Let's read the entire run

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 154: February 1990

part 3/5

The making of a paladin: Great. More on this irritating subject. :sigh: A relatively short article that feels more like an extended forum piece, this rebutts some of the recent controversies around them, with some talk on their training, and how they differ from clerics and regular fighters. The writer takes the approach that getting into classes is not an easy business, requiring years of training from youth rather than being derivable from divine inspiration or picked up on the job. Not the best approach from a dramatic story point of view, and also one that fosters the view of Paladin as elitist detached from everyday problems and compromises. Not very keen on this one, as it very much does not solve the stereotyping and characterization problems that bedevil the class. No help here. Moving swiftly on then.


All in the family: Heraldry! There's something we haven't seen covered since 1981. And since this new article draws heavily on the new proficiency system, there's vary little rehash involved. Unfortunately, this leads to a textbook case of supplements spreading slots too thin, with 8(!) needed to get all the skills involved. Not a very well considered bit of mechanics. No-one's going to bother with that. Well, not unless the guild has it's own draconian enforcement methods to keep the nobles in line and employing their services, which this certainly presents hints towards. Overall, it's an entertaining but decidedly problematic article, with lots of cool little flavour bits, but decidedly dodgy crunch meaning they may not work out well when applied to your game. Y'know, Roger, as an editor you're supposed to spot and fix issues like this. I guess the system's still new, they haven't had time to see the bugs develop yet.


John Denver says plant a tree for your tomorrow. More crap completely untargeted advertising. Go AWAY! We get enough of this from Michael Jackson. We do not need sensitive acoustic guitar playing on top of the eco crap preaching. And don't you even think about joining in, Ozzy. For the supposed prince of darkness, you don't half have a bunch of soppy preachy ballads in your back catalogue. I'm watching you. Erm. Sorry about that folks. We now return you to your scheduled reviewing.


For king and country: Hmm. Army based gaming. There's something you'd think we'd have more on than we do. We've had quite a bit of stuff on playing and managing an army from the top down, since D&D does have extensive wargaming roots, and the name level stuff presents that as a default option. We've had several editorials from Roger about gamers within the real world military. But roleplaying as a standard grunt or a special forces troop within an army? Somehow we've managed to get this far without the magazine mentioning the idea, save in relation to Top Secret, a few reviews of modern games, and as your backstory in Traveller. And it's such an easy setup to create adventures for, because you have someone actively issuing your characters with missions without the railroading complaints. This article takes a fairly gritty simulationist approach to the topic, with tables where you roll to enlist, to find out your odds of promotion, what duty you're assigned too, and what happens during a particular year. You may want to fudge these a bit to ensure the group can stay together if not playing a solo game. It also sticks closely to the medieval fighter-centric view of armies, where they don't take advantage of the awesome benefits having magical healing and artillery in your arsenal to win wars. So it's a well written article on it's own terms, with plenty of detail, that is at the same time, very poorly suited to D&D worlds and campaign gaming. There is a good campaign to be had with this idea, but you'll have to find somewhere else to draw from if you want to avoid an awkwardly disjointed experience.


The deathgate cycle, the new heptology by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. They can really churn them out.


How to win wars and influence people: Thomas M. Kane gets a second article in on the theme. This is another one drawing heavily on realism issues, pointing out that logistics are usually a bigger enemy to overcome for an army than the supposed human foe. Disease, horrible terrain, disorganised command chains, morale issues, this is why zombies really revolutionise fantasy warfare. With plenty of quotations by Sun Tzu and other noted generals, they once again remind us that real battles bear very little resemblance to D&D ones, and are more commonly exercises in who can get the drop on the opponent and break their spirit rather than head on fights that end when one side is all dead. It's no wonder that adventuring party seems a far more glamorous option than army grunt. So with all the themed articles this month being at mediocre or below, this has not been a good issue so far. Let's hope the other features manage a bit better.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 154: February 1990

part 4/5

Role-playing reviews: Genre mashing! In the infant days of roleplaying, people piled everything they could into D&D, largely due to lack of other options. However, these days, we have systems specifically designed for very particular blendings of genres, instead of just a straightforward kitchen sink. And let's face it, this isn't a bad thing at all. So Ken's chosen remit this month is to examine some of these experiments, see which ones have turned out best.

