Let's read the entire run

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 331: May 2005


part 7/7


Class acts: Barbarians get Archaic Armaments. Because lets face it, one of the hallmarks of being a barbarian is not having as good a set of weapons. But they can make up for it with special features, and you can make up for it with sheer savagery. Not one for the pure optimizer.

Bards get the multiclass advice this time. Once again, the fighty classes combine best, with ranger being particularly good at adding new tricks without diluting your current ones. Split spellcaster, on the other hand, sucks as much as ever.

Clerics get Tokens of faith III. 7 new holy symbols for your enjoyment and optimization. Woo.

Druids get Environmental weapon lists. If they're not from a forested agricultural area, scythes, staves and scimitars may not make sense. Seafarers need nets and tridents, mountaineers need climbing and digging stuff, etc. A nice callback to the 2nd ed druids handbook.

Fighters are also venturing onto the high seas with Marine Munitions. A bunch of mundane and magical items to make a seafarers life easier. This is pretty useful stuff for any class in that situation.

Monks get The Sidewinder Monk. They emulate the snake, becoming deceptive, fast striking, and rather scary. A really rather cool variant from both fluff and crunch perspectives.

Paladins get Knightly Effects (which really should be Affects, given the context, rassenfrassen editor. ) More variant equipment that really could be pretty useful to any warrior.

Rangers get Rangers Militant. If you look at modern army tactics, the skillset of the ranger is somewhat closer than that of the fighter (although neither are really that realistic, but that's more a matter of the underlying system. ) So treating your rangers as special ops military types rather than badass wandering loners is an entirely viable character concept. Once again, they are honing their reskinning skills for the next edition.

Rogues get Be a Lover, not a Fighter. Like bards, rogues are well suited to solving problems without straight combat. And you'll probably live longer if you try it.

Sorcerers get Familiarity Breeds. Another way to upgrade your familiar and yourself by taking feats. Another pretty useful set of tricks.

Wizards get Wizard Affectations. Why do they dress in the way they do? What does it symbolize? The answer, in your campaign, is up to you.


Nodwick's team do another advert for some quick cash. They really ought to invest their money better. Dork tower comes a cropper from encumbrance. Zogonia needs to do some resurrecting again. Well, they've got a better track record than Nodwick has.


They might have chosen a very old-school topic, but the implementation wasn't quite up to old-school snuff, and fairly rehashed as well, leaving me not particularly excited through most of it. Even with an editor who's more interested in the same things I am, there's still going to be substantial month by month fluctuations in how interesting the material is. And of course, next issue is the birthday one, which is particularly tricky to find new things to say about due to the specialised topic. What more can they add to the magazine's namesake? Time to find out again.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 332: June 2005


part 1/7


75(108) pages. Look ma, I'm an adventurer! I'm just going to glance back at the camera to pose and go raar before I try to kill the monsters, because my family would never let me live it down if I didn't bring back snaps of my heroic deeds. Once again, the zoomed in nature of covers compared to the old days makes the world the adventurers live in seem less significant and threatening, even when the danger should be a pretty big one like, say, a goddamn dragon. Maybe it will beat the adventurers after all, but I'm not making any bets, especially as the articles inside seem more focussed on creatures around them, such as cultists and kobolds. Let's see just how much familiarity has bred contempt after 29 years then.


In this issue:


From the Editor: After a decidedly unimpressive cover, the editorial immediately reminds us of one of the most awesome ones of the past, the dragon vs fighter jet one from 1989. One that was obviously done before the Code of Conduct, and TSR deciding it was institutionally against LARPing in all it's forms, as the associate editor talks about the spectacular convention adventure they set up that year, with visual representation of all the rooms in the dungeon. Just the thing to really open a young gamer's eyes and make them go wow. This reminds us that in some ways things were indeed better in the old days, but it's also very much a matter of perception, as it's harder to impress adults who have a wider range of experiences to draw from. Will this year's conventions have the same kind of wow factor to a new attendee? Well, that's the hope. They're certainly bigger than back in the 80's And if they're spending a fair bit of money on promotions, they might well pull it off. Just got to make sure videogames don't draw everyone away with their even larger budgets.


