Let's read the entire run

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 304: February 2003


part 3/9


Mercenaries for hire: Our first feature this month is basically an expanded Guild Secrets detailing a fantasy Foreign Legion equivalent. That's a bit of interesting real world lore they haven't done in the magazine before. And since the idea of giving up your old name and memories to escape your dark past, and being put in a group of other random malcontents of all classes and races and sent on missions by mysterious masters is a perfect way to set up a campaign, I think this is definitely an idea that works well with the D&D ruleset. You can play a group still in the legions, or one that's recently finished their 5 year tour of duty and been released to build a new life on an unfamiliar world, and you have a good reason for the locals to tolerate creatures of different races, even if they aren't common in the area you've been posted or normally considered monsters that should be killed on sight. So like the gladiator one last issue, this shows you an effective way of organising your campaign, concentrating on the setting details, but not forgetting to include a few interesting bits of crunch at the end. Only it's not generic at all, having a clear author vision while still retaining a fair amount of flexibility in how you apply it. So this is a very strong start to the issue indeed. Well done, Mr Mearls, well done.


Monstrous magic: 46 new spells in 9 pages? I think that's a little too much for me to describe each of them for a change. That'd virtually double the length of this issue's review. The title is pretty self-explanatory. It's a whole bunch of spells that are most useful if you're a monster, or have monsters in your retinue with appropriate powers to enhance. They do things like boost your DR, SR or natural armour (which only works if you already have some) or let you do tricks with your gaze attacks, swallow power, diseases, energy draining, etc etc. Basically, this is just a more general version of those dragon specific spells we often get on birthday issues. As such, it's mostly for the DM, but some of them'll also be useful for players too, particularly if you're experimenting with the many monsters that can gain class levels. Since they're enhancing existing abilities rather than granting new ones, they also tend to be slightly more powerful than regular spells, which means this is rich grounds for the optimisers amongst you. Will you be able to make up for those ECL modifiers by deploying these spells cleverly?

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 304: February 2003


part 4/9


Saddle up: Ha. Here's an amusing result of the 3e desire to make monster races available as PC's. What do you do when you have an intelligent monster you can ride, and one of the other PC's wants to do exactly that? The question becomes even more interesting when you have a huge monster that can carry everyone else at once, and everyone has missile weapons, flight, and their own ideas about what the group should be doing. So this is one of those specialist articles that'll be either damn useful, or useless depending on if your players decide to add exotic mounts and intelligent monsters to their party. Still, I like it, and it's an idea they never did last edition either, which makes it extra cool to see. Examining the logical consequences of weird premises is how you get some of the most distinctive yet real feeling alternate worlds. Let's get our spellcasters and archers on a dragon and revel in drive-by bombardment and high intensity dogfights, because this doesn't look like it'll bog the game down.


Prestige races: Yay! An advancement in rules technology, and the first OGC article in the magazine. The ability to further develop your innate racial abilities is an idea that will get quite a lot of different implementations, with level based ones in Unearthed Arcana & Arcana Evolved, heritage feats in the 3.5 splatbooks, and bloodlines (also UA). Even more interestingly, this doesn't use any of those, instead showing you how to apply a magic item style model to personal upgrades, spending XP and time to gain specific inherent bonuses rather than levelling up or making better gear for yourself. That really demonstrates just how many different ways you can accomplish the same goal in 3e, each having different cost/benefit tradeoffs. It also reminds me that real world evolution isn't a linear process either, but a series of random experiments, with only the good ones surviving and getting to develop further, and the overall trend generally being towards greater diversity and specialisation until a big disaster comes along and changes the environment, at which point whatever survives has to evolve to better fit all the new niches opened up. At the moment, the OGL is very much in the expand and experiment stage of things, only to crash when 3.5 comes along, and lots of products are rendered obsolete, leaving the companies with unsold stock and suspicious the rules could be changed on them again any time. As a result, they moved towards making their own variant corebooks that still used the d20 system, but differed substantially from D&D 3e, with all new classes and variant rules. But anyway, this is a very interesting article indeed. It looks like the benefits are sufficient that spending the XP won't result in you falling behind either, and if anything, you'll soon catch up again because you'll be getting more XP if you wind up a level behind the rest of the party, while still being able to match them in overall power. Most of these are more powerful than feats, and of course you don't have a sharply limited number of upgrades you can purchase either. It might take a little longer to get to 20th level, but you can wind up way more powerful than most nonepic characters by taking this route. Playing around with these will definitely please the CharOp lovers, especially since they also have full permission to develop their own variants on the theme. This is very definitely a positive step by the magazine's writers and i hope it won't just be a one-off experiment.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 304: February 2003