Space 1889 sees GDW put a very different spin on space opera from Traveller. Drawing heavily on the works of Jules Verne, H G Wells, and other proto pulp and sci-fi authors, it sees the british empire extending their reach to the rest of the solar system in steampunk spaceships. The combat system seems designed to facilitate swashbuckling adventures where you're far more likely to pass out and have to escape or be rescued than killed outright, and you can integrate the board game into the overall ruleset for extra airship battley fun. And the settings of mars and venus are well developed and full of adventure hooks. It all seems like good rip-roaring politically incorrect fun. Very tempting.

Shadowrun of course merges cyberpunk with D&D flavour fantasy to create a game more popular than any of the pure cyberpunk games out there. Demihuman PCs. Various monsters, including Dunkelzahn the dragon CEO and all the undead people love to tell stories with. All the cool powers you're familiar with from years of gaming, plus cyberware enhancement and netrunning minigames. It's no wonder it appeals to a broad range of people. It is however, a bit mechanically dense and clunky, with disconnected subsystems all over the place that take quite a lot of learning. Ken is a bit dubious as to if it'll be worth it. Wait 'til the next edition unless you can take the steep learning curve.

Course, it's easy to forget that AD&D has quite a lot of clunky bits bolted on itself, it's just that we're used to them from years of play. Spelljammer adds more than it's fair share of these, as thy have to figure out ways of handling gravity, air supply, ship combat and interstellar flight that are fun and not too bogged down in realism. As with Shadowrun, the familiar elements should help ease the transition to new vistas. There are several new PC and NPC races, and quite a few existing monsters get repurposed for the new environment. You can have weird and wonderful adventures in in a setting more akin to some medieval fantasist's idea of space than the real thing, or you can just replace the hollow asteroids and ruined spaceships for regular dungeons and carry on pretty much as usual. Once again, even the official designers are swinging back towards freewheeling, house rule happy fun in their gaming. Ken is positively giddy with the possibilities, and I'm pretty positive he's not just saying that to be a company shill this time. Roll on the supplements.

In another amusing footnote, we find out that cyberpunk authors are becoming aware of the RPGs based on their work just as quickly as the fantasy ones, with Walter Jon Williams providing an official conversion of his Hardwired novel for the Cyberpunk system. This comes highly recommended as well. Interesting. They don't miss a trick. D&D's new system for making faerie folk available as PCs seems to be pretty decent as well. All in all, a very positive set of reviews, with a well above selection of notable products. This has been a fun bit of reviewing.


Fiction: Raistlin and the knight of solamnia by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. (Or just Racy Hickman :rips bodice: if you go by the misspelled contents page ) This is a little prequel piece in which our delightfuly 'cesty little canon pairing engage in a little small scale heroism, lifting a curse and learning a few moral lessons, which, this being a prequel, they'll fail rather to take on board. Story of their world. An amusingly chaotic intro in which kender get all the dread they deserve segues into an adventure where the heroes win by brains rather than brawn and the supposed good guys are proved to be prideful jackasses, again. :shakes head: Pretty much exactly what you'd expect from these two. If you like their work, you'll like this. If not, you know what to do by now.


The role of computers: Mines of Titan is a sci-fi RPG set on Saturn's moon. A pretty open ended game, your theoretical goal is to earn enough money to leave. In the meantime, there's tons of things to do. You can gamble. You can go bounty hunting. You can talk to people and get all sorts of missions. Choose your buddies carefully, and make sure you train up before tackling the hard missions. Another way to eat up hours and hours of your life.

David Wolf: Secret agent gets a fairly negative review because it's mostly animated cut-scenes where you have no power to influence the plot at all. The bits where you do have control are ridiculously easy as well. Lame. Go rent a movie instead. This is what happens when you try and build a game around a gimmick instead of strong gameplay design.

M1 Tank platoon, on the other hand, gets 5 stars. Not only do you have to pilot a tank, you get to control a whole platoon and co-ordinate their actions against the enemy. This is one instance where you really need to read the manual, which as it's 200 pages long, means this game won't be for everyone. But with both great graphics and a huge tactical challenge with near infinite options, it's just the thing for a bunch of jaded reviewers.

Star fleet II: Krellan Commander sees you attacking the humans you were saving in the last installment. it's another enormous game, so much so that you'll need to adjust your computer's buffer settings to avoid crashes, and it'll still be sluggish unless you're on a high end machine. But once again, that doesn't mean they don't like it, just that you should think before buying.

