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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8748764" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 116: February 1996part 3/5Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Unlike Roger, Ed's material continues to be consistently good, even if the sheer quantity of things he produces makes them lose impact when taken in large doses. This time we look at the towns of Blackbarn, which does indeed have a large black barn built when it was first founded. It's a prosperous farming town, which doesn't have to worry about the brigands who plague the rest of the Border Kingdoms due to a group of ghostly riders who attack any groups of overt troublemakers and are typically immune to nonmagical attacks themselves. They won't attack anyone poking around underground though, which means more sneaky adventurers can still do some looting, and the place also has an unusual frequency of gremlins, so be prepared for pranking and small items going missing. That should keep a visit from being boring despite the relative safety. The town of Bloutar, on the other hand, is particularly dangerous for outsiders, as it's right in the middle of monster-infested hilly forest that's a real challenge to navigate. The people who live there have to be pretty tough to deal with that, so picking a fight with a random local is probably not a good idea. Still, if you want to do a little XP grinding, you could pick far worse places. These once again manage to pack in both interesting histories and present day challenges into page sized chunks. Forgotten Deities: Some more plausibly deniable portfolio juggling going on here. Malyk the Dark Mage seems to be just your basic ascended archmage, providing patronage for the still young school of wild magic and encouraging wild mages to create more wild magic zones wherever they can. He's actually an aspect of Talos, giving him an inroute to attracting a slightly smarter selection of chaotic evil havoc causers. No-one knows this apart from Mystra, who's obviously aware of these new perturbations of the weave, but doesn't seem to consider this muscling in on her portfolio a threat for the moment, or actually wants someone else to take credit for that kind of magic so she doesn't have to be responsible for it's negative aspects in the same way that Tempus keeps Garagos around but weak rather than completely wiping him out. Like the Krynnish gods of magic, he doesn't actually have any conventional priests, but he does give wild mages who worship him an expanded spell list with access to Chaos and Elemental priestly spells, which is nothing to be sneezed at. Certainly looks like you can have plenty of fun using his followers as antagonists in your game, with their very unpredictable magical powers and agenda of spreading chaos. Looking forward, he'll gain independence and become a full deity in his own right in 5e, so his number of followers must grow over the following century without integrating them with the Talos worshippers. Another danger of messing around with aspects and multiple portfolios for deities. When the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing, there's a danger of them becoming full entities in their own right and turning on the head, making all your centuries of clever machinations fall apart. Doncha just hate it when that happens.</blockquote>

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