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Thanks!

I'd expect a lot of it is that it takes a while to build up a good villain. The mastermind BBEG behind a 20-level Adventure Path will have had a lot more time to do memorable things than anybody from a module for 1st-level characters.

MMV has a couple of candidates. Tirbanas are caste insects (there are four different kinds) that incubate their eggs in humanoids. Mockery monarchs kill people and implant creepy centipede-like critters into their bodies; these mockery drones try (badly) to imitate their hosts, then jump out...

I remember (with disturbing clarity) using the 396 Berserkers as an XP factory. Once your front-rank fighters are tough enough to not get killed in one round, it's easy. Tell the front rank to attack, the bard to use his Fire Horn on one set of 99 Berserkers, one spellcaster to cast REST, and...

Wow. Yep, that's it, all right. http://www.empirewargames.com/ has the director's cut of those old ads; now I wonder whether that 640x480 GIF made the rounds of some BBS'es, back in the day. (And... Ganghedge!? I remember Westhedge and Starhedge, but, ahem...)

The dot-matrix-printed ads for Ironhedge -- somebody's tiny-press RPG -- that were in the back of many a Dragon Magazine in the late '80s still stick in my memory. I wonder how many copies sold, and how much all those ads cost. The PDF market has totally changed that sort of thing. Then there...

The biggest surprise I've had along those lines was when I found out a couple of teachers at my high school played Magic: the Gathering. Much more recently -- by which I mean, since I started grad school -- it seems that at least half the people in my department are F/SF nerds of one kind or...

They really like that gimmick, don't they? The character you use must make a big difference in that fight. My paladin took her down so quickly the whole thing was anticlimactic. (He also didn't get to meet the demilich at all, so I can't compare notes on that one.) I'd actually figured that...

Hey, it's not as if invincible armor comes cheap! (Aside: I was amused a couple of years ago to discover that bicycles cost less than the sum of their parts.)

Advancing Hordes sells d6's with dragons in place of 1's, and MacGregor Historical Games sells d6's that look like a dragon compressed into a cube (ouch!). I haven't seen any dragon-themed dice that aren't d6's, unfortunately.

Yeah, it's a McGuffin, but it'd make more sense if bad guys had hidden that particular McGuffin. Would there be problematic consequences if you changed the backstory so that Dragotha stopped the ancient adventurers from getting his phylactery, and many Bothans... er, somebody was able to find...

Never mind where they hid it, is there a reason they didn't destroy it?

Gaming treatments of Rome tend to focus on earlier periods than you're interested in (heck, historians tend to neglect the period you're interested in in favor of earlier eras), and Constantine's world is very different from Augustus'. Zenobia is based on the Roman world circa 260 AD, which...

One of the interesting optional systems in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia was a way of doing that. Characters got "weapon choices" every few levels, and could either spend them to become proficient in new weapons, or to get better at using weapons they were already proficient in. Each weapon had...

The cool thing is that "Kopf" is actually derived from Latin "cuppa", "bowl" -- "Haupt" is the German word that comes from the same root as "heafod" and Latin "caput". The Proto-Indo-European for "head" was *kauput; the initial "k" became "h" in the Germanic family.

Borders was the closest thing to an LGS I had for over a year, then two new game stores appeared in the last few months.

It sounds like you've got plenty of fault lines within the campaign to work with -- people who benefit from the status quo vs. those who want the PC to reform the government, magicians vs. steam engineers, quite possibly city dwellers vs. townsmen (do the farmers feel exploited by the city folk?)

A DVD archive of issues 251-369. :heh:

If we didn't have clerics, who would sanctify the cows? ;)

After all the hallucinogenic spores, it was inevitable.