Several other notable new games mentioned in the news section. Ghostbusters II. Double Dragon! And the second dragonlance conversion, Dragons of flame. They also seem to be getting over their griping about copy protection phase. That's a vague relief.

 

[Jhaelen]

The princess ark stuff is of course a welcome addition to the roster, and I look forward to them developing that over the next few years.

Wow, really? The Princess Ark article series was something I could never quite figure out. I didn't even understand what it was supposed to be about! Definitely the part of the magazine I liked least.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 154: February 1990

part 5/5

Novel ideas: Hmm. Looks like we have a second new column starting this month. The book department is one of TSR's most profitable divisions now, with it's relatively low materials costs, and mass market penetration even among non gamers. Actually, they've recently found out that they're the second biggest sellers of fantasy books in the whole country. So why not give it a little more promotion. Better than throwing good money after bad. And so the magazine becomes a little less about roleplaying, and a little more a mouthpiece for promoting whatever TSR is up to at the moment. On the plus side, I finally get to find out a bit about Jeff Swycaffer, along with Mary Herbert and Robin Bailey, as they profile the writers behind some of their recent and upcoming books. The books they've written, a little about their lives, their literary influences. It's been a few years since they last ran profiles on people, and this is fairly interesting reading, although I get the impression that they did some serious cutting to fit them all into a couple of pages. Like the mini's column, I actually rather enjoyed this as a change of pace, but am all too aware that it could soon become a waste of space. How very awkward. Guess I'll just have to keep judging them on a month by month basis.


The voyage of the princess ark: Another 5 weeks in the life of Haldemar and co this month. Due to a divination, they choose to head northeast, to see whatever is out there. This leads them to a mountainous island where they encounter trouble negotiating the landscape due to their maximum flight height, and then they nearly die when a dragon attacks. Along the way, they have to sacrifice another of the crewmembers. The plot definitely thickens. Once again we see that despite their power, there are more than enough things out there in Mystara able to challenge them. Plus the fact that they choose to save the life of the member of a rival noble house over a loyal crewman makes it even more clear what kind of "heroes" we're dealing with here. They're not going to breeze into a town, solve all the puzzles, kill the biggest evildoers, and then breeze off into the sunset with a cheering crowd behind them, leaving the world a cleaner, happier place. They're going to bounce from one scrape to another, frequently making hurried escapes from whatever they've pissed off this time. And the adventure is going to be all the more interesting and unpredictable as a result. This time round, we also get some player-centric crunch, with a spell described in the journal being statted out. Need some help with your navigation. Use this. It's good for your entire fleet of skyships. You can also reverse it, which makes for great hidden locations. If you've made it to companion level play and want to protect your domains, you should be able to see the value in this.

Dragonmirth reminds us that the reality behind monopoly is just as cutthroat and grim as that behind D&D. Yamara gets married. Wackiness ensues.


TSR previews: Dragonlance is once again our biggest export. DLA1: Dragon Dawn is the first of a trilogy of adventures set in Taladas. Good to see them once again giving their new properties plenty of push. Ansalon, on the other hand is stuck in the past. The Prequel trilogy has proven so popular that they've decided to give us another three books. This time, it's Riverwind who's history we get to see in greater detail.

D&D rolls out it's creature features fast and hard, with PC3: The sea people. Jim Bambra lets you mix merpeople, sea elves, tritons, dolphins, etc to create undersea parties that rival regular ones in racial diversity. That's unlikely to get a follow up.

Lankhmar gets revisited for a quick adventure. Nigel Findley does LNA1: Thieves of Lankhmar. Will his distinctive style translate to the old S&S milieu?

Flint Dille also seems to have been a busy bunny lately. He delivers his sister wolves howl, rumble of thunder a Buck Rogers graphic novel, and an agent 13 book, Acolytes of Darkness. Several big names are involved in their creation, including Frank Miller, Buzz Dixon, and Dan Spiegle. Very interesting indeed.