Scale Mail: It turns out that it's not just the army that has tons of gamers filling in time there. The Navy is pretty good at that as well. And given the nature of these things, I'll wager the air force will be along to defend their geek cred as well in the near future.

Second, we have a letter from someone who doesn't get to play much, so more setting and less disconnected generic crunch is definitely a more interesting read to them. Remember how many people bought the dragonlance novels but not the games. Can you afford to cut them loose from your marketing strategy?

Next is another person who was initially suspicious of eberron, but won over by it's coolness, and now wants an article on pirates there. It does sound like a fun combo for an article, I'll give him that, even if they did do articles on pirates already just a year ago.

Also a topic worth returning too is more Call of Cthulhu monsters. Believe me, as long as James Jacobs is in the building, you'll have no shortage of things like that coming down the pipeline, even if they aren't official conversions.

While the magazine might be doing a bit more setting stuff, that does not mean WotC as a whole has changed their policy on not fragmenting the market. Nor are they going to convert Magic: the Gathering worlds to D&D, despite the potential extra money for half the extra effort in that.

However, even if WotC isn't bringing them back, other people are. This also applies to those old Tom Wham games, which are now published by Steve Jackson Games. Nice to see someone didn't sign away all their rights to the magazine and wind up screwed for finances long-term.

Thankfully, the humour in the april issue hits the mark this year. Hopefully they won't skip it again for several years running.

And finally, we have one of those tedious little rules quibbles that pops up every now and then. No amount of perfectionism and seriousness will stop those from slipping through.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 332: June 2005


part 2/7


First watch: Another sign of things to come, as they release the Dungeon Masters Guide 2. See them realize that near core books sell even better than regular splatbooks and turn that into a major part of their strategy next edition. Or just enjoy all the cool new stuff. Depends how cynical you are.

Eberron gets Five Nations. Lots of fluff and a bit of crunch on Khorvaire's various regions. Nice to see a still young and quickly growing gameline around here.

D20 stuff is also full of familiar solid sellers. Malhavoc releases the Book of Roguish Luck, courtesy of Wolfgang Baur. Like WotC's official releases, this has new core classes, new prestige classes, feats, and some interesting rules experiments. Only somehow a little less formulaic than it's official relation. Funny how that works. There's also the Monsternomicon. Hee. Will you nom them, or will they nom you? More Iron Kingdoms goodies converted to 3.5 for your enjoyment. Another thing that must have been more popular than I remember.

A ton of movies also get micropromotions. Mirrormask. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Howls Moving Castle. Rather idiosyncratic choices. Guess they've got to keep up their geek cred.

Reaper minis get kudos for another sinister cloaked and horned guy. I'll bet he has fun doing the maniacal laughter thing, with all the metallic reverb from his helmet.

Jeff Easly supplies art for a new game, Nin-Gonost. Another example of shiny new technology applied to old ideas, this uses magnetic soles to it's pieces to help them stay put.

And they also supply promotion for another of their mates. Tony Mosely now has a website up compiling his old Zogonia strips, plus extras. Unfortunately, it appears to be no longer functional, but that's life. Everything ends at some point.

Speaking of which, they also have an obituary for Andre Norton. I didn't even know she was dead until I read this. That's rather depressing. (note: this was written in september 2008, when I was first cataloging all the contents of the issues. Ahh, the confusion of holding multiple references of time in place at once.)

 

[Hussar]

Always wondered what happened to Tony Mosely. He just kind of up and vanished from the Internet one day.

 

[Echohawk]

Always wondered what happened to Tony Mosely. He just kind of up and vanished from the Internet one day.

