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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Varianor Abroad" data-source="post: 3980619" data-attributes="member: 12425">Whew. I'm still reading through my copy. I am deliriously happy that I bought in from day one as a subscriber. I'm writing a review, but here's a couple things already. This kind of magic just doesn't happen every day. I feel like I did reading Dragon when I was a younger fella. (Now I just have a more mature wasteline...perspective.)Ecology of the Lich – really well done stuff. Made me want to use a lich as a villain in a future campaign. Many flavorful ideas. I liked how the author explained the transition to lich, then to demilich. Ed Greenwood interview – A couple of expected questions led into a couple of unexpected questions. I really liked the part where Ed talked about how the Forgotten Realms aren’t supposed to be awash in magic. They’re supposed to be hugely varied with magic, so that there’s spells and items and effects to make it more interesting for players. I remember an early Dragon article with Pages from the Mages, where Ed would write about spellbooks with interesting covers and variant spells in the pages and then we would get new spells. It’s so cool. (And also a bit remniscent of the very cool pdf series from Bret Boyd, Behind the Spells, which according to an ad is coming out soon in compiled form! Yeah, now that’s an awesome 3.5 product!) Got me all excited about maybe running a game with all sorts of neat little magical oddities.Star & Shadow magic – awesome. I thought that I had a lot of this from Book of Roguish Luck and from the patron-only adventure Castle Shadowcrag (that I got as a member of Open Design). Well I was wrong. Here’s the complete Illumination school, combining light and shadow magic, as well as a big pile of spells including some very cool 0 level ones. (I would have liked to see a Greater Shadow Bite, maybe one that does damage, and perhaps a Greater Shadow Blindness, the spell that interferes with darkvision, but hey, who’s picky? I can write that myself.) A whole new and useful school of magic? Me likey.Power Attack article was handy. Very interesting to dissect the math. I kinda glossed over that, truth to tell, but found the General Trends illuminating. In my experience, I see players either going for the tried and true +2, or sometimes +5, but this opened my eyes to more uses. Ancestral Spirits is all about getting, well, an ancestral spirit instead of a familiar. This is very, very cool stuff. I’m going to allow this in future campaigns! I love the flavor of this variant for a wizard or sorceror.Action – Easy Variants for Cinematic Combat. Some of these were really, really good. Exactly what I should do in my games. (Well, okay, I’ve allowed and/or done a couple things from this article in the past. Not all eight.) I’m jealous of his cool. In particular, I like Option #7 for skills to make rolling a 20 more exciting. Comics are good stuff. This particular Bolt and Quiver was very funny, in light of all the forthcoming 4E changes.Dangerous Doors was a cool article. Years ago, I had a pdf from Creative Mountain Games called Perilous Portals that had a lot of similar stuff. This article sent me looking for the old pdf, which sadly appears to have gotten zapped off my computer in the big changeover along with a few other things. Sadder still, Perilous Portals is no longer on RPGNow.com. So I must be content with Dangerous Doors, which has a couple really cool ones, including the low level Hot Door Handle trap and the Earth Elemental Door.</blockquote>

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