient is definitely on the rise in this series. It may still be entertaining, but I'd want to filter this stuff out a bit before actually putting it in a game.

Unsurprisingly, we get more details on Renardy in the OOC bit. Lots of cultural and statistical data. Business as usual here. Can't say I'm that enthralled.


The marvel-phile: We finish serving up last year's leftovers, and actually have some interesting gaming advice here this issue. How do you build good villains? Why do so many official Marvel villains suck? Well, let's start with the name. A bad one condemns you to risibility even before you start, no matter how powerful you might be. Then there's the costume. Poor color co-ordination or the wrong areas of skin exposed can make it very hard to take you seriously. And finally, possibly least importantly, there's the powers. After all, there's plenty of badass normals holding their own out there in comic books, on both the good and bad sides. A single dumb trick is probably worse than none at all. And having too many schticks means it becomes impossible to remember them all and apply them to maximum effect. Their universe runs on dramatic logic rather than raw power.

They then go into specific examples of villains who have successfully repurposed themselves in the comics. Most notable is Paste Pot Pete becoming the Trapster, but there's others out there trying out a little self-improvement. Now, if they can just avoid things merging into a morass of grey grimdark villains with poorly defined badass powers. (yes, you, liefield.) And to top it off there's stats for the Sentinels and Hurricane. This is much better than the last few issues. Creative advice is more interesting than straight statblocks.


Rifts world book two, Atlantis. Beware the splurgoth. Now there's a name that'll eat your brains if you look at them the wrong way.


Forum: David Howery talks about painting minis, and expresses annoyance that there are so few minis of normal animals, along with various other thoughts about the practical problems of painting real creatures. There are some textures paint just can't simulate.

Justin Kelley is annoyed that magic resistance is so much more common and harder to penetrate in 2nd edition. Their mage is proving useless at high level! Elementary tactical error, methinks. That kind of stuff is why you move into buffs and terrain controllers rather than direct blasty effects. If your wizard isn't contributing much at 25th level, I have no hesitation in saying you're Doing It Wrong, since so many other groups are finding their spellcasters naturally graduate to supreme overlord at that level.

Bryce Harrington goes back to the headache of how to build fantasy cities in a defensible way with so many horrible creatures and spellcasters roaming around. Some historical models offer more benefits than others, but given the variety of powers out there, none really seem optimal. I guess it depends what monsters are most common in the particular area then.

Rene Vernon thinks that energy draining needs a little nerfing, but crossbows need powering up. More differentiation! Do you want every weapon group to be as complicated to handle as polearms and swords?

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 179: March 1992

part 4/6


The role of computers: Macs may still be getting a decent amount of games, but it seems PC's are starting to pull ahead now, generally getting stuff first. However, it's Amiga that are really suffering. Just a couple of years now before they go bankrupt, and boy does it show. Might be a good idea to abandon this ship before it sinks. So it's another amusing historical pointer in the intro section here.

Conquests of the longbow: the adventures of Robin Hood gets a very positive review, with the reviewers impressed by both the graphics and gameplay. Point and click movement is applied with increasing finesse, and you get plenty of choices in how to overcome the various obstacles and bring peace to the land.

Eye of the Beholder II: The legend of Darkmoon once again goes to 5 stars, with substantially improved graphics and sound. Seems like they're saying that all the time these days, with particular emphasis on the precise specs needed. Point and click, and engage in lots of violence, as long as you have a good enough machine. SSI know what they're doing at this point.

Neverwinter Nights is of course their official online game. It's a pretty interesting, translating the turn-based D&D combat process surprisingly faithfully. Course, the world really isn't ready for this as a mass market product, with costs of several dollars an hour in phone bills, which probably explains why it doesn't count as part of the later series. I wonder if you can still get hold of this one.

Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers only gets a short review, but they say it's as good as previous instalments. I guess, like the book reviews, that's all a series with established fans needs.

