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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8668687" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 107: May 1995part 5/5A Few Good Rangers: New Kits? In this newszine? I know that kind of crunch is more a Dragon thing, but I'm still surprised we've got halfway through 2e with only a single lacklustre one so far. I guess that's probably due to the changes in management. Dave's time in Dragon is noticeably higher on little crunchy articles filled with new monsters, spells, etc than the first half of the 90's as well. Let's see how these turn out in terms of flavour and mechanical balance.Deep Rangers are explorers and protectors of cave ecosystems. This gives them a perfect toolkit for a dungeon delving adventurer, at the cost of all but one of their nonweapon proficiency slots. They're still probably coming out ahead overall powerwise, but it's not a complete no-brainer, especially if the DM baits & switches and most of your adventures turn out to be overland or urban ones.Desert Rangers, on the other hand are all bonus, getting a boosted spell selection, stealth skills, and obviously desert survival abilities handy for the whole group, with the supposed penalty of attracting assassins irked by their do-gooding ways just more opportunities for XP. Like Swashbucklers or Bladesingers, they're strictly for cheesy high power campaigns that don't care about balance and just want fast-paced action.Testing the Mettle: We finish things off with a surprisingly ambitious new set of optional rules for those of you who want more horror focussed games. Ravenloft already has Fear & Horror checks, but they don't last long. What if you want a more Call of Cthulhu situation where people acquire permanent phobias and tics as a result of the horrible stuff they encounter? Well, here you go then. This definitely wouldn't have appeared in here under the old management because that kind of optional rule isn't allowed in tournament adventures, so it's of no use to their core audience, but they seem to be diversifying into more general gaming material lately, as the kits in the last article also show. The kind of thing that works better in systems built around it rather than trying to shoehorn it into D&D, where you naturally increase exponentially in power over a campaign and go through lots of enemies in the process without any permanent harm, but is still interesting to see here as a change of pace. I'm very unlikely to use it myself, but I have no objection to it being here. One of those issues where the special feature dominates the issue, expanding what the RPGA does for it's users once again and hoping enough of them take up the offer to make it sustainable. The other features are also interesting, showing a definite shift in the kind of articles they're accepting and publishing. Time to move on and see what sticks, and what falls by the wayside in the next few issues as the staff responsible come and go.</blockquote>

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