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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4588208" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 67: November 1982part 2/2An extensive set of articles on the astral plane takes the crucial center spot this issue. 13 pages of general stuff on the description and physics, plus a 5 page mini adventure. This makes me very happy indeed. Because I'm a huge planes fan, and because it's such a big part of this issue, I'm going to break it down into it's subsections. The preface gives us a basic description. Silvery weightless place with conduits, psychic wind, occasional bits of debris. Not that dissimilar to later developments, apart from the lack of dead gods. Astral encounters is still a bit vague, as they still don't have many creatures to populate the place with. Again, the chances of meeting a god passing through are rather higher than later fluff would indicate. Most of the creatures will be rather powerful, but that's ok, as you'll probably be pretty high level too if you're there. Astral traveling reiterates the common ways to get there. Will you project, or go there bodily? Either way, you don't need to worry about food, drink, sleep, aging, etc, because time passes at the rate of one day per thousand years. But it does catch up after you leave, so be prepared. Encounter checks and the psychic wind elaborates on the chances of running into trouble. This should have been condensed with astral encounters, as this positioning is not very good organization. Movement and combat establishes the intelligence powered flight that people in astral space use to get around. Watch the wizard doesn't leave everyone else behind. Fun stuff, because it requires very different tactics to be successful in to regular battles. Magical alterations is mostly a list of spells that don't work, (druids in particular are rather screwed) but there are also some ones with weird effects. This eats up a lot of space, as they tackle every spell individually, rather than giving general formulae organized by school and stuff, as they would later in planescape. This could definitely do with some refinement. Fedifensor is the module. Recover a powerful magical sword from a githyanki fortress. Just another day for seasoned adventurers. This one involves a lot of luck, as if you roll badly, you may might meet a demon prince or greater titan along the way, while the final fortress would be a walkover for anyone strong enough to face down things that powerful. Don't think attacking everything you see head-on is the best course of action. I've quite enjoyed this, as it feels familiar, but is still noticeably missing several elements that would be crucial to the later planescape portrayal. It's nice to know which bits were part of the original conception and what's changed since then. And as this is one of the few planes that's survived to 4th edition fairly unscathed, it can't have been bad. There's certainly already room for plenty of adventures here. Now all we need is a good set of articles on the ethereal and outer planes. Sometime soon, hopefully. Fiction: King of the cats by Gillian Fitzgerald. Ahh, romance. What a wonderful thing. But where fae are involved, it never turns out well for the humans involved. A nicely mythical feeling little story. Loyal readers: More talk from Gary. He comments on the various character classes he's thinking of developing, and the feedback he's received upon them. He once again strongly rejects the idea of anti-paladins, and talks about demoting the monk to an optional class. On the plus side, they're considering making a full oriental variant of D&D with all new classes. Yay. More foreshadowing. Another thing that it'll take them years to actually get round to publishing, but that's interesting in itself. On the negative side, he introduces one of the dumber mid 1st edition optional rules. Comeliness. Separating physical attractiveness and social skill and presence is not an inherently bad idea, as the WoD system shows, but doing so in this kludgy way mid edition just turns the two into even greater dump stats, given how few are the number of things that they are used for. What was he thinking? Poker, chess, and the AD&D system: A fifth piece from gary this month (whatever happened to his promise not to write too much and monopolize the magazine? I guess the same thing that happened to their promise to always cover a wide range of games. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> ) Once again, he reminds people that the AD&D rules are official, and owned soley by TSR. If you add to, subtract from or alter them, you are no longer playing an Official AD&Dtm Game. On the other hand, I as the creator and head of the company, can create Official AD&Dtm Material as I choose. It is a duty I take on with a heavy heart, and a determination to make the game more fun for you, loyal readers! This is primarily him commenting on and justifying the recent stuff such as barbarians and devas, and their oddities when compared to the standard rules. All of this was well thought out! You can rely on my judgement! I roll my eyes. He really really needs an editor who'll say no to him. The role of books: Lew gives us a group of big reference books containing the catalogue of myths and fairytales in condensed form. Any one of these contains enough plots to keep you going for centuries, if you file off the serial numbers and mix them together. Of course they're probably not easy to find these days, and the internet is more comprehensive than even the thickest book can manage. But there's a lot to be said for editorial oversight. You'll have to decide for yourself if you can search out stories individually and tolerate reading it all on a screen. Reviews: Trollpak is a runequest supplement, giving us plenty of detail on the Uz, as they call themselves, including makng them available as PC's, plus a bunch of different adventures based around them. Readable, comprehensive, and not forgetting the gloranthan sense of humour. Just be careful not to overpower the PC's, especially when using them in large groups. Wormy gets back home and has to defend his horde. What's new gets Sooooo close to doing sex in D&D this time before being interrupted. So it looks like we get to see the seed of the plans that would eventually grow into  Oriental Adventures. Probably the biggest variant made on 1st edition AD&D, showing how you can completely rework the classes and monsters while keeping the same basic framework. This is rather a divided issue. On one hand we have tons of cool stuff on the planes, and several other good articles. On the other hand, Gary is continuing his unchecked rampage through the magazine, adding on stuff all over the place seemingly at random, while insulting anyone who gets in his way.  What is up with that? I seriously hope they'll start putting more freelancer articles in again soon.</blockquote>

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