Let's read the entire run

[(un)reason]

Best of Dragon Magazine 4


part 3/6


PLAYERS PERSPECTIVES: Our other themes this time round are stuff aimed at the players, and stuff aimed at the DM, mirroring the division in the core book. Although I note no monster manual equivalent, and indeed, these best of's have been curiously light on reusing monsters from the magazine in general. I guess that shows just how much more dependent on the formulaic cranking out of new monsters, magical items and spells they became as they went along. So let's see what broader topics they thought would best serve the needs of adventurers everywhere.



Be aware, take care: The very first thing they thought worth repeating was advice on putting together a good group and making sure they prepare properly for the adventure at hand. This makes it very clear that combat, while important, is only a very tiny part of an adventurer's average day. Far more will be devoted to exploring, planning, supplies, keeping your gear in good nick, and possibly even communicating with monsters in a non-hostile fashion. The people coming from tactical wargames would already know that direct hack-and-slash is not the best way to actually win a fight, but they might still need a little work on customising and roleplaying individual characters, while the newbies have a lot to learn if they don't want to be stuck at 1st level dying repeatedly. At this stage, D&D played RAW is still pretty unforgiving, and this kind of advice makes perfect sense as a starter.


It's a material world: Material components, huh? Gonna do that again? Well, after one article which talks about the logistics of adventuring, another one would make sense if they're doing mini-themes within the larger categories. And as we have found all too many times, if you take away away these kind of concerns from spellcasters, they run rampant over the game, even at low levels. So this may or may not be an article you want, but it is one that we need, and one we probably deserve as well. Keep the players working and spending for their powers and they won't come to take them for granted. Good to see them not pandering to their audience.


Finish fights faster: Unarmed combat is something they seem to struggle to get the rules right for, and get lots of questions about in Sage Advice, so it doesn't surprise me at all that they'd recycle an article on it in the hope that more people will read it and stop pestering them. And since they simplified it down to three attack types, with even grappling less than a page long, it certainly still seems usable, if not enough to satisfy MA enthusiasts. Still, I think along with hit locations and criticals with specific effects, that's a level of detail best handled in a completely different system built from the ground up to cope with it. They're wise not to obsess over it, when weapons work better anyway.

 

[(un)reason]

Best of Dragon Magazine 4


part 4/6


Two-fisted fighting: After unarmed combat, we have two-weapon fighting, which makes a lot of sense, since it's another thing people regularly try, so they need to work out all the edge cases for it ruleswise. This is also handled in a fairly simple and brisk fashion, without the extra complexities they would introduce next edition in the Complete Fighters handbook, letting you spend proficiency slots to remove the penalties even if you're not a Ranger or have high dexterity. Even before Drizzt, this is obviously still something many players thought about and wanted to try, as it's just cool imagery, however you slice it. (although not so many people use two bludgeoning weapons at once, funnily enough ) And if you can sort out the balance problems, why shouldn't the players have their fun?


The whole half-ogre: They recycled this article in the magazine, and a previous best of. Now they're recycling the recycling. Yo dawg, etc etc. Admittedly, Roger does add on some extra details compared to Gary's original treatment, but still, this is going for the easy targets at the expense of actually bothering to come up with truly inventive new material. I guess just like new classes, new races get an incredible amount of demand, so they simply had to include whatever they had in that department, even if it wasn't that impressive.


Riding high: Putting the article on aerial mounts in the players section pretty much indicates that they approve of you using this idea at higher levels, which is nice to know. Let's hope your DM will let you be as awesome as the system allows rather than nerfing things to fit prefab adventures. Even if the list of creatures here is very superseded, given the number of awesome and scary flying monsters introduced since then, this is still a pretty cool way to finish off the chapter.



CREATING CAMPAIGN(ing): If players are constantly hunting for the next new toy for their players, for DM's, it's far more of a necessity. They have to keep coming up with new challenges every week if they want a campaign to last. A little variety certainly doesn't hurt either. Let's hope this chapter isn't filled with retreads from the usual suspects at the expense of picking the best articles then.