This Facebook page mentions that Tony has seen some hard times. The page seems to be part of a campaign by Open Gaming Monthly to convince Tony to return to making Zogonia comics, which would be awesome.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 332: June 2005


part 3/7


Chromatic dragons: This time last year, we got PC class progressions for the Metallic dragons. A few pestering letters later, they decided this was well worth revisiting, and so here's the basic 5 chromatic dragon ones in exactly the same formula. Despite Chromatic dragons being slightly less mentally and magically competent in general than metallic ones, they have pretty much exactly the same number of levels where they don't advance their hit dice and related stuff, which does make me wonder how much this is calculated, and how much it's just eyeballed. Why are Black dragons the only one that get 15 HD instead of 14 at 20th level, when White dragons are supposed to be the weakest overall? Which special ability did they think was so significant to bump them back up again? I guess only the writer or editor can answer that. So there is slight diminishing returns here, but they're still more playable than the powerful Celestial progressions in previous issues. Now all we need is Gem ones and 3e Council of Wyrms would be fully doable using only official rules, which would be neat. Maybe next year, maybe not. Guess we'll have to see if people still want more after this.


Touched by madness: Dragonlance may have had bigger dragons than a regular D&D campaign, but Eberron technically tops even that, as the entire planet is mythologically created out of the bodies of three gigantic dragons. And since people can get access to divine spells regardless of what they worship here, there's plenty of cultists for all of them. So this article is sort of in theme, but no dragons appear directly. Instead, it's more material for those of you who want a lovecraftian edge to your game. Since Eberron is very much a kitchen sink, and Lovecraft is very popular indeed in the WotC and Paizo offices, there's no way they weren't going to give you a chance to incorporate it. (while also making the material generic enough that you could extract it and use it in another campaign. ) Most notable is a 3 level "racial" evolution class that enables you to gain the aberration type, which is very handy for getting into those twinky feats and prestige classes a humanoid would normally miss out on. There's also the expected madness related feats, many of which have drawbacks as well as bonuses attached to them. Once again, the Eberron material is just different to be interesting, and seems to have more effort put into it's mechanical design and integration than the generic stuff. I just worry that they're getting too into the lovecraftian stuff and neglecting D&D's other influences.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 332: June 2005


part 4/7


Cutting up the dragon: Here's one that would have been just as appropriate last issue, with it's focus on equipment and how to handle and sell off your loot properly. If any creature has a ton of items that can be made from it's body parts, it's dragons. We had some stuff on this in issues 62 & 98, but they were surprisingly underpowered. Here, there's lots of options, and I'm reasonably sure they're set at a fair price commensurate with the bonuses they grant. You can turn their whole body into a boat, their skull into a helmet, their claws into weapons, their vocal chords into musical instrument strings, and use their eyes and breath weapon glands to make potions that grant you those abilities. It's all well integrated with the recent article on power components, and the visuals are great. If you've killed a dragon, don't just take the hoard and let the body go to rot, as you'll be passing up a huge amount of profit. Another occasion where the 3e implementation is better than those from previous editions.


The ecology of the kobold: Hmm. This is a nice birthday present. I'm vaguely surprised kobolds haven't appeared here before. Ok, they have, playing an extensive role in the ecology of the amphisbaena, and they've got plenty of other articles in the magazine, but not their own ecology. (ok, they almost did, but it got cancelled due to politics) Well, no more! It's a doozy of an ecology too, filling a whole 10 pages. They may be small, but they've played a big part in a lot of campaigns, and have built up quite the mythology. In issue 60 Idi Snitmin showed us what rings of feather falling can do for hit and run tactics. In issue 127, Tucker's kobolds made the adventurers terrified to leave the dungeon. In Dragon Mountain, we got a whole boxed set full of the most diabolical tricks the writers could conceive, making 1/2 hit die monsters more than a match for name level adventurers. In 3rd edition, their connection to dragons was enhanced, and they gained a new talent with spontaneous spellcasting. And that's where we are now. This ecology further reinforces that connection by presenting a myth in which Kurtulmak was created by Tiamat, and sent into the tunnels to hunt down egg thieves, particularly gnomes. (they do love a good fry-up) In addition to the usual stuff on their lifecycle, and as you'd expect, plenty of stuff on traps, (although they certainly aren't the most inventive traps ever featured in this magazine. ) they also include another mythological tale, a sample warren for you to use, which is suitably cramped and convoluted to be very confusing to inexperienced adventurers, and some promotion on the new D&D kobold miniatures. sigh That bit of slightly tasteless pimping aside, this was well worth the wait, giving these guys all the respect they deserve, and probably more. Tread softly my friends. Under the bed, even small horrors can become your worst nightmare.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 332: June 2005