part 5/9


Locked away: We've had articles on magical doors, magical locks, and magical keys before. Now we have one on magical chests. Yet more opportunities for you to fill your players with paranoia whenever they're down in the dungeon, for anything could be trapped or enchanted and turned against you. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, muahahahaha! The individual chests, both magical and mundane, are pretty devious as well. Two layers of transparent stone with green slime suspended within, so any application of force will drench both you and the contents, completely ruining your profit margin and your life. Magnetic chests that are near impossible to batter down or pick open if your equipment is ferrous, because it'll just get stuck. Gross chests made of troll flesh that regenerate if you try and break them open. This is all pretty ingenious stuff, some of which could be applied in reality as well. It's always the ones that apply scientific principles to fantastical ideas that come up with the most ingenious yet plausible tricks. As with the last article, I'd delight in introducing this one to my game, and seeing what my players made of it, what equally ingenious tricks they'd try to get into them.


Guardians of the wild: Fey time again. Always a risky business, given how annoying players find tricksters. Still, they have got a lot more serious in recent years, so who knows how this'll turn out. Let's see if there's any more whimsy juice in the kegs.

Changelings give you an ECL + 0 option if you want to play a fey-touched character who doesn't quite fit in, and has minor magical abilities and worries about their true parentage. Given what I know about players loving sexy brooding loner types, they'll eat these guys up and they'll be reappearing in any best of reprints.

Crystaline Cats are tremendously pretty, but don't let them scratch you, because they breed like Slaadi, implanting a little crystal that grows up worryingly quickly. Thankfully they're kinda hampered in stealth attempts by their nature, so steer well clear and use missile weapons and hope for the best.

Forces of Nature are draconic fey with wings made of leaves. They are indeed pretty forceful, and can kick your ass both physically and magically. If your party is powerful enough that even treants can't stop you from despoiling the forest, who ya gonna call?

Green Guardians are a good substitute for treants as well. They look like ferns, and can sing hypnotically and emit poisonous spores to deal with despoilers without excess violence. Still, at least they can't animate trees, so they can't rearrange the scenery in quite the same way.

Sparks are annoying little arsonists that can teleport from one flame to the next, so they have a strong incentive to be destructive, sneaky little gits. Sounds pretty fae-like to me. Thankfully one solid hit will snuff them out, so stock up on your water pistols and true strike spells.

Seelie Fey are pretty, but they aren't necessarily good. Joining up does get them a fair number of extra powers, at the cost of vulnerability to cold iron. If you're one of the in crowd, it seems like a pretty sweet deal, so they can afford to be exclusive.

Unseelie Fey, on the other hand, are always twisted horrors, in a depressing attack of grey and black morality. As they're also the product of mixed-race matings, that makes this incredibly racist as well. Two depressing cliches for the price of one! I don't think I'll be using much of this article.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 304: February 2003


part 6/9


Fiction: Haunted by Dave Gross. Our former editor returns to the magazine with a tale revisiting characters we saw statted out during his run. A flashback heavy tale of the Malveens and how they wound up in their current situation, this is one of those stories that really takes advantage of the Realm's high magic level, and the corresponding jadedness of it's people, with vampires, ghosts, spells and magic items for sale, oh my. This really reminds me how much setting info and fiction has declined in the magazine since he left, to be replaced with yet more crunchy stuff, with decidedly mixed results. So it's definitely good to see him make a visit, even if the result is adding yet another layer of detail onto the Realms when there's tons of more needy settings out there. It might be a big convoluted mess, but it's their big convoluted mess, and it feels like home. Why shouldn't they put in the effort to keep it that way?


