Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8752239" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 117: March 1996part 1/532 pages. Tarzan?! How'd you get so big? Oh well, at least it'll keep you from catching a chill in the snow, presuming the square/cube law even applies in this setting anyway. Time to see how fantastical and memorable another issue will turn out inside. The Incantatrix: Now here's a blast from the past and no mistake! The extremely rare alternate spellcaster from the Forgotten Realms. Introduced in Dragon issue 90, and then appearing in several of Ed's novels, they excel at metamagic effects, taking other people's magics and removing them or turning them back on their caster, while lacking access to many conventional spells unless they can drain them from the mind of another spellcaster. This makes them terrifying beyond their level in a one-on-one battle with other magical types, but less useful than a regular wizard at practical everyday stuff. Here's where they get updated to 2e, courtesy of Eric Boyd, who's becoming a pretty familiar face in here as well. They get a bit of mild tidying up and standardisation compared to their 1e incarnation, being turned into a type of specialist wizard. This also moderately increases their power level, as they gain the usual extra slot per level, full access to 9th level spells from 4 of the 8 regular schools of magic and more spell slots in general than the idiosyncratic 1e table. Still, the lack of conjuration, invocation, illusion or necromancy spells is more negative than positive, so even with their boost they're still not on the level of regular core spellcasters, and if you strictly enforce the need for training to gain levels they're at an even bigger disadvantage due to the difficulty of finding mentors. You should still be able to use them in a group without problems. A very interesting and unusual article indeed, reminding me of the things Dragon does that they don't. Sending in all that new crunchy stuff just doesn't have the same appeal when you know it won't be allowed in their tournament games even if Polyhedron does publish it. With Roger also doing new races last month, is this going to change in the near future? Well, either way, I guess the plethora of new classes in the 3e minigames will make up for lost time. Larger than Life: Following straight on from last article, this one gives us an incantrix NPC. I wonder if that was co-ordinated by the staff, or they got this one first and then decided to reprint the previous one so this would make sense to the non-hardcore. Verity Shanae is an angsty self-taught spellcaster who only learned magic as a tool to fight another wizard who killed her father & son, and magically imprisoned her husband. Having had anything tying her down to a normal life destroyed, she's extremely obsessively motivated, and will take out any spellcaster abusing their power in her path, all the while wishing she could just stop using magic entirely. Like many a self-taught person, she doesn't even realise how different her skillset is from someone who learned the regular way is and how special she really is. Sounds like she'd find a lot of common ground with the likes of Drizzt, but less so with the perpetual cheerfulness of Elminster. Blatant novel protagonist bait, in other words. This feels like Steve Miller's attempt at pitching his own trilogy of cliched extruded fantasy product to add to the Realms. Thankfully he'll be staying on the adventure writing side of things and this character will never be seen again as far as I can google.</blockquote>

Verification