The Simpsons: Bart's house of Weirdness also gets a short but positive review. Don't spout long discredited catchphrases, just enjoy the action. Funny that you don't see more spin-offs based on this series any more, given the time it's been running.


TSR Previews: A mere half a year after the last new campaign setting, they unleash another, very different desert heavy place for you to enjoy. Al-Qadim, Arabian adventures. Ok, so it's actually yet another add-on to Toril, but it's disconnected enough that you can ignore that and transplant it if you want too, like Kara-tur, and very much unlike Maztica. They finally figure out how to use kits properly, as a device for making classes reflect cultural roles, and the proficiency system probably works about as well as it ever does. I believe this permits a little yaying.

Speaking of kits, we also have one of the books that applied them most radically. PHBR7: The complete Bards handbook, where they weren't so much variants on the existing class as total retools. You could build a whole party of bards and have more than enough variety to be viable and distinct, especially when the half-elf multiclass variants were allowed. Just watch out for the cheese. Here be jesters, and all that.

Spelljammer expands on space combat, with the War Captain's Companion set. Shoulda brought that out before the goblin war stuff so we could use it in those adventures.

Dark sun sees more mass combaty fun in DSQ1: Road to Urik. Tyr and Urik are fighting! Save the newly freed city. Making the world a better place ain't going to be easy. Once again, they use an interesting spiral bound format.

The forgotten Realms is off in Maztica still, in FMQ1: City of gold. See new people, take their stuff, and figure out how to get members of the cool new races and classes the players are drooling over into the party.

Dragonlance has many more short stories to tell. The reign of Istar takes us back in time to that false paradise destroyed by it's own corruption. Look forward to more bloody aesopping, if I know them.

D&D has yet more entry level adventures, three of them in fact, in Dragons Den. Well, I suppose they want to get noobs in, and it ain't easy to run low level adventures with dragons. That they might think we would appreciate help with that is probably justified.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 179: March 1992

part 5/6


Wonders of the land of fate: Surprise surprise, with the release of Al Qadim, (already mentioned twice this issue) we get an article promoting it. Ok, it's not the full-on special Dark Sun got, but it's better than nothing. And it's actually a lot more useful than the stuff in the Dark Sun and Buck Rogers specials. Ok, so it's mostly cut material from the corebook, but it's good material, as well as being appropriate to the theme of the issue. A ton of new magical items, many obviously derived from the arabian nights stories, and new random determination tables so you can get a good idea of their respective frequencies. The descriptions are very short, but do the job, and still manage to sneak in a decent bit of flavour. It does get released officially after all a bit later in the Land of Fate boxed set, but this is still useful stuff, and seems a good one for drawing people into the new setting. Jeff Grubb has done his job well, producing so much cool stuff that he can't fit it all into one book.



Ars magica gets a 3rd edition. Now with more crossover with the WoD. Watch out for those tremere.


Role-playing reviews: Back to fantasy gaming again. So many people who think they have some neat ideas to contribute to the genre. Some of them may even be right. This time it's Lester W. Smith who's our compere.

Fifth cycle gets an all round positive review. The worldbuilding is good, the system makes sense to him, and the magic has a nice internal logic to it. It has enough supplements to fill it out without overly bloating things. If you want another decent alternative system, go for it.

Barony gets a slightly less positive review, mainly due to it's small press origins being pretty obvious. But the ideas therein are rather more innovative, and it includes a rather spectacular treatment of Dragon battles, for some reason. If they could just tidy up some of the more pretentious and idiosyncratic language and make it more accessable. Pff. I'll bet I could understand it no trouble. After all, we had to deal with high Gygaxese for over 10 years.

Stuff O' Legends is halfway between an RPG and a boardgame, combining diplomacy and battle in a game of heroics revolving around the Trojan War. It's full of military and supernatural elements, as you build up your heroes and get them into position for the eventual inevitable conflict. With lots of optional rules that add further variety, it looks like an interesting edge case that could be taken either way.