Elminster's guide to the realms: Speaking of mess, Ed turns his attention to the messy business of grinding grain to make your bread. While the Realms does have some water and wind mills, and even some magically powered ones there's also plenty of places that can't afford the enchanted solution, and don't have the right climate to harness the elements, so they have to rely on draft horses. This is one of those articles that reminds us that when Ed does realism, he really does his research, with this capturing the small details of life perfectly. Constantly having to save so you can replace things when they break (which is a regular and expensive occurrence with primitive industrial machinery ) and dealing with petty village politics feels completely true to reality, and Ed manages to describe even these small scale dramas in a way that keeps them interesting as well. It's nice that even after introducing so many high-powered elements to the game that he can still make little things like this full of real feeling human details too. It's good to see he's still putting the effort in to learn new stuff to introduce, not just running on autopilot.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 304: February 2003


part 7/9


Silicon sorcery: We've finished promoting neverwinter nights for now, so it's time to give Asheron's Call 2 a turn. Like the first one (see issue 284) this has a lot of cool stuff worth stealing for D&D, with their skill tree system converting neatly to the 3e feat one. They aren't as amusingly metagamey as the previous selection, but they are a pretty solid collection of fighting style feats that give you more options to enhance your attacks, possibly at the cost of trading off one facet of your stats to be considerably more effective at another. Improving your pain inflicting, unpredictability, or counterattacking skills are the kind of tricks that are entirely valid in any setting, so while less quirky than last time, these are more balanced and generally applicable. I suppose that fits the overall way the magazine has gone in the past couple of years. So let your fighters have a good look through these. They're unlikely to regret it.


Campaign news: 3.5 may have surprised a lot of people, but if they'd been paying attention to the constant tweaking the RPGA has been engaged in over the past year, they'd be less so. The WotC people do feel more of a desire to tinker with the rules and fix problems that way than TSR ever did. This time, they've created a whole 40 page, 10 chapter free downloadable rulebook to detail all the things they're doing to keep the living campaign from breaking under the strain of thousands of groups, many of which are actively trying to twink their characters. Hopefully that'll keep things stable at least until the 3.5 books drop, at which point they'll pretty much have to update their house rules. Yet again, I'm left feeling they have a job I don't envy one little bit, like trying to herd cats that are constantly looking for nastier claw sheaths and grills for their teeth. Seems like the more I see of organised play, the less I want anything to do with it.


Places of mystery: The Dragonshead Barrows are a collection of tombs in the hills near Irongate. They still have a reasonable number of unlooted ones, but they're currently right in the middle of a goldrush of adventurers, so that may not last. Still, since many of them are well hidden up there, some will probably remain unfound, ready to ignite more legends in the future. Yet again, they're engaging in worldbuilding that justifies a world with large numbers of adventuring parties active simultaneously, with varying levels of success. Well, with the living campaign going on, I guess they've got too really for it to make any sense.

The Hool Beacon is the place where an old adventure took place. What happened to Baltron, and why does it no longer bear his name? I guess that's a definite mystery for your players to solve, so this column is living up to it's name. If only there were more creatures from the elemental plane of ooze for DM's to include here.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 304: February 2003


part 8/9


Dork tower fails to effectively manage their time.


Dungeoncraft: Monte decided he's going to do extended multi-part bits of advice after all, starting with some info on city designing. This is another of those cases where you can wind up under or overdesigning all too easily, either making tons of detail that never gets used in actual play, or not having some crucial bit of info on hand and having to grind to a halt if you can't improvise it. So I guess the important thing to do is predict if they'll be sticking around in an area, or just passing through. Not an easy task, and one highly dependent on if you're running a plot-centric or sandbox game, and how likely players are to follow obvious plot hooks that are dangled in front of them rather than doing their own thing or coming up with unpredictable solutions to problems. Ironically, this means that the tighter the control the DM has over the party, the less extraneous worldbuilding they're likely to need to do. I never thought of it that way before. Monte obviously does have some insights to offer that Ray didn't. Good to see this column becoming useful to me again.