Who was that masked android?: Our token non D&D article at the end this time is a Marvel Superheroes one on secret identities, and their preservation in the face of investigation. Let's face it, if it weren't for narrative convention, and a decent supply of mindwiping and retcons, there would be far fewer supers with their disguises intact. (And it'd be another order of magnitude or two harder 20 these years later, with the huge increase in surveillance and recording technology, both government and private. ) In contrast to the recent Top Secret articles, this is a crunch heavy examination of the various factors affecting your chances of being discovered, well tied into their universal resolution scheme. The bigger your impact, both as a person, and a superhero, the greater the chances someone'll come along able to put two and two together and say, hey, if you took his glasses off, doesn't he look exactly like .......... ? Anyway, I found this another article that's both useful and likable, with it's easily determined divisions, and plenty of examples.


With a truly rubbish themed section, and several other very problematic articles, this is a bad issue overall, but in an interesting way. The Princess ark is still fascinating, and we're seeing the start of the early 2nd ed controversies, which is also fun to read about, but with lots of crap articles, and strong signs that the magazine is being interfered with in unpleasant ways by upper management, it makes for an unsatisfactory experience overall. Stressful times man. Let's hope there are some improvements ahead.

 

[(un)reason]

Wow, really? The Princess Ark article series was something I could never quite figure out. I didn't even understand what it was supposed to be about! Definitely the part of the magazine I liked least.

It's basically just episodic gonzo pulp adventures that also happen to give us some nice bits of crunch along the way. I'll agree that sometimes it gets a bit silly, but it does have lots of useful ideas and worldbuilding pointers incorporated. Plus, like the gazetteers, it embraces D&D's rules quirkiness rather than trying to fight against it. (apart from haldemar's persistent ability to get knocked out without being killed ) I rather enjoy the rules as in setting physics approach to design.

 

[LordVyreth]

It's basically just episodic gonzo pulp adventures that also happen to give us some nice bits of crunch along the way. I'll agree that sometimes it gets a bit silly, but it does have lots of useful ideas and worldbuilding pointers incorporated. Plus, like the gazetteers, it embraces D&D's rules quirkiness rather than trying to fight against it. (apart from haldemar's persistent ability to get knocked out without being killed ) I rather enjoy the rules as in setting physics approach to design.

I enjoyed it as well, but I have to admit that as it got farther in, I started losing interest. Part of it was was too many Greyhawkian terms and that new Red Steel stuff they tried to push, and part was how out there with the living ship and other planes and hollow world, so I started losing track. Plus eventually they ran into nothing but anthropomorphic animal people each time.

 

[JoeNotCharles]

That's funny, because I never liked the first couple of bits where all they were exploring was jungle. It helps if you'd read a bunch of the Gazeteers, so you had these incredibly detailed countries and then a big white map with nothing weird names around it. So it was really exciting to finally be finding out what was in these other countries - and disappointing when the answer was "trackless jungle".

Vulture Peninsula was awesome, though.

 

[Orius]

It's basically just episodic gonzo pulp adventures that also happen to give us some nice bits of crunch along the way. I'll agree that sometimes it gets a bit silly, but it does have lots of useful ideas and worldbuilding pointers incorporated. Plus, like the gazetteers, it embraces D&D's rules quirkiness rather than trying to fight against it. (apart from haldemar's persistent ability to get knocked out without being killed ) I rather enjoy the rules as in setting physics approach to design.

I've seen a little bit of the Princess Ark articles and they seemed pretty good. A nice mix of worldbuilding, crunch and stuff to help DMs develop campaigns. A shame it was for the D&D game, or maybe it's a shame that D&D and AD&D diverged the way they did.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 155: March 1990

part 1/6

116 pages. After 4 years of staying stable, the page count starts to creep up again. Have paper costs decreased? Are they getting more advertising in? Are the sales going up? I don't think it's that last one. In any case, that means more stuff for me to read and review. The 90's are definitely going to take even longer to get through than the 80's. And that's not even counting the frickin insert, which is missing again. :mutter mutter mutter: Okay, that settles it. I'm easing off the gas right now, rather than waiting for the burnout to hit. I've managed daily installments for a year now without a break, I don't want to ruin that good track record. Let's see if this issue has anything that'll cheer me up.

In this issue:

Letters: A letter from a new sculpting company looking for employees. At least, it looks that way to me. Hmm.

Someone curious about the witch NPC class. Roger is quite happy to point out the last two issues they appeared in. You'll have to find them yourself, mind.

A letter from someone who's noticed some of the displacer beast illustrations have insufficient legs. Sloppy artists, again. Send them to remedial fantasy anatomy classes.

