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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9086375" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron issue 144: October 2000part 2/6Secrets of the City of Ravens: For a long time, the Forgotten Realms novel line steered mostly clear of Raven’s Bluff, because it was such a busy and fast growing place that it would be very hard for a novelist to stay consistent with all the lore. But Rich Baker has finally taken on the job, showing us what happens when a swashbuckling rogue/sorcerer (he obviously had access to the 3e rules before they were released) gets himself involved in Myrkyssa Jelan’s latest plot. A big part of that is trying to get hold of a magical book called the Sarkonagael, and unsurprisingly, the new spells in it turn out to be important to the plot. Are they actually worth it and do the power levels match up with core ones of the same level? This kind of new crunch mixed with setting material continues to be a popular type of article despite the edition change, as if anything they’re need more than ever with so many old spells still not converted.Abolish Shadows does exactly what it says on the tin, disrupting any shadow based effects and causing lots of damage to creatures of the shadow type. Unfortunately, it’s only instantaneous, so the darkness will soon close around you again if you don’t have some more persistent form of light as well. Shadow Bolt causes a moderate amount of temporary Str + Con damage with a reflex save for half. Most useful for sorcerers, who can spam the same spell multiple times and take down nearly any creature in a few rounds, since ability scores don’t scale with level as much as hit points and far few creatures will be immune to this than fire, electricity or nonmagical weapons.Shadow Simulacrum lets you create a shadowy clone of someone with all their powers. By default it attacks the original homicidally and disappears after beating them, but you could also order it to do more sneaky things and make it exist for longer by spending XP, giving you lots of evil twin based plot options that hopefully get exploited in the book.Shadow Sight is also pretty self-explanatory, letting you see through shadow and darkness, even magically generated stuff easily, foiling any attempts to hide via that method. Camouflage or invisibility will still do the job though. A much better choice for dungeon exploration than bringing bright lights everywhere that instantly mark you as a troublemaking surface dweller and make surprising anything with eyes much harder. These are all pretty practical and useful for a wide range of parties.Forgotten Realms 2000 Survival Kit: It’s still a good 8 months until the release of the new FR corebook, but it’s their most popular setting and they have all the Living game conversions to think about. So here’s a dense 6 pages full of some of the crunch that’ll be appearing in there so you don’t have to take a break if you want to switch. Stats for the various demhuman subraces. A loosening of the multiclassing restrictions on Paladins & Monks for the followers of specific deities with appropriate portfolios. The domain options for clerics of 123 realmsian gods. Three new feats which can only be selected by people from specific regions, which are noticeably more powerful than the ones in the PHB. They’re getting started on the power inflation straight away then. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Some of these, like Luck of Heroes, will wind up going into general circulation in the future, reminding us that balancing greater mechanical power with fluff limitations is rarely a stable arrangement. Finally, conversions of 15 magic items and one spell that should be familiar to long-term fans. Wizards still get to pull out of context tricks like making themselves insubstantial to metal in this edition that completely ruin a fighter’s day, even if the duration isn’t quite what it was. A reminder that even after all this work to make the system more balanced, game balance is a fragile thing in a game that’s constantly having new stuff released for it. All it takes is one poorly thought out supplement, or several things from separate ones that seem innocuous on their own but combine in highly effective ways the writers didn’t consider and the power creep starts all over again.</blockquote>

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