Five keys to success: We kick off the chapter, completely unsurprisingly, with one of those basic list articles that showed up every few years. If you have these things, and follow this advice, you shouldn't have a problem coming up with exciting adventures, at least until you're tapped out of ideas and feel you're repeating yourself with everything you do. And these ideas have certainly been repeated many times, so they feel very familiar indeed. I guess that proves their value quite effectively, even if I don't find this that interesting on rereading.

 

[(un)reason]

Best of Dragon Magazine 4


part 5/6


A PC and his money: If your PC's have more money than they can spend, then you probably haven't done enough worldbuilding to create things that they want. I certainly know that given unlimited resources, I'd have no problem thinking of things I wanted to do and create, that would probably involve years of work and vast sums of money that would eventually improve everyone's lives. In the meantime, you have all manner of minor expenses, taxes, regulations, unexpected delays, etc that ensure you always wind up spending more and taking longer than you budgeted for. This reminder that there's always more challenges out there even if you save the world (it's just that many of them are boring ones) should keep the DM going when they players get to the end of an adventure, and they haven't had time to think of another big one yet. (plus, they want to make sure they have incentive to go out again instead of retiring. )


The care of castles: Given how frequently she showed up and how much she was praised for a few years, it's surprising how little of Katharine Kerr's work has been referenced in the later years of the magazine. Unlike Ed, Len, or Roger, she didn't add new monsters, setting details, classes or magical items that could really be incorporated into the D&D canon, being more concerned with making real-world historical and mythological stuff work in game. Which is definitely a bit disappointing, since she was their highest-profile female writer, and later moved onto becoming a proper author in her own right. Still, this isn't the best example of her work, it still feels pretty dry and lacking in the abstractions that'll let you run this complicated logistical stuff without it eating up your entire campaign. Given that they gradually moved towards faster-paced, more combat focussed material, I can understand why stuff like this fell out of fashion.


Saintly standards: D&D clerics already have more supernatural powers than the average mythological saint, so saying there's another, NPC only class of people who get even more special powers than you can definitely feels like the kind of restrictive old-school thinking they've since done away with, letting you become nearly anything if you take the right prestige class, templates and feats. That said, the specific saints detailed are fairly interesting, and ripe for updating to later editions. This certainly isn't bad, just dated.


These are the breaks: We've already had articles on realistic finances and logistics. One on weapon breakage seems to fit with that kind of mood, and shows what their current areas of focus are. And like critical hit tables, this still feels like a load of extra work for negative fun, and I'm quite pleased that they eventually gave up on trying to put that in our D&D, settling for abstract critical hits, and weapons & armor only breaking if you actively target them. This is one bit of history I see no value in reclaiming for the modern age.

 

[(un)reason]

Best of Dragon Magazine 4


part 6/6


Repair or Beware: Another obvious follow-on from the preceding article, Arthur Collins is proving to be quite the editor's favourite, since this is a pretty short one that certainly didn't stand out to me the first time around, and with a 1 in 10 chance of some kind of damage happening, seems even more of a pain in actual play than the previous one, even if it doesn't involve a table, and the breakage is a more gradual process. I'd really rather not use either of these, if it's all the same to you.


Wounds and Weeds: Kevin J. Anderson, huh? I'd forgotten he contributed here as well as doing gaming tie-in novels and terrible Dune sequels. Well, at least you can say he does his research, since herbalism is full of esoteric little details about the nature of plants, where you find them, and what they do. This still looks pretty solid mechanically, in terms of making sure they're useful, but still not more powerful than basic healing spells. The framing fiction part of this is still pretty decent as well, reminding us he can be a pretty good writer when not cranking out formula to a tight deadline. It's a shame what having to make a living can do to your creativity.


