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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8766896" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 118: April 1996part 4/5Forgotten Deities: Something a little different this month. Rather than gods who grant power to worshippers, (albeit of not very good selections due to their general weakness) Eric gives us two fully statted out elder evils. Dendar the night serpent and Kezef the chaos hound. Even without any worshippers, they're god level threats, with hundreds of hit points, serious damage outputs & selections of spell-like powers, the ability to devour your soul after killing you, immunity to a whole load of things, regeneration and the ability to reform if even that isn't enough unless killed in very specific ways. Don't even think of taking them on unless your group can deal with the Tarrasque in one sitting and still have time for lunch. And unlike the Tarrasque, once you've annoyed them you can't get away just by flying and waiting for it to go back to sleep. Dendar can send you nightmares anywhere in the world, while Kezef can find you anywhere by manifesting at the point of your birth and then flawlessly following the path of your life experiences at the rate of several years per hour until he catches up with you in the present. They're not just combat monsters but terrifying on conceptual levels. This is very interesting indeed as it presents a departure from the 2e policy of gods being things you can't even hope to fight or resist no matter high level you become, towards the 3e style of  them being epic level opponents which you can beat, but only if you have a good handle on the system in general and how to exploit the cracks in that particular creature's laundry list of powers and resistances. Looks like that might have happened even if TSR hadn't been bought out by a company more keen on complex tactical gameplay. Definitely a lot to think about here, even if these two are unlikely to appear directly in anything but the highest level campaigns. Maybe if you incorporate the tricks from Ed's article this issue a slightly lower level team would have a decent shot. A World of Your Own: Roger's look at the elizabethan era once again turns into a lengthy list of references. This is a good century after the invention of the printing press, so there's not only plenty of books about the era, but books from the era you can use for research as long as you can decipher the somewhat archaic language and lack of spellchecking. Francis Bacon, Robert Kirk, Galileo, Christopher Marlowe, Shakepeare, there was both interesting fiction and scientific primary sources that have managed to survive to the present day. You'll still probably want to consult some history books written after the fact for the sake of accessibility, particularly ones with good illustrations so you can get a better idea of the fashion, and maybe some RPG books so you don't have to make up all the stats for the technology yourself, but this is one where you can get a clear picture of how the people of the time thought and wrote without it being filtered through multiple layers of translation and revisionist historical agendas. The usual iteration of formulas here, with Roger providing lots of useful material, but leaving it up to you to put the real creative spark of life into it if you use the ideas for a campaign of your own. No enthusiasm here.</blockquote>

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