Ladders to the sky: The shine is probably starting to wear off spelljammer around the office, as the realities of the first couple of year's sales are in, and they aren't so great. It's not dead yet, but new products are starting to slow down. And aside from the special, and rather a lot of Sage Advices, it hasn't seen much stuff submitted to here either. Allen Varney tries to spark things a little by reminding you how easily you can incorporate space stuff into an existing game. All you need is a means of going up! And this being spelljammer, cheesy ideas work just fine. Giant plants which shoot up into space as part of their mating cycle. Hired by a passing ship with a crew shortage. Random portals that send you somewhere unexpected one-way. Many of these would also work fine for introducing the planes as well. And a nice reminder that it's not hard to shake up a game that's getting stale by changing the environment and removing most of the familiar cast. Just be careful, for as many a TV show can demonstrate, this kind of trick can kill a series as easily as it can revitalise it, and pushing the reset button afterwards may not help. Good luck pulling it off.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 179: March 1992

part 6/6


Sage advice: Why can't druids cast call woodland beings and commune with nature. Those are well within their remit (Oops. Errata. )

Can you save against a warp marble (only if it's thrown at you)

How do you determine an object's resistance to dispelling (use the person holding it. )

Does a ring of wizardry boost your spelljamming power (not officially, but Skip quite likes that idea. )

What magic items can bards use ( Officially only rogue ones, but skip likes the idea of making them jacks of all trades. Skip will argue the case with his sagely might! )

If you invent printing presses, can they mass-produce magical spells (Hell no! That would game balance up the ass with a 36 inch spiked rotating dildo!)

Can you get someone back from a bag of devouring by turning it inside out (no. If they've been swallowed, it's already too late. They're gone, jim. )

Can you overclock a wand of conjuring to summon high level monsters at high level (no. Wands do not scale. Live with it, or sell them on to lower level adventurers for a tidy profit. )

Can a bag of holding's weight reduction powers be negated (not normally. Skip will laugh at you if you wreck one by experimenting to find a way to do this. )

Do cloaks of displacement protect against magic missiles (No. A penalty to automatic hit is still an automatic hit. )

Are item malfunctions always detrimental ( The odds of them being beneficial are about as good as real life radiation mutations being beneficial. Not bleedin likely, in other words. )


Dragonmirth is rather wizard-heavy this month. Yamara gets caught between the packs of marauding journalists. The twilight empire team have to figure out how to get flammable slime off in a hurry.


Through the looking glass: Hmm. Another interesting topic tackled in the introduction to this piece. The irritating battle between houserulers and official only takes a slightly different form when it comes to minis, but it is there. Try taking a customised piece to a Games Workshop store game, and see what happens. And as they're the biggest baddest guys on the block, you may well have to lump it if you want to play. TSR will die, but they continue onwards, regularly driving off existing players and having to draw in new ones with their irritating company policies. Yet another reason to steer clear of con games, as if there weren't enough.

Lots of stuff that seems adaptable to all kinds of fantasy games this month, presuming your GM will allow it, ironically. Two hordes, one oriental themed, the other gnolls, from Ral Partha. Thunderbolt mountain minis have a mermaid, a dark elf, and a nicely idiosyncratic box containing a triceratops war machine ridden by orcs. There's one you really wish GW would let in their WHFB games. And Grenadier finish this off with a Halfling, a Ranger and a generic dungeoneer. They should fit together in a team nicely.


Great. The moonshaes get another trilogy. What a thing to happen to them.