Runes: To those incapable of it, preparation can seem like magic. The same certainly applies to writing, and it has a long history of being treated as amazing and scary by the illiterate. For example, the Norse emphasis on rune magic. It was just another alphabet, albeit somewhat better suited to carving in rock or wood than modern rounded scripts, but it built up it's own fascinating set of mythology, and list of spells you could do with them. How much more could you do with the idea in a universe where they do have real power. While largely historical, there's still plenty of ideas here to steal for your games, especially as this is largely system free, so it still looks useful to this day. Make a record of the magic you use, because it would definitely be a shame if you lost it, given how hard it is to develop.


Runestones: Following straight on from the last article, Ed Greenwood's more specific take on the same topic works excellently as a way to round out this issue. The system of dwarven runes he introduces here will be used in the artwork of several Forgotten Realms supplements, sometimes with amusing easter eggs in what they're actually saying. That's very worth keeping indeed, as it forces you to reference back to here whenever you see them to figure out what's really going on. If you wind up flicking through some other articles as a result, then they've done their job well. This definitely has the historical weight to deserve it's inclusion.



Once again, the rules gradually become more solid as we go along, with the classes in particular improved substantially from a few years ago. Also notable is the far greater emphasis on worldbuilding, which also jives with my perceptions of the magazine at the time. At this point, they'd run out of things to do down in the dungeon and were seriously looking around to keep their roleplaying interesting. The result is very worth noting. So what changes will the final best of bring? Let's ring the bell and call out "TIME! LAST ORDERS PLEASE!" on this unbelievably lengthy journey.

 

[(un)reason]

Best of Dragon Magazine 5


part 1/4


82 pages. The pace of the best of's accelerates, as this one says May 1986, a mere year after the last one. While things may still be moving forward in the outside world, here, they're going back to the old school, leaving out the themes, and just picking the best articles still unrepeated from the magazine's past. Although it is very noticeable that where the first best of crammed 39 articles into 72 pages, this has only 20 in 80, showing how word counts have expanded in the last 7 years. If this series kept up, that would probably have changed even more in the long run, especially in the last few years when lengthy articles like the demonomicons increased in frequency quite a lot. But it was not to be. Let's see what they thought worth reiterating in the days just before Gary left for good and Lorraine took over, axing a whole bunch of things in her wake, including this series.



Thrills and chills: Ice age adventuring still looks like a pretty neat idea, making everyday survival and resource accumulation a bigger challenge. One series of cheesy CGI movies certainly hasn't exhausted all the many options you have to tell stories in a world like that, and there's a wider range of fantastical monsters that fit the bill than when this was originally released. A larger campaign setting exploring the vagaries of a frigid world in the same way that Athas showed us different dry, hostile climates is very much an option. Maybe some day, I'll get to try it out.


Mind of the monster: Getting inside monster's heads and playing them as smart as their stats dictate is also a good idea, one that's both been explored thoroughly since then, and equally often blatantly breached. So this bit of advice feels very familiar, as it's been built upon, and expanded in quite a few different directions, from the brutally tactical to the humorous. Don't mind being reminded of it at all.


The oracle: They seem to be running low on classes to rehash, so they can't do a full section on them this time around, but there's still this one. The old school divination specialist, and also pretty decent secondary healer for some reason, with their lengthy list of different real world divination methods. They're weaker than regular wizards or clerics, but hardly useless, even if they're probably better suited as NPC's. Once again, the problem is that the regular spellcasting classes have such a versatile and reliable selection, so it's difficult to make new ones that use the same memorisation rules without them feeling redundant. And as we know, that's still a long way in their future. Definitely a pain the ass overall.


Firearms: Some people want to present guns as a great world-beater, making other weapons and magic redundant. Ed Greenwood was smart enough to give us a more nuanced view back in the day, showing he's certainly not all overpowered cheesiness. Medieval guns were actually rather a pain in the ass, slow to reload, and prone to misfiring. They might be able to equal a fireball in damage-dealing potential, but they certainly aren't faster or cheaper than having a wizard on team in D&D. Which I think makes sense, otherwise introducing them ruins (or at least changes) the game dramatically. This still seems to strike the right balance between cool and challenging for long-term use.


