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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8769880" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 119: May 1996part 2/5Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed's tour of the border kingdoms just seems to get slower and more detailed with every month, as he devotes a full 3 pages to the town of Emrys and it's surroundings. Another one where staying is artificially expensive and getting a permanent home even moreso because it's a walled town on a hill surrounded by a bog, with no more room to expand outwards. This is not helped by the rulers, a group of seven powerful naughty words who style themselves dukes, but are just your basic high level evil adventurers who took the place by force and haven't had anyone come along who can beat them yet. Good civic management and draining the swamp is low on their priorities compared to enjoying the high life and protecting their positions. The kind of place that's an excellent target for high level PC's to improve, but don't think it'll be a cakewalk, particularly if you just storm in there openly, as they have their fair share of high level remote smiting magic hidden away in their heavily guarded keeps. If you're lower level, there's still plenty of opportunity for adventure in it's narrow seedy streets and equally cramped high-rise buildings, with all sorts of wealthy traders passing through and a lucrative market in "escorts" for people needing to do things we're forbidden to talk about directly due to the code of conduct. He's definitely pushing at the limits of that in general lately. What with all the other things going wrong in the company their editors must have other things on their minds. He's still coming up with places that are both varied and good for adventuring in in their own ways where anyone else :cough:Roger:cough: would have run out of steam a long time ago.Role-Playing First Aid: Backing up the articles about pacifist knights and new kinds of holy warrior, we have one about the merits of playing healers and defensive characters in general. If you pick your spells right, you contribute a lot more to a group than another person rolling to hit and damage each round. Yet somehow they're not actually that common, and tournament play often suffers from this, as unlike in a home group where someone'll probably take the healer role even if they don't really want to, in a Living campaign everyone is building and bringing their own characters separately and being assembled into groups on the day, so many groups lack a balanced selection of classes. Even in a standalone tournament using a fixed set of pregens, people seem more likely to pick the other classes first, so if you don't have a full table, cleric is the most likely to be missing. Like the begging for more judges in the editorial, this feels like an attempt to counter a longstanding demographic inequality where people favour the cool classes even when the results turn out tactically suboptimal. It does have some decent advice on spell selections, plus four handy new defensive spells (that are mostly more powerful variants of existing ones) but the underlying agenda is pretty obvious here. Will it make any difference? Probably not, given the way they intentionally overpowered clerics & druids in the 3e changeover to make them a more attractive option and even that didn't completely work. Roll on introducing other classes that can take on the healing role without bringing in all the issues that making religion of some kind mandatory in your worldbuilding causes in D&D.</blockquote>

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