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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4638409" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 86: June 1984part 1/3100 pages. Welcome to their 8th birthday. Too old for every one to feel significant, but not a big round number like 10 yet. They're still trying something special, with a full-on cut-out cardboard castle for you to construct yourself. Which is pretty ambitious, really. Plenty of other stuff too. They certainly won't run out of ideas any time soon. But the important question is, is it good? Very good question. As ever, gentle readers, I shall attempt to inform and entertain you.  In this issue: Out on a limb: A letter asking if familiars can be raised (not easily)A letter asking if lycanthropy caused by magical items is contagious (not normally ) These two feel more like sage advice questions than letter ones. What's up with that. Now this is more like it. Eric Field points out a mistake in the poison article in issue 81, and then asks if they ever plan to do a listing of gamers again. They reply that with circulation in the hundreds of thousands, if they tried that these days it'd take up a whole issue. Not feasable or desirable. A letter engaging in generalized complaints about how the magazine has gone downhill in the past year. Too many cartoons, too many adverts, not enough stuff from Gary & Len, etc etc. Kim replies, but doesn't seem very enthusiastic about it. Some nitpicking on the nature of gemstones. A letter asking how you get special rates for conventions. This of course varies considerably from convention to convention. The forum: Mike Beeman has great difficulty comprehending the concept of multidimensional space. A universe can be unlimited in size in multiple dimensions, but still bounded in the others. And via the miracle of four dimensional folding, it can be infinite, but still have sections which border on other infinities. Is that so hard to comprehend. All it takes is a little advanced geometry knowledge. That you're finding it hard to understand does not make it inherently incomprehensible, merely that you haven't built the right mental model yet. Jennifer Walker offers a possible rebuttal as to why Dragon doesn't promote Gen Con more.Russell Thorp has some optional rules from keeping players from combining every herb at once to make a super-healing poltice. Can't have the nonmagical options overtaking the magical ones. Jeff de Remer has some thoughts on alignment and the nature of paladinhood. Because the 9 alignments are equal, it ought to be no harder to follow any one than the others. But exemplars of an alignment still need to be held to higher standards than anyone else. And finally, Kirk Everist thinks that the forum is a good idea, and the two types of letters sent to the magazine should stay separated. Well, of course you'd print one of those. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> The ecology of the slithering tracker: It was born in the strategic review. Now it's back in the magazine, courtesy of Ed Greenwood. It may not seem like the most threatening of creatures, but then, the really nasty ones rarely do. Before you know it you're turning into a giant puffball, being sucked dry of all your moisture, desperately trying to get that little squirming thing out of your urethra, or having your brain eaten from the inside because you listened at a door without using protection. The slithering tracker is unusual among oozes because it's really rather clever. Which is good for it, because otherwise it'd be doomed, as it doesn't have effective combat attacks, or proper manipulators. In a way, it's so helpless in the face of most other dungeon inhabitants that like kobolds, you're almost rooting for it to succeed despite the odds. As it is, it's the kind of monster that kills silently and unexpectedly, which rarely makes players happy. Because they're intelligent, you can invent all manner of tricks to lure the players into a false sense of security. Ed is his usual loquacious self in matters of their physiology and behavioral habits, inventing a whole bunch of cool little details beyond the basic monster description, most of which will be relevant in actual play. So it's just another masterful contribution from the king of setting depth then. Familiars with a special use: Stephen Inniss returns to the topic he covered in issue 84, albeit with a different slant. Last time, he examined the natural animals. This time he focusses on the magical creatures wizards can persuade to bond with them. Firstly, he asks why should lawful and chaotic evil wizards get the cool extraplanar servants, and provides analogous creatures for the other 7 alignments.  Then he adds three more little magical beasties for those of you who would prefer more options in the pseudodragon mould. Obviously, there's a lot more new crunch in here than the last one, which means you're more likely to want to refer back to it in play. As with imps and quasits, these guys are substantially more powerful than their masters at low levels, and should be treated accordingly. Exercise caution with letting a 1st level PC get one. But they're no more broken than the existing examples (yeah, everyone loves instadeath poison), so I don't have a problem with them in the larger sense, and can happily add them to my list of cool things I'd like to use in a game sometime.</blockquote>

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