A second volley: Ed's sequel a year later does not suffer from power creep at all. If anything, the opposite, as it's focussed on smaller, handheld weapons rather than the siege weaponry of the last one. It covers fewer weapons, but can go into greater detail on each of them, reminding us that the reason Ed seems to be a neverending font of ideas is that he does his research, and knows good sources to draw from. (and being a librarian doesn't hurt with that) He may have been trapped into endless Realms expansions in later years, but in the 80's, he did plenty of other stuff as well, and this kind of article is a good reminder of how versatile he was.

 

[(un)reason]

Best of Dragon Magazine 5


part 2/4


Instant adventures: I've seen quite a lot of articles over the years that help you get an adventure going quickly when you're short on ideas. In light of that, this particular one doesn't seem that impressive, as it has neither proper random tables to take the brainwork out of it, or the kind of detail that Dungeoncraft managed over the years. Sorry, but I'm afraid you've been superseded, and can remain in the archives.


Modern monsters: Ed Greenwood continues to play fast and loose with the 4th wall, as he will do for many years to come, making sure that if D&D PC's find themselves on modern day earth, they'll have plenty of suitable challenges, even at higher levels. (after all, a tank is the equal of many big ugly monsters. ) Yet again, we're reminded that a few decades ago, more fantasy stories were set on earth in the distant past/future, or had protagonists from the real world transported there, and even stories that started off with no apparent connections to present day earth would develop them. That trend is very interesting to examine.


How many coins in a coffer: Ah yes, the great hassle of encumbrance, weights and volumes. If you compare D&D coins to real world ones, they seem absurdly big and heavy. I think that falls under the category of excessive abstraction. Of course, since this stuff gets ignored a lot of the time, it's only a problem if you let it be one. I think at this point, this is best left as water under the bridge, and a vague hope that they'll pay more attention to the math in future editions. Certainly not worth obsessing over when we could be having fun instead.


What do you call a 25th level wizard: The oldest article in this collection, this still looks pretty short and goofy, as a semirandom way of generating long pretentious titles, but is also still useful for any system, and possibly not as ridiculous as some real world people's lists of titles. Meh, it fills a gap in the page count neatly. Sometimes that's the important thing when you're an editor and have some hard choices to make about what to include or leave out.


Ruins: This reminder that the adventure can start before you go underground by exploring abandoned buildings, along with an extensive list of examples still seems pretty decent, as well as being good practice for your repurposing skills. What kind of monsters would move into a ruined building, and how would they fiddle with it's original layout to make it feel more like home for them? It's not a no-brainer like the random dungeon generation tables, but you can still refer back to this one again and again and find something useful to your current situation. I think it deserves it's position here.


Libraries: This bit of random generation, giving you a random topic for a book plucked off the shelf in a library also seems like a lifesaver in the middle of a session. It is indeed the kind of thing that will show up repeatedly, so you might as well bookmark it, because you know how easily stuff like this gets lost if you don't keep up to date with your dewey decimal system sorting. Short but sweet, it could probably be made more comprehensive and applicable to games other than D&D style fantasy, but I'm not complaining too much about that.

 

[(un)reason]

Best of Dragon Magazine 5


part 3/4


Keep 'em guessing: Now this is an interesting one to be reminded of. Ed Greenwood's piece on keeping all the rules behind the DM's screen, so the players can concentrate on playing their character rather than number crunching. (and the DM is completely free to fudge for the sake of story whenever they feel like it) That's not something that would have flown in the days of competitive wargaming, and shows how the influx of people who saw it more as an acting and storytelling experience than one where how much stuff you could kill and take was the primary measure of success and advancement changed things over the years. It also foreshadows his love for superpowerful characters who could do things that regular PC's simply couldn't, and trying to fight was a mug's game. So this is definitely one of his more controversial pieces, depending on if you think following the rules, or doing what's best for the story is more important in an RPG. Let the debate rage over the decades.