With lots of stuff for various official campaign worlds, and plenty of bits that you can insert in anywhere as well, I've rather enjoyed this one, and it looks like it also has more reusability than the average issue as well. Keep submitting those cool articles folks, surprising us and making sure things don't get too dominated by the same recurring writers.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 180: April 1992

part 1/6


128 pages. Welcome to the halfway point of this insane trek through time. Finally I can say, I am at the midnight of my suffering. Though there may be many challenges ahead, there will be a dawn. This kingdom shall know peace again! So proclaim I! We shall slay every dragon, delve every dungeon, roll every polyhedron, and er, drink with every white dwarf! (cue accusations of racism) And the ending shall be glorious! So press onwards with me, stalwart comrades from across the globe! Together we are strong! We shall not fall prey to despondency or insanity! (florble gibber thnorble help me! Or kill me now!) We shall face this april fools issue like we faced the ones before. Deadly seriously! (see page XX for the contract. ) It too shall fall! (god, I'm such a fool) I will not fail! (the betting pool is still open) Let's make it so.


In this issue:


Letters: No surprise that the letters here again prove that the collective readership have more silliness when combined than the writers. And a lot more wiling to ask questions about sex than they are to answer them. I hope that their parenting skills aren't similarly stilted. They also demonstrate the usual array of stupidly twinked characters, requests to buy stuff, chain letters, non sequiturs, bad crossovers, submissions that haven't a hope of being published, and other stuff that makes you go what is this I don't even. Perhaps it would be more fun if I had a little wharrgarble. WHARRRRRRRRGARRRRRRRRBLE!!!!!! Yeah, I think I feel a little better. And now, thanks to this, I'm imagining whargarble and other such amusing macro effects dubbed onto an oral sex scene. Ceiling cat approves strongly.


Editiorial: Hmm, this is a new one from Roger. A clever one too. Just how far can you take the concept of unusual PC's before they become unplayable? You need to be able to fulfil most, and preferably all of a certain checklist. Sentience. Communication. Hands or other environment manipulating capabilities. Movement. Power. Ability to advance. And not being inherently disruptive to the party by nature or needs. Ok, some games make a point of breaking some of those rules and still work, (Traveller, Wraith, Earthbound Demons) but like rules of musical structure, they remain valid as a general thing despite certain songs benefiting from violating them. I remember seeing a checklist very like this in forum threads before, but not in this magazine, which means he may actually be innovating here, and creating something that then spreads to GM advice things in other books. Can anyone trace this to an earlier source? Given the silliness of his recent editorials, this is a surprisingly serious and useful entry. One might suspect him of building things up to make a deliberate play on expectations this month. Still, it continues his efforts to get us to expand our gaming horizons, so it's hardly coming from left-field, especially when you consider his old articles for the magazine before he became the editor.


Suspend your disbelief: Oh, here we go with another realism in gaming (or at least, verisimilitude) article. Personality! consistency! believability! These are the great principles with which you must build your game. Ecology! Society! Parsimony! The things in it come from somewhere and must interact with each other! Hmm. Either this is a very dry parody, or just very rehashed indeed. Either way, everything said here has been said before in the magazine, better, and in greater detail previously. Yawn.


Not another magical sword: Another person complaining that magical weapons should get more detail so as to make each of them special? That idea in itself is starting to seem rather overdone, ironically. And not reflective of my personal experience either. I don't have names for my half-a dozen guitars, only one of the laptops in my family has a name, and the various electrical appliances that we rely on certainly don't get that kind of sentimental affection. Yeah, they might all have their individual quirks, but this is generally a pain in the butt to work around rather than something to celebrate. Not that making them visually and mechanically distinctive is a bad thing, but there's a lot of other places I could be putting my effort, and I only have so much energy to give. Fortunately, they also provide some nice specific examples as well as the oft-repeated generalities, keeping this from being useless to me. As with last issue, the Greenwood influence is very noticeable. No escaping it these days, with even the other campaign worlds that are consciously trying to be different winding up using the same methods.

 

[amysrevenge]

Just wanted to say that I'm still really enjoying these. Keep it up!

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 180: April 1992

part 2/6


Role-playing reviews: Rick demonstrates his particular sense of humour again in this little article, lampooning the crap deal psionics gets in so many systems. We've seen near nowt on it since issue 78. And either it's too similar to magic, or incoherently designed in many systems. Doesn't stop them from putting it in though. Which of course means he has enough to make a good themed column. Hopefully that'll also stimulate freelancers to send in stuff, so we can get a psionics themed issue for this edition as well.

