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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8143962" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 40: March 1988part 4/5Night of the Wolf: Another particularly unusual article straight away, this time a bit of fiction with stats at the end for Ars Magica. That got just one in the entirety of Dragon's lifespan, as part of their final attempt at pushing system diversity The Dragon Project in 1993. So this is very welcome, especially as this is only just after it was first released, and most of Polyhedron's readers would have been unfamiliar with it. Straight away, it establishes that these are not your familiar D&D wizards, with a few relatively fixed spells per day, and no thought on how their magic affects their day to day life and the society around them. These wizards are terrifying sociopaths who's power makes them largely above muggle law, and even the nice ones turn a blind eye to their fellow's abuses and side with them over mundane social mores to a worrying degree. Rather than learning individual spells, they have a detailed set of magical skills that they combine flexibly to accomplish nearly anything if they have the right ones, and enough time and power to spend. They also have a lot more emphasis on their personality, with several different axes of opposed personality traits plus customisable likes and dislikes with concrete mechanical effects a la Pendragon rather than a simplistic 3x3 alignment box. It all paints a picture of a much darker and more complex world than any D&D setting, where spellcasters are set apart from the common folk, shaped by the kinds of magic they specialise in and driven by obsessive passions. They might be interesting to play, but they're not safe to hang around if you're a regular person. A pretty good introduction to the system as well, showing the same character in both native stats and approximate AD&D ones, which illustrates all the things it does that D&D can't. Hopefully this drove a few sales their way back in the day.</blockquote>

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