The real barbarians: Katharine Kerr's contributions once again seem fairly dull in hindsight, devoted to realism, maybe with a bit of rose tinted spectacles, as she talks up the merits of so-called barbarian cultures. Having less of a preserved knowledge base does not mean the people there are dumber, as if anything, they actually have to think for themselves more. Knowing violence is only one insult away leads people to actually be more polite and serious about honouring their commitments. The really important thing about wealth is not how much you have, it's what you can afford to give away. It is a fairly substantial change in mindset, but calling it better than modern day thinking is very questionable. Still, it's preferable to just giving your heroes modern morality, when that would be utterly illogical given the situations they've experienced. More detailed knowledge of reality helps you make your fantasy more fantastical.


Tarsakh showers: Ed Greenwood's final little contribution here is his most explicitly Realmsian, giving us the calendar for his world and some important days in it as an example, while encouraging you to make your own one, quite possibly even more different from the real world. After all, 365.25 days per year is not a mathematically elegant number, and there could well be more or less satellites around your world (and you could be on a large moon orbiting a gas giant, a dyson sphere, or a non-spherical world that doesn't fit real world astrophysics.) They might not have known how big it was going to get, but even before Gary left, they people in the offices would have been wondering about the Realms, and just how much more Ed had to show of it. Putting this article in the best of feels like a good bit of foreshadowing for that, so this certainly has some historical significance.


The humanoids: This article probably should have gone in the 3rd best of, along with all the demihuman expansions. Guess they underestimated it's popularity, or the tendency of readers to want symmetries completed. And since the main difference between the many low HD humanoid races was initially a matter of a few HP and AC points, giving them different racial personalities was a pretty substantial help, particularly when it comes to Orcs and Hobgoblins. As with the full profiles, there's a fair amount here that stuck, and still has influence in their portrayals today. Roger may not have stuck around quite as persistently as Ed, but his output is still pretty significant in hindsight, and the way he affected humanoids is just as important as the way he affected demihumans.


Best wishes: Wishes keep on being a pain in the ass that shows up in Sage Advice, so I'm not surprised they reused this one, even if it's not a particularly fun one to read. Still, at least it merely advises you not to make them too powerful, and able to accomplish multiple things with a single wish, not to twist the intent of the caster to screw them over. (which should be reserved for wishes granted by genies, not your own spellcasting capability) That's a lot nicer than they could have been. I'm slightly less irritated by this than I was first time around, having seen more alternatives along the way, but it's still not exactly interesting reading. I could have skipped it without feeling I'd lost anything.

 

[(un)reason]

Best of Dragon Magazine 5


part 4/4


Magic for merchants: Len Lakofka disappeared from the magazine at the same time Gary did, so even if there had been more best of's, he probably wouldn't have been in them. Not that I would have missed him anyway, as this is another of his contributions that I really can't see myself using. The Merchant class wasn't particularly useful anyway, and this system to give them minor magical abilities is pretty vague, plus the basic assumptions behind it don't really work anywhere but old school D&D, so it's not useful for converting either. Probably best left in the slush pile, really.


Spell strategy: As with the random library books article, this is the kind of article that's a lifesaver in the right situations, particularly if you have random encounters in your game. It would be very boring if every wizard you encounter unleashes the same spells in the same order, especially as you never know how much of their reserves they have left, or what they might be expecting to deal with later. Roll away, and if it throws up an unexpected result, go with it, try and turn it to their best advantage as a combatant. You'll probably learn more about tactics that way than always spending hours carefully building encounters under tightly controlled circumstances, and have more fun too. Now, if only we had an updated equivalent for 3e, where the spell list can get even more cumbersome at high level.