An amusing suggestion for naming your dumb rampaging fighters/barbarians. Name them after the sound their weapon makes. Roger is amused, but a touch bewildered. How very 60's Batman.

A letter from someone who really likes many of the covers, and wishes they included a little more detail about the artists and methods of production. Bah. Write to them yourself, see if they want to give away trade secrets.

Connected to this, a letter asking where the hell the arrowhead on issue 150's cover is. You'd never spot it if you don't know it's there, particularly with the scan resolution I have to investigate from.


Sage advice gets to be a fetching shade of peach this month. Not that this does anything for the readibility. But that was never a problem, anyway.

Are demons and devils dropped forever? This sucks! ( We're carefully considering all the options. We don't want to annoy anyone. So we'll work out a compromise solution that merely annoys everyone a little bit. )

Do shamans get bonus spells for high wisdom. (Only if they learned their powers, rather than getting them innate.)

Can I photocopy the monstrous compendia sheets (yes. But if you sell it, the TSR rules nazis will kick your door down with their jackboots, and exact their brutal revenge. )

Are the new dragons really THAT badass? ( Not quite. We have our reasons for making all these changes.

Will we gets stats for tiamat and bahamut (2nd ed don't stat deities. Another casualty of the bitchin brigade. )

What can dragons dig through ( Anything common in their native terrain. Dig it, baby. )

What's the age category of a random dragon. (We suggest 2d4. Otherwise horrible random deaths may result. )

Why can dragons have AC better than -10 ( Because they're over a thousand years old. When thousand years old you are, ignore rules binding lesser creatures you may.)

What is the spell detect gems (It's not a spell, it's an innate power. As to why dragons have it, that should be obvious)

What's an alignment of nil (editing error. We were considering making nonintelligent creatures unaligned rather than true neutral, making the distinction between those that consciously maintain a balance and ones that just don't give a about morality, but it fell through. I'm sure you're intrigued to know that little tidbit)

Do fireballs do extra damage against white dragons (wait till next edition dear. It's only 10 years. You can get way more badass, and they won't even go up an age category in the meantime. )

Why are fire giants only immune to nonmagical fire. Why doesn't dragon breath count as magical (Because we don't want to nerf wizards, and we don't mind nerfing red dragons sometimes, because they aren't PC's)

Where are my wolverines, whales and sharks ( In a minute dear. Compendia 2 and 3 will be in the shops before you know it.)

How smart are werebears (smarter than the average bear)

What's the xp for noble genies ( Really not enough. Better to be their friend than their enemy )

Shouldn't liches be limited to 10 HD (No. They're monsters now. They scoff at your mortal HD limitations. On the plus side, they don't get con modifiers anymore. Well that's interesting to consider)

Shouldn't soldiers be tougher than farmers (have you seen what farmers put up with in D&D? Random plains encounters are way meaner than random city ones. )

Why was the huecava renamed (oops. No-one'll care, especially when the new version is more intuitive to pronounce.)

How strong are korred. ( Worryingly)

How much damage do cat's rear claw rakes do (enough to kill a wizard, no trouble )

Do orcs have too many chiefs and not enough indians ( Great. More errata. Pass Skip the historical revisionist whitewash )

Can rope trick be cast sideways or down (honestly, you let them cast lightning bolts at an angle, and suddenly we get a load of copycat questions. Skip is not amused)

How many pinches of dust of disappearance do you normally find (how long is a piece of string. How big is a pinch. When is being invisible around someone sexual harassment? These are all questions with highly variable answers.)

Does a wizard raising their strength with a wish still suffer the temporary penalty (yes)

Do you get a bonus for attacking someone while they're spellcasting (no. They can still get out the way)

Can you memorize the same spell more than once simultaneously (yes, but not advisable)

I still don't get the difference between spells known and spells memorized (Skip has been more than generous with you. Skip is giving you one last chance to pull your boots up and fly straight. Otherwise Skip will do what skip does, and show you what he can really do with his sagely knowledge. )

Unearthed Arcana is different from it's source material in Dragon (Our playtesting, we had it. And we used it. Course, that's all in the past now, thanks to Lorraine Roll of thunder, organ music, wolves howl: ) Williams. Do not mourn for us. But be glad that we lived. )

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Magazine Issue 155: March 1990

part 2/6

Forum is another big one this month.
S. D. Anderson sorta rebutts the people picking apart his scenario where an itemed up fighter slaughters a horde of not so well equipped enemies. Yes, you're right that if they surrounded him, they'd probably win. But there are bottleneck situations where they wouldn't get the chance. The rest of his comments get very dull and nitpicky. Bleh. Let's just enjoy the game instead of dissecting it.

