Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9088113" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron issue 144: October 2000part 4/6Ecology of a Dungeon: Now there’s a title we’ve seen before, in Dragon issue 211. Despite removing that section in the monster entries, there’ll still be a fair few ecologies released this edition, although some will be rehashes of old ones. This is indeed pretty similar to the old one, hitting most of the same beats, just in a slightly different order. Why was it built? By Who? Who lives there now? Where is it? Why would the PC’s want to go there? The difference is that the new one has a shorter word count, and a greater degree of acceptance that although working up all this ecological stuff may be interesting, sometimes you will just want to cut loose and do an insane megadungeon that makes no practical or logistical sense held together entirely by magic, and it’ll have all the more impact due to the contrast if you have put some carefully worked up logical locations in the same campaign. Which I think fits the general trends in design now. We’re getting over the 90’s shame about the fact that D&D is built around delving dungeons and killing dragons, and although it may branch out to engage in some quite elaborate worldbuilding and getting into character, it’s always going to come back to that starting point eventually. As C.S. Lewis said, when I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of being childish and the desire to be very grown up. Overall, the new version is probably slightly weaker overall, but both do the job and are quite useful to a newer reader, and a 6 year gap is probably long enough for the repetition to not be annoying. Arachnia Australis: A little more non D&D coverage this issue with a look at mutant Australian spiders (as if the real ones aren’t terrifying enough!) for the latest edition of Gamma World. Let’s find out if their mutations are merely exaggerations of real world species or they’ll reach the heights of wackiness the game managed in the 80’s. Artraks have an extremely potent neurotoxin that they can bit or spit that’ll kill you within minutes. Only the fact that they’re two meters tall on top of that and spin webs of corresponding proportions is unrealistic. <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" /> Yaager are scaled up hunting spiders, lacking webs but able to sprint at cheetah-esque rates. Once again, scary, but no more so than a real world animal. Shwarsfrou have human level intelligence, mind-reading and illusion generation powers, using them to create a lure that’s just what the victim is looking for and leads you into their snares. Supernatural, but in a logical, non-wacky way, that’s definitely the kind of thing you watch out for in a dungeoneering situation. Lampor can talk, and delight in using that to terrify their prey even further before they eat you. Their venom is necrotic, so you’ll have several days of agonisingly watching yourself rot from the bite point outwards before dying which they can taunt you in. A very effective horror story villain, but once again, not wacky at all.Lupinus take their name pretty literally, with wolf-like social structures. Thankfully, they’re also around wolf sized rather than towering over humans like the other ones here so they’re still a manageable combat challenge.Pretexis are friendly to humans, but hunt other spider species with great viciousness and have venom tailor-made for the purpose. This means they’re very handy to keep around and will make your settlement much more pleasant in general as long as you can tolerate them. As with the rest of this collection, this is firmly in the useful, but not wacky at all camp. The general sensibleness of the D&D designers at this point is definitely rubbing off on them.</blockquote>

Verification