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<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5978158" data-attributes="member: 27780"><p><strong><u>Dragon Issue 287: September 2001</u></strong></p><p></p><p></p><p>part 2/7</p><p></p><p></p><p>Up on a soapbox: Gary's finished trying to find out exactly what a role-playing game is to all of us. Now what? Ancient actual play stories! Why, he remembers it like it was yesterday. Well, as someone who's read through all the issues from back in the day now, I can safely say that the amount of contemporary written material is way smaller both in number and size of books, which leaves obsessive old schoolers forever hungry for more information to sate their curiosity. So here we get to hear about what was possibly the very first recurring villain in a D&D game, an evil dwarf with boots of speed and a repulsion ray shooter, which allowed him to escape and have multiple encounters with the players before being finished off for good. Which of course made them hate him all the more. This is a good demonstration of how if you want monsters to survive more than a single encounter, you need to build them accordingly, because D&D does not make it easy if you play by the RAW. But it can be done, and it can be made fun. And let's face it, it's the things that were hard to pull off that we remember most. They had to step out of their comfort zones to make and publish D&D in the first place. We still ought to be doing the same in our games. </p><p></p><p></p><p>Dork tower switches genre, but the violence remains. </p><p></p><p></p><p>Dreamlands: We start our planar articles with one emphasising the toolkit elements of the new MotP. Where should the plane of dreams go in your cosmology if you have one? Jeff Grubb manages to find justifications to fit it in all 4 of their classifications, with fairly substantial differences between each of the versions. In your multiiverse, are dreams little universes you create when you sleep that end when you awake, or are you tapping into something big and universal, that may or may not have a ruler, and may or may not be that easy to visit physically. So this shows off a fairly substantial change between this and 2e. They've well and truly abandoned one true wayism and big convoluted metaplots (Forgotten Realms aside) to encourage you to build your own setting instead. So this is very cool indeed, and jam packed with ideas to steal, mix and match for D&D or another system. I think it fully deserves to be a leading article. </p><p></p><p></p><p>When celestials attack: One problem we've encountered before is trying to make many of the planes good for adventuring in. Too much conflict, such as the instant lethality of some elemental planes, and an adventure is difficult to keep going. Too little conflict, and it never starts in the first place. But still, it's not that hard to come up with reasons for conflict in the upper planes. There's tons of celestial beings of varying alignments, power levels and priorities, and I'm sure the PC's can manage to get on the bad side of one of them by doing something morally ambiguous or short-sighted. The weaker ones can be dogmatic and inflexible, while the more powerful ones have complicated sets of priorities as they try to do the most good over the long term, and sometimes sacrifices need to be made. So this looks at a broad spread of celestial beings, and what their particular triggers are likely to be. It does a pretty good job of reminding us that they're not a homogenous group at all, and your experiences should be quite different depending on where you are and who you talk too. The kind of stuff that provides plenty of non rehashed adventure hooks, and shows us what we can do with all these fantastic universes out there. Which hopefully'll get some more people using them, instead of popping off to the abyss for another slaughterfest. And I do value variety. </p><p></p><p></p><p>VS Celestials: Having come up with plenty of reasons why you could end up in a fight with celestials, it's time for the mechanical advice on how to deal with it. They assume that you'll want to stay on the side of light, and take them down without killing them, which further affects the tactics they advise. They tend to have fewer weaknesses than their evil counterparts, so this is a fairly tricky one to advise upon. Disrupting their vast array of spell-like powers does seem like a good idea though. And if you're neutral or evil, then using those spells that are super effective against good creatures will make things easier (particularly protection from good's enforced pacifism thing. ) Still, don't expect it to be easy. Best advice is to outnumber them, given how many more evil creatures there are in the monster books than good ones.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 5978158, member: 27780"] [B][U]Dragon Issue 287: September 2001[/U][/B] part 2/7 Up on a soapbox: Gary's finished trying to find out exactly what a role-playing game is to all of us. Now what? Ancient actual play stories! Why, he remembers it like it was yesterday. Well, as someone who's read through all the issues from back in the day now, I can safely say that the amount of contemporary written material is way smaller both in number and size of books, which leaves obsessive old schoolers forever hungry for more information to sate their curiosity. So here we get to hear about what was possibly the very first recurring villain in a D&D game, an evil dwarf with boots of speed and a repulsion ray shooter, which allowed him to escape and have multiple encounters with the players before being finished off for good. Which of course made them hate him all the more. This is a good demonstration of how if you want monsters to survive more than a single encounter, you need to build them accordingly, because D&D does not make it easy if you play by the RAW. But it can be done, and it can be made fun. And let's face it, it's the things that were hard to pull off that we remember most. They had to step out of their comfort zones to make and publish D&D in the first place. We still ought to be doing the same in our games. Dork tower switches genre, but the violence remains. Dreamlands: We start our planar articles with one emphasising the toolkit elements of the new MotP. Where should the plane of dreams go in your cosmology if you have one? Jeff Grubb manages to find justifications to fit it in all 4 of their classifications, with fairly substantial differences between each of the versions. In your multiiverse, are dreams little universes you create when you sleep that end when you awake, or are you tapping into something big and universal, that may or may not have a ruler, and may or may not be that easy to visit physically. So this shows off a fairly substantial change between this and 2e. They've well and truly abandoned one true wayism and big convoluted metaplots (Forgotten Realms aside) to encourage you to build your own setting instead. So this is very cool indeed, and jam packed with ideas to steal, mix and match for D&D or another system. I think it fully deserves to be a leading article. When celestials attack: One problem we've encountered before is trying to make many of the planes good for adventuring in. Too much conflict, such as the instant lethality of some elemental planes, and an adventure is difficult to keep going. Too little conflict, and it never starts in the first place. But still, it's not that hard to come up with reasons for conflict in the upper planes. There's tons of celestial beings of varying alignments, power levels and priorities, and I'm sure the PC's can manage to get on the bad side of one of them by doing something morally ambiguous or short-sighted. The weaker ones can be dogmatic and inflexible, while the more powerful ones have complicated sets of priorities as they try to do the most good over the long term, and sometimes sacrifices need to be made. So this looks at a broad spread of celestial beings, and what their particular triggers are likely to be. It does a pretty good job of reminding us that they're not a homogenous group at all, and your experiences should be quite different depending on where you are and who you talk too. The kind of stuff that provides plenty of non rehashed adventure hooks, and shows us what we can do with all these fantastic universes out there. Which hopefully'll get some more people using them, instead of popping off to the abyss for another slaughterfest. And I do value variety. VS Celestials: Having come up with plenty of reasons why you could end up in a fight with celestials, it's time for the mechanical advice on how to deal with it. They assume that you'll want to stay on the side of light, and take them down without killing them, which further affects the tactics they advise. They tend to have fewer weaknesses than their evil counterparts, so this is a fairly tricky one to advise upon. Disrupting their vast array of spell-like powers does seem like a good idea though. And if you're neutral or evil, then using those spells that are super effective against good creatures will make things easier (particularly protection from good's enforced pacifism thing. ) Still, don't expect it to be easy. Best advice is to outnumber them, given how many more evil creatures there are in the monster books than good ones. [/QUOTE]
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