James Wise uses the emergent method of determining class and alignment, as espoused in N4. This means characters are more likely to stay in character. I very much approve, having used that method myself.

R. J. Wenzel reminds us that the point of monsters is to be defeated. If every monster was a supra genius with a vast xanatos roulette of contingency plans running at all times, the players aren't going to find things very fun. Similarly, in his game, spellcasters and magical monsters are rare enough that conventional forces and defences still work most of the time. Let the PC's be truly exceptional, like they should be if you want to replicate heroic stories.

Ahmed G. Amin doesn't allow resurrection in his games. Let death keep it's sting. Blah da de blah.

Larry Lidz wants to get rid of alignment and ban druids from making leather armour. Someone else really ought to be playing some game other than D&D.

Wesley Crowell reminds us that politely and clearly explaining things is the solution to parent rage. Acting as if you have something to be ashamed of, on the other hand, will definitely make it worse. Way of the world.

Gregg Sharp thinks that japanese animation is a rich source of gaming appropriate material to draw from, that is almost completely ignored at the moment. Muahahahahahaha!!!! :wipes tears from eyes: Man, that's another good reminder how much things are going to change in geek circles in the next few years. I wonder how long it'll be before we get a letter complaining ZOMG D&D is totally being animeised this suks. In any case, a surprising number of familiar names are mentioned, including Dragonball (no Z yet) Ranma 1/2, Dirty Pair and Urusei Yatsura. There's entire countries full of cool stuff out there, just waiting to be translated. Don't get stuck in the same old cliches the local media uses.

Bob Keefover suggests that there ought to be a stage magic nonweapon proficiency. Both real wizards and rogues would find that to be of great use, one for imitation, and the other for economy. I'm pretty sure that appears in a supplement or two at some point.

Dan Silvinski continues to fight the AD&D vs D&D war. He chooses the greater complexity of AD&D. Seems like that's getting rather more press than the probable AD&D 1st vs 2nd war that could have happened.

Robert Morrison, on the other hand, chooses D&D. Once you add on the companion, master, immortal and gazetteer stuff, the question of which game is simpler and has less options is decidedly less clear-cut. And he still believes that the D&D planar and weapon mastery systems are superior to their AD&D counterparts.

David Howery responds to the people raging over his revised cavalier, justifying his nerfs in a lengthy point by point manner. Yawnarama. How little things have changed.


Wild in the woods: Despite being about as mysterious and magical to the average D&D player as glass windows, elves are still technically fae creatures. Which means a special on them is likely to involve pulling some of the ridiculous number of elf related articles they get from the slush pile, just to placate that insatiable demand. So, they haven't done an article on wild elves yet. Fresh from poncing up the paladin a little more, Eric Oppen sets out to demonstrate exactly why there aren't any wild half-elves. Along with not being very bright, they're a dour humourless xenophobic lot who'd be much happier if all the so-called civilised races just vanished from the face of the earth. If it weren't for their dramatically different environments, they'd get along surprisingly well with duergar. A very good example of neutral not meaning apathetic good or ruthlessly selfish evil without the sadism, but actual neutrality. They seem perfectly aligned with chaotic neutral as presented in issue 106's paladins article - Me and my tribe are the only Real People in the world, and we're not going to trust anyone else further than we can gut them from with a well placed arrow. (which I guess makes them perfectly suited for a certain kind of adventuring party. ) A well focussed, but curiously unlikable article, he seems to have got into character a little too well when writing this, making it come off as hostile to the reader, not just the other creatures IC. Still, it is interesting, so it's certainly not a total failure. Just a little strange.


The elfin gods: Or, see this freelancer do a mediocre pastiche of Roger Moore's elf god naming conventions from issue 60. Set the random syllable generator to flowing and melodious, and let's look for gaps in their portfolios that need filling. Meharama. And since none of these guys and gals made it into 2e's Monster Mythology, I suspect the official writers feel much the same way. They're not even updated for the new edition with sphere lists for their priests. Come on, it's been nearly a year now. Get your acts together!