DM's toolbox: We had some relatively simple advice about playing NPC's last month. Now Johnn gives us the advanced course. While the advice is in his usual crisp bullet-pointed style, each of the individual steps will require a fair amount of thinking about and following them all will result in a pretty detailed and well-rounded character. So it's the kind of approach that'll be hard work, especially if you apply it to more than just the important NPC's, but that'll get good results if you do. Not all of their articles are aimed at people who've only got the core books and haven't necessarily played much, which is always pleasing for me to see. I just have to hope I won't run out of inspiration or the will to engage in self-examination, both of which never get any easier no matter how long I do them.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 304: February 2003


part 9/9


Sage advice is getting vile and dark. What fun for Skip.

What CR are bone creatures (CR+1. Please do not recurse this formula. )

When do you need to make the alchemy check for liquid pain (When making it without magic. Any idiot can use it. )

Do you have to spend skill points on the dark speech ( No. Only feat senor. )

Do corrupt spells need material components or not. (Well whatdya know, one of them does. You'd better do as the spell says. Skip doesn't want to piss Monte off by pointing out his contradictions. Monte's an even bigger badass mutha:shut yo mouth: than Skip. )

The rules for corruption spells say they can't be permanent, but two are. When do you pay the price. (You'd better pay upfront. Like Skip said before, don't mess with Monte, especially when he's contradicting himself. That's when he's at his most dangerous.)

If you're immune to energy drain, can you cast corrupt spells (Sure. You'll still lose the points. If you can't lose Con, you'll lose Cha instead)

Do you have to be both undead and fiend to use flesh ripper (Just one or the other. No worries dude. )

If you suffer cha drain from using dark speech, can that prevent you from using it again (yes)

Do you need to meet the prerequisites for elixir of dark speech to work (no)

Are monks subject to the supernatural diseases in the book (Yes. )

Does detect evil detect all evil creatures (Yes, just at different intensities. Monte made another mistake. Don't tell him Skip said that though. )

Do you get iterative attacks with rapid shot (yes, afterwards.)

Just how good is regeneration at keeping things alive. (Almost infinitely. If you don't have their weakness, you're screwed. If they don't need food, you can hack at them forever and they'll just pull themselves together. )

Does fast healing work at negative HP. Does it automatically stabilize you (As long as you're not dead, and yes. )

Can you imbue people with metamagiced spells (Yes, if you can imbue spells of that adjusted level. This makes most options not feasible. )


What's new fights for the money. Make sure you pay up this time, for a military coup often offends. Still, at least would-be despots are more reliable payers than games companies.

Slightly slanty cone templates. What's up with that? I guess they're slightly harder to calculate than the straight ones.


Another fairly significant issue, all in all. Between the new edition announcement and the experiment with OGL material, we're once again moving forward, and making lasting changes to the way they operate. The fact that most of the articles are pretty good too is nice as well. Still, I doubt things'll really settle down until after 3.5 is out. Even if the company is getting into a routine now they're in new offices, the public'll have plenty to say about all these changes. Let's see how long it takes to catch up this time around.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 305: March 2003


part 1/9


116 pages. Seriously skewed perspective and ridiculous scowling again. How can that guy's fist be bigger than his head? Unless you're trying to simulate a close up shot on a wide-angle lens, that simply does not happen. It's only been a couple of covers and I'm already sick of Wayne Reynolds. Still, at least it's once again appropriate to the contents. Time for another city themed issue. Ho hum. That's the kind of familiar topic where you just have to hope that they put a different spin on it, because it's a pretty big one, so they do have to come back to it again and again. Still, if you can make it good here, you can make it anywhere. Let's see if this is a new york or a detroit, or something in between.


Scan Quality: Good, unindexed.


