Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8770889" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 119: May 1996part 3/5The Endless War: A break from all the faith heavy stuff as we head off to Krynn, where the gods are currently AWOL and regular people are having a lot of spiritual crises because of that. That is, when they aren't having more immediate physical crises of being attacked by the new, bigger badder dragons. Even the oldest and most powerful of regular dragons has no hope against them one-on-one. Not that this stops them trying, whether out of arrogance or desperation, as we see in this bit of fiction, which is basically just 5 pages of a single battle between Onysablet and one of Takhisis' dragonriders. They put up a brave fight, but their dragonlance snaps on her scales and both dragon & rider die without even learning some philosophical lesson or winning some small long-term victory with their sacrifice. So this is a piece where the scariest enemies of the original trilogy get worfed to show how much more of a threat the new big bads are and how the old battles of good vs evil seem trivial compared to the threats of chaos, magic ceasing to work and monsters from another world. Unless they learn to set aside their petty ideological differences they've got no hope of survival. A reminder that the short fiction in Dragon was taken over by 5th age material for nearly the whole year. It was jarring in there, drastically lowering the average quality and accessibility of the fiction by making it all in-house metaplotty crap and it sticks out even more here, which doesn't normally publish stat free fiction at all. One of their most irritating management decisions in the final days of TSR, this is no more pleasant to experience second time around.The Druid Circle of Chauntea: The religion-centric articles continue with another mid-length temple overview. As befits a nature deity, it isn't actually set in the city, but 30 miles away, making it one of the most distant locations yet that still falls under the Living City umbrella. Unsurprisingly, this physical distance also reflects a certain emotional distance from and suspicion of the city dwellers. Don't let the nobles get too cocky or they'll expand their holdings and domesticate yet more wild land. Don't let the humanoids get too populous or they'll consume like locusts before crashing when they run out, leaving behind barrens that'll take years to recover. Keep an eye on that Mellisa Eldaren, she's might still be a druid but she's getting too close to the city dwellers, accepting an official government position and all. Don't let those extremists in the shadow circle infiltrate the whole druidic hierarchy or it won't end well for anyone. Maintaining balance is a big complicated job, and not everyone agrees what the ideal intermediate point to aim for even is, plus the criteria for druids losing their powers are considerably more relaxed than paladins so there's plenty of room for internal conflict on these matters. With war brewing in the area again, there's a lot of things they could get involved in and probably not enough high level druids to go around. So this isn't as good as the previous two in mapping out the temple and depicting the day to day life of the faith because it's very focussed on the current metaplot events and the fallout they might have upon the countryside. It still makes pretty interesting reading and gives you plenty to think about philosophically, but it has less general usefulness outside the very specific context of the Living City  in the year 1367 DR. One mainly for the hardcore readers.</blockquote>

Verification