NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4652020" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 90: October 1984 part 2/3Gods of the suel pantheon: This month's deities detailed are Phyton, god of beauty and nature (the kind of portfolio you'd normally expect from a goddess, hmm. ) Xerbo, god of the sea, money and business (which is almost as annoying a portfolio as wee jas.) and Osprem, goddess of water voyages. Rather nuanced portfolios here, which I find interesting. They're definitely improving on the trick of balancing the bonus powers with appropriate restrictions and XP surcharges as well. They really should have kept that up in 2nd edition, instead of making many god's priests definitely more powerful than others. Thieves guild 2nd edition. Woo. Buy it now, etc etc. Playing the political game: In one of their bursts of appropriate positioning, they put this immediately after an advert for the Companion set. You don't have to do dungeon crawls all the time. Bringing politics into it can really spice things up, especially once a game's been running for a while, and you've built up a proper cast of NPC's. Suddenly, it's not all good guys and bad guys, and you kill the bad guys first chance you get anymore. You have to deal with resource management, alliances, treachery, territorial expansion, and all sorts of fun stuff that a single person, no matter how powerful, can't solve on their own. This can, of course be a daunting task to create scenarios for. So here's a nice bit of advice on the topic, including a couple of examples of actual play. You thought saving the world was tricky. Maintaining it's a lot harder. If you find you can't challenge your players by conventional means anymore, this is definitely a good way to go. Sure, they can make enough food to feed hundreds of people a day, and defeat a demon prince, but what happens when thousands all over the country are starving, and they have to choose who gets saved, or lycanthropy is spreading amongst the population faster than it can be cured. If you run it right, a truly epic adventure, that's what. As ever, I am very much in support of this playstyle. Plane facts on gladsheim: Another plane gets an extensive official profile. It's been too long since the last one. Was no-one sending them in, or were the submissions they got just not good enough? Anyway, welcome to Gladsheim. One of the most adventurable outer planes, as despite having good leanings, it's still a wild and untamed place full of monsters and warriors. Roger decides to focus on the Norse section of the plane, to the exclusion of everything else. This may not have been such a good idea, as he falls into one of the primary traps planar chroniclers have to deal with, making an infinite universe seem too small and stereotyped. They managed to avoid it with the astral and hellish articles, but this is a definite case of fail, I'm afraid. The incorporation of real world legends is handled way too literally, instead of making the effort to make them fit properly within D&D, they just seem tacked on with little consideration to the larger picture. Once again, they also suffer the problem of individually spelling out the changes in spells and magic items, rather than just giving general patterns. Only since the article isn't as long, this winds up taking more than half of it. In other words, I found this article a massive disappointment, that manages to take a thrilling subject, and make it seem hackneyed and dull. I'm very disappointed in you, Mr Moore. You're normally such a reliable student. D+. Must try harder.  As with the astral article, we also get an official adventure set there, Aesirhammer. This is rather more fun, giving you the chance to meet some really high level creatures, negotiate with them, and possibly take their stuff. Of course, in the GM's advice they STRICTLY FORBID that you let the players keep the world shattering plot macguffin and actually use it themselves, or that you be permitted to mess up the status quo in any way. But if you ignore that, you have a neat sandbox with which to play, that could enable you to have all kinds of effects on the setting. After all, if you hit the reset button after every adventure, what's the point. High level play should be about making permanent changes to things, and having big friends and enemies. Step off the railroad, take your time, and set up a really great show. Reviews: Chill is our only review this month, getting a pretty positive look at. Once again we see the advantage of boxed sets over single big books in making games quick to start and accessable, while allowing you to build plenty of depth into the setting. This simplicity does have it's costs in terms of setting depth, and there are a few silly elements. Still, it's not hard to houserule those, and then you have a streamlined yet versatile horror game. It already has 4 supplements, and looks like more may be along soon. If you like your horror a little less grim and weird than Call of Cthulhu, this could be a worthy addition to your collection. The Ares section gets to have a colour cover for the first time. Manwhile, in the ares log, they use the space to provide a brief review of a book on the space program, and how you go about becoming a part of it. Those are certainly both developments. Guess the amount of trust (and money) they're getting for this section is increasing. Skills for the super agent: Ahh, a persistent problem with supers games. How do you balance batman with superman? Much fun has been had with this debate in the past. Unfortunately, this completely ignores the generalities of this question, and goes into providing templates for trainees of the various organizations in the Champions game. With point costs of between 12 and 30, they don't show you how to make a really badass secret agent style character who can stand up to superbeings in a toe to toe fight by skill, grit and luck, either. I get the impression I may be thinking at cross-purposes with the author of this article. Not that it's a terrible article, but the way it's designed means it doesn't have much use to players of other games.</blockquote>

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