The complete psionics handbook gets a rather dry and descriptive review, with lots of explanation of how it works. It may seem daunting at first, but it's not that hard to understand, and differentiates things from magic quite handily, apart from a few near identical powers in the telepathy domain. Unlike certain forumites, he considers the fact that powers aren't usually level restricted a plus. It could do with more GM advice, monsters, and other cool peripherals though.

Psionics is a Mayfair Role Aid product. It doesn't do quite as well, having a bunch of irritating niggly restrictions on it's powers. But with plenty of cool stuff to mine and surprisingly little overlap with the official system, it could run alongside the other system if you wanted.

GURPS Psionics Also gets a solid but not gushing review. It encourages you to pick one or two skills and specialise in them, which encourages team differentiation in a class free game. The mechanics are solid, but psychic battles are rather complex to manage. It also has more campaign material than the other two,aimed quite strongly at modern day games. As with all the GURPS stuff, it's for those who like to customise, and mix and match elements from multiple genres for their games.

Rick also gives brief reviews to the Draconomicon and Ashes to Ashes. Neither are perfect, but both have lots of cool stuff for you to use. Seems both Vampire and D&D started with a greater proportion of adventures in their early supplements.


Your basic Barbarian: Another april fools collection of things NOT to do when playing a dumb smashy sort. All the classes have their own stereotypes of how they can be disruptive to the party. Fighters probably get the least attention, when compared to preachy dick priests, thieves that steal from their own team, and wizards who take over everyone else's role at high level. But they can be a real pain in the butt too, and this article shows you how! Exaggerated dumbness mainly. Never be afraid to leap into a situation, short-circuiting debate and getting your companions into trouble. Apart from water, which is a source of terror to anyone with heavy armour, and of course rust monsters, which must be fled from with as much speed as you can manage. I do not see myself laughing at this one. Just a bit of space-wasting goofiness.


Hot night in the old town: Or how to keep things interesting for clerics when they're not out adventuring. Because of the nature of both their organisations and their powers, (at least, if they resemble real world priests at all) there is a certain natural pressure on them to get involved in the community, and lots of demand for their powers if they're willing to set a reasonable price. Lots of fun can be had trying to increase your congregation and settle disputes, get together the money for a decent temple, and competing with priests of other gods. Many of them may involve asking your adventuring party buds for a little help, and lead into a whole new adventure. This seems like a very cool idea, and the principle could be applied to the other classes for generation of tailored between adventure solo bits without too much effort. It certainly makes for considerably more variety than another motiveless wandering monster. Very handy indeed.


Colorful connection: Looks like puzzles are indeed becoming a regular feature, with another crossword. 80 more cryptic clues for your puzzling out, and an overall secret contained within. Actually seems like it would be more appropriate put in the birthday issue than the april fool one, but that make the solution too easy to guess. Another one that'll easily eat up a few hours unless you're a real whiz at this kind of thing.


Cyber HERO: Yes, another supplement for the HERO system. They're not gonna let a genre get away.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 180: April 1992

part 3/6


Forum: Adam Lesh deals with the Robin hood problem with roughly the same advice I would have given. You can't expect players to follow the film script, and you can't expect the game to follow the same narrative logic when the rules encourage other options. You can use those stories as inspiration, but don't forget the adaption.

Steven Davis would rather like playing gods to be a viable option for adventurers who've reached obscene levels of power. Things might change, but they can still have meaningful challenges. Roll on Nobilis to make that feasible system-wise.

Victor Paraschiv thinks that fighters are still crap and not worth playing, especially when you could take a multiclassed demihuman or a paladin instead. Perhaps increasing the XP differential would help?

Jake Remley goes back to the violence in roleplaying/TV/music/video games is corrupting our youth stupidity. Roleplaying is far less dangerous than those other media, because it's all in your imagination, and frequently very abstracted. It does not make you more likely to commit real violence.