Good hits and bad misses: Ah yes, critical hits. Surprised it took them this long to put them in the best of. But then that was the kind of thing that a vocal section of the public wanted, but the official writers really weren't that keen on, so while they may have experimented with it a bit, they tried to play it down, leave that to Rolemaster. Still, here they are, for those of you who do want the frisson of knowing you could get your skull crushed or your head lopped off at any time. Like the weapon breakage rules, I'd rather pass, but more power to you if you do. See you in the afterlife, sooner or later. Remember, this is not a case where the first to arrive is the winer.


The astral plane: Now this is one that totally deserves to be here, and I'm only surprised they didn't put the 9 hells ones in the best of's too, given how unanimously it was praised. I guess it probably comes down to space again, since that was a three part, 40-odd page piece that would still eat up nearly half a best of even without the artwork. They'd have to do a whole planar themed book to make that worth their while, and they already had more comprehensive plans on that front. This is another one that hasn't aged brilliantly, partly due to the fact that they left out the adventure from the original magazine, partly due to the loss of formatting in the name of space, and partly in comparison to the longer and more atmospheric portrayal in the Planescape books. Spending more than half your page count on detailing how specific spells and magical items are altered by being in another universe rather than just giving general principles definitely feels like more of a drag second time around. This is still cool as inspiration, but I wouldn't want to go back and run an astral adventure using only the information in here.




This issue doesn't have many recent articles, and feels like them going through and compiling "the best of the rest", whatever is left over after the themes of the last three best of's. As such, I can quite understand why they stopped doing them at this point, even without the management changes. If they'd done them every 4-5 years, they could have kept them up indefinitely, but they had to rush them for more short term profit, not knowing if D&D would last, or it was just a fad. Such are the follies of history. And so that's the end of that. Just one more to go. Time to skip forward 20 years, and see how the idiosyncrasies of the mid noughties have fared in hindsight.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Compendium


part 1/10


264 pages. Or Dragon Compendium, volume one, as it says down the bottom, as Paizo obviously intended to do more of these before WotC shut down their licence. Still, it's more than it seems at first. Just as the 3e monster manuals were the equivalent of 2-4 2e monstrous compendia, this is 3 times the size of the old best of's, and far bigger than even the largest issue of Dragon Magazine. It would probably have taken them quite a while to put together another one while still keeping up two magazines monthly. Whether my review will be even longer than issue 200, we shall see, but I won't be actively trying to push it. After all, after nearly 6 years, I'm very much looking forward to seeing the end of this.



Into the Dragon's Lair: Erik takes the introduction, unsurprisingly enough. A new series of Best Of's was one of the first things they wanted to do when Paizo spun off from WotC, but it's taken them more than two years to finish the first one, which shows you just how much they agonised over what to include in it, and how they had to squeeze working on it between getting new issues out every month, as all of the credits are staff regulars; there was no-one assigned specifically to concentrate on this project. Still, at least that means it wasn't rushed, unlike the first set of compilations, which did often feel like they were forcing it. And after the last three years of the magazine, I'm reasonably sure Erik's tastes have enough in common with mine that I'll approve of most of his choices. Once more, unto the articles.



RACES: As I noted in the previous best of's, it wasn't until the 1996 revamp that they really made regular columns packed with new monsters, spells, magical items, etc a thing, putting several in every issue come rain or shine, and in the process, giving us more than we could ever use. Still, that's 10 years in the past at the time this was published, so they have a LOT to choose from. So it's very obvious that this will involve a lot more little bits of 3e specific crunchy stuff, and fewer general articles, many of which will be from the old school issues anyway. I'm going to be seeing ones I only just redid in the previous best of's a third time in quick succession, aren't I. :sigh: But first up, new PC races! Well, it is one of the first things you pick when making a new character. Why not put it first in the running order as well.



