(un)reason
Legend
Dragon Issue 295: May 2002
part 6/10
Nodwick faces a traditional adventuring challenge. Storm the castle. As ever, the techniques used are not so orthodox.
Class acts gives us a 5 level prestige class for the first time. It also gets cut down to a single page, with no illustration. Bit of a step down, really. Anyway, Andy Collins gives us the Siege Engineer. One PC's are fairly unlikely to take, because it is only useful in a specialist campaign, but if you've reached high level and decided to do the old companion set thing of settling down, building a castle, and attracting followers, having one of these as your cohort and chief of guard would be immensely useful. Similarly, if you do a lot of breaking into castles, for whatever reason, and have a high int fighter, you might find it useful to dip into this for the Disable Device skill. Just don't take it on a whim, even if it is only a 5 level class. If the DM isn't on board, you'll just end up not using half it's abilities most of the time.
Elminsters guide to the realms: As Ed has done before, but very few other writers have the space to do, he includes a false rumour in his campaign setting. In a world full of supernatural creatures, it's surprising more plot hooks aren't false, or the product of one thing pretending to be another. Amusingly, the illusions are more impressive than the real thing this time around, which is just the way the actual culprits want it. Fitting with that, the illustration is really good this month as well, being both evocative and useful, while keeping the real dangers out of sight at the edges of the image, where a casual skimmer won't spot them immediately. I think this counts as another success, and shows again that he can do cool things no-one else can get away with because of how much he's done in the past. It's good to be on top.
part 6/10
Nodwick faces a traditional adventuring challenge. Storm the castle. As ever, the techniques used are not so orthodox.
Class acts gives us a 5 level prestige class for the first time. It also gets cut down to a single page, with no illustration. Bit of a step down, really. Anyway, Andy Collins gives us the Siege Engineer. One PC's are fairly unlikely to take, because it is only useful in a specialist campaign, but if you've reached high level and decided to do the old companion set thing of settling down, building a castle, and attracting followers, having one of these as your cohort and chief of guard would be immensely useful. Similarly, if you do a lot of breaking into castles, for whatever reason, and have a high int fighter, you might find it useful to dip into this for the Disable Device skill. Just don't take it on a whim, even if it is only a 5 level class. If the DM isn't on board, you'll just end up not using half it's abilities most of the time.
Elminsters guide to the realms: As Ed has done before, but very few other writers have the space to do, he includes a false rumour in his campaign setting. In a world full of supernatural creatures, it's surprising more plot hooks aren't false, or the product of one thing pretending to be another. Amusingly, the illusions are more impressive than the real thing this time around, which is just the way the actual culprits want it. Fitting with that, the illustration is really good this month as well, being both evocative and useful, while keeping the real dangers out of sight at the edges of the image, where a casual skimmer won't spot them immediately. I think this counts as another success, and shows again that he can do cool things no-one else can get away with because of how much he's done in the past. It's good to be on top.