part 5/7


Bazaar of the Bizarre:The bazaar continues giving us consistent (if somewhat smaller than in the old days) monthly deliveries, with some more Dragon themed stuff. No great surprise here. This time, the focus is on stuff the Dragons'll be using against YOU. Rarr.

The Amulet of Fearsome Might boosts your fear aura. This isn't dragon specific, but how many PC races get a power like that? You'd have to deliberately cheese your character build to exploit this.

Bands of Impact let you make your tail attacks more damaging. This also isn't dragon specific, but not many PC's'll be able to get much use from it. We need more tailed PC races.

Cat's Paws let you squash things as if you were a size category larger. Not sure what that has to do with the name. Doesn't matter anyway. Another one very few PC's will be able to use.

Dragonslayer Claws let dragons kick other dragon's asses. Unless you're big enough to wear them, they'll be of no use to you. Let us move on then.

Elixir of Blindsight boost's dragon's already pretty sharp senses even further. This is no use to anyone else either, save possibly a half-dragon PC. Not that those are too rare these days.

A Hidden Tooth lets you store a whole bunch of treasure inside it. Even if you slay the dragon, you may miss the best part of their hoard if you don't search the body thoroughly.

Pectorals of Obsidian Hide make your DR harder to penetrate. No admantine, no dice. Not very useful to anyone else then.

The Rod of Dragon's Blood lets you reuse your spells and spell-like abilities in quick succession. You can now be a little more spontaneous than before. Not that Dragons ever had a problem with that.

Vials of Explosive Breath let you store a breath weapon in them, giving you an extra one to use in a knockdown, drag-out dirty combat. You don't live a thousand years without knowing when to use your hard-saved limited resources.

Wand Scales allow gigantic dragons to use wands, without even occupying a hand. Like human sized wand sheaths, this lets you blast away happily until they run out.


A novel approach: This column is in theme as well, as the second part of their dragon invasion series hits the Realms. They're not just doing a big trilogy showing how it was solved, but also a slice-of-life anthology showing regular people's experiences with fire-breathing lizards being everywhere. As with Krynn under the giant dragon overlords, some people were terrified, while others saw it as an opportunity, and the dragons are primarily thematic drivers for the human level plots. This also means that the column is all about the stories, with only one little bit of new crunch that turns you into a load-bearing boss, making spells permanent until you die. Which I suppose is always a handy one for driving the story along, as it's all about a heavy price for a powerful effect. I guess even with their in-house books, the items created for the novels aren't put under the same kind of editorial scrutiny as the official rules books, so they get a bit more freedom to simply be cool.

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 332: June 2005


part 6/7


Sage advice: How often can the warlock use eldritch blast (As often as they like, subject to normal action limits. Itss a standard action, before you assk. )

What type of damage do eldritch blasts do (No type, unlesss you give them one. That means nothing can be completely immune to your attacks and ruin the adventure for you, collins collins.)

What kind of action is applying an eldritch essence to your blast (None. Its all part of the ssame action. Not like those ssilly ssorcerers, sslowing themsselves down with metamagiced sspellses.)

Can you target weapons or armour with an eldritch blast (Yess)

Are golems immune to eldritch blast (Yes. Sso ssorry, pleasse don't hurt me, collins collins. Looks like andy was wrong earlier. Don't worry masster, you can take vitriolic blast to overcome that.)