Diabolus still seem depressingly nerfed compared to previous editions, making me not particularly enthusiastic to see them again. And they have such cool flavour as well. What price a little immunity when it cuts both ways, and can be a pain in the ass as well as a benefit.

Diopsid are one I wasn't expecting to see again, the decidedly quirky beetle-people Jonathan M Richards gave us just before the edition change. Their oddities make them an ECL +1 race, and they do get a fair number of minor tweaks to their racial abilities. They're still different enough to be a good roleplaying challenge, even if they're a little less funny this time around.

Dvati are the bonded twin people from the same era. They may seem more superficially human, but they also take a fair bit of work to make sure the edge cases of their nature aren't too exploitable under 3e rules. That's the price of an interesting concept, it seems. Sort it out now, or deal with a bunch of questions in Sage Advice.

Lupins, on the other hand, are pretty easy to convert, with the main interesting thing being their sense of smell. It's just a shame they had to fall back to the basic cultural stereotype, when there were several different ones in mystara, making them a lot more diverse than most demihuman races.

Tibbits are the oldest of these conversions, and the only one that wasn't already a PC race. Since cat related species are perennially popular, an ECL +0 feline shapeshifter seems like it'll get plenty of use. Just watch out for the kender players looking for another race to cause trouble with, as they do have definite mischievous tendencies.



CLASSES: Funnily enough, they didn't do very many new classes in the 2e years, so there's a big gap between the old updated ones, and the all new ones. As with the last chapter, this still means we're getting new rules material, which makes this collection feel less lazy than the old school ones. Whether it's faithful and/or an improvement mechanically though, is another matter altogether.



Battle Dancers get the ethnic ties from the original portrayal stripped away from them, and in fact, their requirements and abilities bear very little resemblance to the previous edition at all. A very unfaithful conversion indeed, to the point where I'm annoyed about them using the same name.

Death Masters get powered up so they start spellcasting from 1st level, and get as many spells as regular wizards. They're still weaker than regular necromantic specialists in terms of spellcasting power and flexibility, but they do get superior HD, BAB, and familiar to wizards, so they're not a completely idiotic choice. Still, they're definitely tier 2, no competition with the top classes here.

Jesters got a prestige class treatment in issue 330. Giving them a core class treatment here as well feels somewhat strange, especially knowing they were probably created concurrently. They lack the ability to kill with a joke at higher level, but they do get a wider selection of magical abilities with which to prank you with, and the agility bonuses the prestige class lacks. Overall, they're slightly less powerful than a regular bard, simply because they don't have as many additional tricks from supplements to choose from, but fill a similar niche in a party. That makes sense to me.

Mountebanks: Now this interesting. While Gary hinted at it, we never got full official stats for the Mountebank class back in the day. So this is actually all-new material for the compendium, which is very cool to see. They differ from the Charlatan not only in being a core class, but actually having some magical power (granted by a fiendish patron) to back up their trickery, putting them somewhere between a rogue and warlock in terms of character role, and with their resources handled the same way as Ninjas. Their selection of magical abilities is fixed, and not hugely powerful, but since social manipulation tricks are pretty flexible, I think they can definitely create a niche for themselves in a party, whether the other members like it or not.

Savants are another of Gary's potential creations that finally got realised way after the fact. They're another one that gets changed hugely from the previous edition, discarding the split class sage stuff to become a generalist in a similar mould to the Factotum, only not quite as mechanically experimental. Still, you'll wind up considerably better at each class's tricks than trying to be an equal advancement multiclass fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue, so I guess it just about works out mathematically.

Sha'ir still seem like a pretty faithful conversion that also smooths out their original mechanical issues. No problem at all seeing them rehashed here.

Urban druids also seem like a popular choice that it makes sense to include, since you do have to cater to the powergamers at least a little, and they're one druid variant that isn't nerfed at all. Welcome to the urban jungle boys, it gets worse here everyday.

 

[Hussar]

Hang on. Wasn't there another best of in there? The one with Gorgolands Gauntlet in it?