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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8783281" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 121: July 1996part 1/532 pages. Dinosaur scrum! You can't all eat the same human, he'll slip away while you're fighting! Looks like we're going back to the Living Jungle, which will continue to host it's fair share of goofy comedy material. Worse things happen at sea, but not by much. Time to see how much cheese they'll manage to pack into this issue, and what strange jungle animals the milk will have been derived from. The Living Jungle Just Got Livelier: The idea of signature characters for splats is definitely on the rise, with White Wolf already doing it for several of their game lines, although D&D won't catch up officially until the release of 3e. This appears to be another early adopter, introducing each of the new races with a short IC talk from a example character. Of course, being the first we see of them, this also means they have to be stereotypical examples of their races with very formulaic backstories; they're from places that are taboo or hard to access for the Nubari, which is why they've never seen them before, and have decided to venture out and see what the rest of the world has to offer. There's little of interest here, particularly consumed all at once. Better move on quickly to the later articles where we actually get the mechanical information then.Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed does love his wizards. They consistently wind up higher level than any other class in the Realms, living beyond their natural lifespan and accumulating treasure & influence accordingly. They're also responsible for most of the cool new spells and items that appear in his many Dragon articles, further increasing their prominence in the eyes of the readers. They don't rule every country, but even the ones they aren't formally in charge of usually have some in vizier positions. It's just particularly obvious in Felshroun, because you're surrounded by the four towers. Redcloak, who lives in Lakelight tower. Black Flame, lady of Folly tower. Greenshadow, who lives in the Watchwood tower. And breaking with the color theme, The Manyfaced Lady, who lives in the Sentinel tower. Each of them has their own magical themes, although none is actually multiclassed or a specialist wizard. I guess that's another reason they're so popular, you can build them all very differently without needing to add feats and prestige classes, which makes roleplaying them differently easier as well. This turns into another masterclass in how to make a set of NPC's interesting despite them all being of good alignment, as each still has their own quirks, ways of teaching apprentices (which might well be some of your PC's, since they definitely have powers worth learning) and ways they contribute to keeping the town safe & well-run. If only he'd apply the same loving care to a group of paladins. Another entry where Ed feels increasingly less edited than the old days, as he has seniority over the current crop of editors so they're just letting him indulge his quirks and ramble on as long as he wants on a topic before moving to the next one. It still makes for interesting reading, but does reduce the ratio of instantly game useful material to fluffy worldbuilding about food, musical instruments, horse breeding and whatever else grabs his attention at the time.</blockquote>

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