Does hideous blow require separate actions to activate and use (no. It's jusst like a touch spell)

Does hideous blow provoke AoO's (yes)

Does deceive item really let you take 10 on use magic device checks all the time. (Yess. Very useful, yess?)

What use has a warlock for practiced spellcaster (Nonem sso they can't take it, masster. Ssorry)

Can a warlock qualify for Master staff and Master wand (Yess, but they can't use the powers they grant. No use, no usse, collins collins.)

How does warding work (Ssimple. Trusst andy. Andy will explain all your quesstions. )

Do feats that grant spell-like abilities have to be taken at 1st level (no. Sspecial development can come at any time in your life, collins colllins. Andy just wishes he'd get some. Poor andy.)

Does mage slayer drop all your caster levels, both arcane and divine (Yes)

YOU HAVE GOT THREE QUESTIONS WRONG, YOU MUST PAY!! (No, masster, please don't take Andy's job away! Andy's still learning, Andy will do better, andy promises! Please, collins collins. Andy begsess you! :sniff sniff sniff: )

 

[(un)reason]

Dragon Issue 332: June 2005


part 7/7


Class acts: Barbarians get Vision Quests. This is actually a pretty neat idea suitable to any mystical type class. Go into a trance and seek the aid of the spirits. There are substantial risks, and you might not get the one you wanted, but the benefits are also pretty substantial for a single feat. Tempting and thematic.

Bards get Where did you go to college? 4 new backgrounds giving you some more examples of how you picked up your skills, and the minor benefits and penalties you get from doing so.

Clerics get Martial Symbolism. What kind of weapons are most appropriate for clerics of particular domains? Here's some pretty commonsensical associations. Yawn.

Druids get The Society. In previous editions, all druids were part of an overarching society by default, with their automatic limit on numbers of hierarchs in a region. This has since been played down. But it doesn't have to be this way. And if you like, you can give specific societies specific benefits. Perfect ground for prestige classes and stuff.

Fighters get Flexible Fighters. 4 new weapon style feats. New tricks to make your enemies lives miserable? Always a market for them.

Monks get Monk Lore. What benefit does Knowledge (religion) give them? Keeping tabs on the competition, of course. Not doing that would be like a musician who doesn't know who any of the other local bands are.

Paladins get Wyrmslayers. Dragons are a stereotypical knightly foe. Tweaking your skills to better fight them would be a damn smart idea. This includes an actual class variant, so it's pretty cool.

Rangers get Trophy Hunter. Consuming the body parts of your fallen foes is a little more grisly than rangers are usually portrayed. But nature is red in tooth and claw. And rangers don't have to be good anymore. This could work.

Rogues get That which does not kill, part 1. More special abilities, this time modeled off the spelltouched feats in UA. An interesting experiment in design here. Are they worth it? Very good question that I'd like to test.

Sorcerers get Claim your Birthright. Another feat allowing them to gain powers based on their draconic heritage. Unfortunately, the actual power is a pretty weedy blasty ray with secondary status effects. Not really worth is when your spells are better, and a metamagic feat would better increase your overall power.

Wizards get Alternative Spellbooks. Another topic that has been covered before, in greater detail. Any material will do, even your own body. Just the thing, if you don't want to spend that feat on Practiced Spellcaster.


Nodwick faces the consequences of his employer's reckless spending. No wonder they can't hold onto it, when they've devalued the gold standard so much. Dork tower is about to die because of a simple mishearing. Zogonia face a new uncategorized breed of polygonic slime, the yellow tetrahedron.


Another day in the office here, with some good articles, and some bad ones. It's funny that despite it being the name of the magazine, they still don't get as many Dragon related submissions as they do horror ones, so they can't be picky about the quality of the ones they publish to the same degree. They may be the big guns, but they don't have the same penetration as vampires. Funny how that's worked out. Oh well, next issue. 333, number of the …… half-beast? Well, we could do with another lycanthrope special for the new edition. It's not? Booo. What wasted opportunity.