In this issue:


Wyrms turn: So it turns out the LotR movie trilogy was a success, both theatrically, and in the even more extended multidisk DVD editions. And a big part of that was due to the sheer attention to detail in things like the costumes, sets and general worldbuilding. All the things that made obsessive fans return to the books again and again, and delve into the appendices after they finished the story. And similarly, people are more likely to want to play in your world if it feels solid and real, like it exists beyond the adventures. It's no surprise at all that the Forgotten Realms is the most popular setting, and got that way by first hinting at the big picture, and then gradually adding more and more detail until all but the most obsessive are satisfied, and they keep buying anyway because now they're emotionally invested in the characters, and want to know what happens to them next. So for all that their DM advice in the magazine is encouraging economy, there is still something to be said for really extravagant worldbuilding, especially when you can reuse it between campaigns if it isn't immediately useful. Just make sure your notes are organised, so you can find things and keep them internally consistent. If you have the time, you might as well use it constructively.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 305: March 2003


part 2/9


Scale Mail: We start off with someone who used to hate playing spellcasters, but was converted by the material in issue 302. Good to see the magazine making a real difference.

A request for stats for giant ferrets. Pretty similar to dire weasels really. Not hard to make the adaption.

Some pop culture reference geekery. Yes, Weezer played D&D. So did a huge number of other people in the entertainment industries. That kind of creative mindset is encouraged by playing let's pretend when you're younger.

A reminder that you can use video games for RPG inspiration, as well as the other way around. Um, we know. They already have a regular column for that. That's a well proven route to getting some more cool crunch and plots in your game.

Some fun min-maxing. Regeneration + template that makes you immune to the regeneration's weakness = near impossible to kill characters. Simple and easy.

Grognard grumbling from someone who refuses to convert to the new edition. Will the next one win them over, or will it take things ever further from what they view as REAL D&D.

And finally, another reminder that gaming can be more fun when played fast and loose. Since they are tying things down even tighter with the revision, that's always worth remembering.


Up on a Soapbox: This month, we get to find out about the first ever D&D Monk, as played by Terry Kuntz. As was often the case, the lawful alignment restriction didn't stop them from being pretty silly at times, ripping off Clint Eastwood, and using their acrobatic powers to paint an entire tower in a night. I got nuthin. That's the kind of thing that can only seem sensible when you were there where following the logical course in a fantastical world causes events to gradually spiral out of control. Still, it's certainly an entertaining little tale, and it demonstrates how rolling with the jokes other people make and then building further on them is a good idea. That's one part of the old school spirit you should never forget.


Zogonia is well and truly in continuity territory. Things can only go downhill from here.

Midnight! Even tolkienesque fantasy can be made Grimdark. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 305: March 2003


part 3/9


House rules: Oooh. They're starting another regular series this month. Even within the WotC offices, not everyone plays D&D in exactly the same way. In fact as designers, they're even more likely to fiddle with stuff, see how it changes the game as a whole than regular players. One area of contention is metamagic feats. Many people find the degree of preparing ahead with the standard system unwieldy, resulting in them getting little actual benefit from taking them. So Andy Collins gives us an option that lets you use them less frequently, but with more flexibility, so you're more likely to be able to use them appropriately for the situation, but you won't have the raw power a cleverly prepared wizard using the standard system can manage. So this is for those of you who prefer sorcerers over wizards, psions or favored souls over clerics and druids. Fewer powers, but more flexibility. People who aren't patient or ruthless enough to squeeze every inch of optimisation out of their character, in other words. Would you rather go for the easy option anyway?


Dork tower is reminded of last year's convention transgressions.


Urban heroes: As has often been the case recently, the first feature in the theme is a little underwhelming. Basic roleplaying advice and new Class Combo builds? The first we've obviously seen before, as city based adventures is one of those topics they do pretty regularly. The Class combos, on the other hand, are very specific indeed, and involve builds with multiple prestige classes from different splatbooks. Ranger/Bard/King of the Wild/Royal Explorer? The way they write it, it seems like a logical career path for an adventurer but is it a good combination in terms of actually making an effective character. At least they've realised that Shadowdancer is a tremendously frontloaded PrC, and so the Aristocrat Thief only takes one level of that before going back to more levels of Rogue. Still, it means this doesn't have much to offer to long-term players, as they'll know the general advice already, and the class builds are more useful to DM's than players, who usually prefer to plan their own progression, and have the time to consider all the options themselves. I'm disappointed. Probably shouldn't be, considering the terrible choice of covers for the topic, but I still am.