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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9661923" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Denis Beauvais was one of my favorite Dragon cover artists, and my friends in my old D&D groups liked his work too.  He seems somewhat underrated and does not always get mentioned among the luminaries of 1980’s fantasy artists.  I particularly loved those chess match covers. I wonder if a chess match with living pieces would make a good encounter - maybe a set piece planned by the big villain. The Red Queen scenes from Alice in Wonderland are an obvious precedent, as are the episodes of Star Trek TOS in which decadent super-aliens mess with the crew out of boredom.  It seems like the kind of thing that dark fey or infernals might get up to. Gary Gygax editorials were always a bit confusing as there was no way to square his admonitions against rule-breaking WrongBadFun™ with the DMG advice to make the game your own, which was the old wargaming way and by all accounts the way he actually ran his own table.  I don’t have clear memories of these particular Cleric articles, but as both player and DM I definitely tried to customize Clerics in a thematic way using either the Legends & Lore book or the real mythology that inspired it.  I made a Cleric of Thor for AD&D 1E and convinced my initially skeptical DM to let me have one level of weapon specialization in the war hammer, balanced with some debuff I don’t remember.  I later did the same thing with a spear-wielding Cleric of Odin.  War hammer and spear were never exactly choice weapons in AD&D so if anything I was playing with a slight handicap.  When the 2E PHB came out those optional rules for making highly customized specialty priests were a breath of fresh air and I used them every chance I got.  Some players today are doing creative stuff with the fantasy religion side of Clerics.  I got a kick out of reading about somebody’s Lizardfolk Shaman who, during down time from adventures, was trying to convert the poor benighted mammals to his culture’s practice of cannibalizing dead loved ones.  Why waste perfectly good protein?  Why bury your dear departed when passing necromancers are always trying to raise corpses for their armies of the night? <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="👻" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f47b.png" title="Ghost    :ghost:" data-shortname=":ghost:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />The horse article intrigues me because you would think that an RPG that started as a fork of a medieval war game would have a much larger role for mounted warfare and detailed rules for the same, but you would be wrong!  The one time I tried to play a 1E Cavalier the DM and I could not even find much in the way of mounted combat rules, and horses never seemed to be a factor in the published TSR modules we used and emulated in our homebrew adventures.Somewhat surprising to see a postmodern literary novel like Eco’s The Name of the Rose discussed in the pages of Dragon, but it actually makes a lot of sense.  Scheming clergy, secret libraries full of forbidden knowledge, rival doctrines - this is great stuff for plot hooks and campaign stories.  I also think that late medieval and early modern alchemy, astrology, occultism, and Hermeticism practiced by figures like Paracelsus or John Dee could be grist for a fantasy campaign.  Those guys were often advisors to rulers so a GM could use them for faction intrigue.</blockquote>

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