The voyage of the princess ark: From the ridiculous to the epic in this series. The princess ark goes from a country full of french dog-people to one inhabited by english cat-people. Logical, I guess. As this is essentially elizabethan england, everyone is very polite, and their time there is devoid of the usual dramas. However, that's because they're just the B plot this month. The main one is that we get to see what happens when you die in mystara. Raman is killed by the ghost he faced several months ago, and has to find his way out of Limbo. (not the same limbo as the AD&D universe, in another example of them making the two games deliberately different. ) And he makes it just in time. Any longer and he would have been buried. Oh, the tales he has to tell.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the article is devoted to exactly that, opening up another interesting avenue of play. If your team got hit by an unexpected and unwanted TPK, you don't have to stop now. You can just take them to the underworld, where they can search for a way back to the lands of the living, go to their eternal rest, or explore the lands of the dead and try and make a living of sorts there. The various types of undead are dramatically recontextualized, we get an interesting synopsis of the society of the dead, and we have more info on how the sphere of entropy tries to dominate the universe. This is the kind of thing that you should consider carefully if you want to adopt, because it gives answers to big questions that may not be welcome. (curiously, that everyone goes to limbo, and only followers of specific immortals go on to get a nice afterlife, would later be adopted in 3rd ed forgotten realms stuff, and I wasn't too keen on the idea there either. ) But it's certainly interesting, and very gameable. Another great example of just how weird and expansive Mystara has become with it's own built up setting.


Your own treasure hunt: Hmm. Another article with a bunch of ideas they've never tackled before. In issue 177 we had a letter about charging to pay. Roger may have come down against the idea there, but his feelings must be more complex than that, otherwise he wouldn't have picked out this article. In it, the writer floats the idea of holding a fundraising event for your gaming group, as if it were a charity or something. The idea that your gaming group should be a formal entity in itself, with books and equipment owned collectively, dues paid for belonging, a fund for expenditures, and written procedures defining where and how you play, and what you need to do to get in (or kick someone out) does seem a bit strange, and it's not something I've come across personally, despite once being in a group that pushed 20 at times. Seems like the kind of thing that would develop when you have to specifically hire out space to game, rather than meeting at someone's house or down the pub. And of course, in schools, where tedious bureaucracy reigns, and the authorities want to keep track of what their students are doing. Most of the article is devoted to the logistics of setting something like this up, including lots of general advice on organising stuff that is applicable to all kinds of tasks. Set clear goals, figure out how to achieve them practically and get the stuff before stating, make sure someone properly co-ordinates things, check as things go on and revise plans accordingly, and since this involves getting other people to give you money, publicity publicity publicity. One of their more interesting diversions into real world matters, and a lot fresher than the stuff on how to be a good writer that pops up every couple of years. This has certainly been a pleasant eye-opener for me.

 

[Orius]

Not another magical sword: Another person complaining that magical weapons should get more detail so as to make each of them special? That idea in itself is starting to seem rather overdone, ironically. And not reflective of my personal experience either.

And honestly, as a DM, I say it's too much damn work for every +1 sword unless you're a tight-fisted bastard who thinks giving out two of them in one campaign makes you a Monty Haul GM. Save it for the special weapons that have multiple powers and maybe even inteligence, and you'll have more time to spend developing other areas of the campaign.

As with last issue, the Greenwood influence is very noticeable. No escaping it these days, with even the other campaign worlds that are consciously trying to be different winding up using the same methods.

Yeah, Greenwood's certainly setting an example other writers are trying to emulate. There's a lot of it in late 2e Dragon where some Greyhawk fans give their favorite setting some love, and the Arcane Lore feature ends up imitating Greenwood's Pages from the Mages features but with stuff you can plop in any old campaign. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but one should keep in mind that it'll take a while for a campaign to get as richly detailed as the Realms did.