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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4670540" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 94: February 1985 part 3/3Creature catalog II continued: Orgautha are gross-looking giant land leeches. They also have two special powers that make them a serious inconvenience for an unprepared group of adventurers. Poor spellcasters. So easy to ruin their days. Rekeihs are incredibly weird looking mobile plants. With a distinctive style and plenty of ecological detail, they will give adventurers pause, but not be too scary once you get into an actual fight. Rummele are extraplanar dogs from Gladsheim. They get a whole bunch of feyish powers such as blinking, shapechanging, and divination, plus the ability to deflect missiles. They're a great cohort for mid-high level adventurers, entirely capable of taking care of themselves against all kinds of screwage. What's that lassie? The last group of adventurers all got petrified? We must rescue them! Bring the reflective shields! Urisk are miniature goat-headed satyrs. They may look cute, but you can bet they'll be humping your leg and chasing the nixies if you don't keep a close eye on them. They have animal companions as well, so expect the unexpected. Viltch are hooligan monkeys from Pandemonium. They smash pretty stuff and generally make a nuisance of themselves. Like many of these extraplanar versions of standard animals, they have substantial magical and class abilities that'll make them a real hassle even to higher level parties if played cleverly. Great Wyrms are a mysterious ancient relation of dragons. They may not be quite as badass as later dragons, but they're certainly no picnic. They have toxic breath, a smaug-esque weak spot and can be a source of great knowledge. Pretty flavourful, in other words. Xaver are decidedly weird looking things that corrode and eat metal like rust monsters. Only they're intelligent and can actually hurt you with their attacks as well. The party is not going to be a happy one after meeting them. Muahahaha. So it seems like we have a lot of fae, planar, and general screwage creatures this time, rather than stuff you have a straight-up fight with. Introducing these guys to your game will definitely result in interesting times for your players. A definite sign that they were trying to push the envelope on what monsters did and how they acted at that point. Ecology may have been a fairly established concept by then, so now they're pushing the boundaries of how you should act in a fight, and the tactics you have to adopt to successfully deal with these weird creatures. Course, if the way you find out is by trial and error, there's going to be quite a bit of frustration and a few deaths on the way. Eh, if adventuring wasn't a challenge, what would be the point? Fiction: Fortunes of a fool by Nicholas Yermakov. Oh, this is mean. How to go from rags to riches and back again, courtesy of some supernatural meddling with a distinctly pessimistic russian slant to it. That makes a change from the usual happy, or at least bittersweet ending, and still feels nicely folklorish. As a change of pace from most of the stories in here, I very much approve. Coming Attractions: Lots of stuff out this month. D&D gets Blade of vengance, a solo module, where an elf must avenge the destruction of his homeland. It also gets AC4, the book of marvelous magic. Lots of new spells and magic items for your delectation and twinking out. AD&D gets C4:To find a king. Part 1 of the prophecy of brie series, this tournament module does indeed sound pretty cheesy. Not a classic. Endless quest gets EQ 25: Conan the outlaw, and EQ 26: Tarzan and the well of slaves. Seems like they're definitely in a pulpy mood at the moment. Star frontiers gets SFKH3: Face of the enemy. Not much info is given on this one. And on the wargaming front, we get The breakout from Normandy, and The Quadrigame of waterloo. Two more highly specialized games designed to cover particular battles in great detail. S.h.i.e.l.d.tm: The Marvel superheroes game's popularity is rewarded by a 5 page article on these guys. Their history, their enemies, their staff (including lots of rather amusing mugshots) and all the cool stuff they have, (including a cutaway diagram of their helicarrier base. ) and finally stats for Nick Fury, their head honcho. A very dense article, this gets tons of info in in an efficient manner. I've seen articles twice the size that don't actually say as much of importance. Guess they're really getting the hang of this 16 pages limitation and editing stuff down for it. The artwork is also particularly good on this one. A fast and furious way to kick off this section, with plenty of stuff that's useful in actual play. You never know when you're going to need a world-spanning secret organization to clear up the messes your players are making. The marvel-phile: My gods. Now this dates this issue. We have spiderman's symbiote, but no Venom. They also don't know who the hobgoblin is yet either. Fascinating. Goes to show how movies condense the stuff from years of comics decades ago into their writing. We also get the Kingpin, another villain who would plague spider-man throughout the ages. Once again, I am shown just how much comics have changed in recent years, and paradoxically, how much they haven't, with events happening back then still having reprecussions now. Jeff delivers another three statblocks and potted histories efficiently as ever. I find myself tempted to pick up a compilation of that era so I can read all this stuff I missed first hand. Must. Stay. Focussed. 271 issues to go. Long Journey. No time for unproductive diversions. From anarchy to empire: David Cook acquires his nickname of Zeb, for the first time I've spotted in this magazine. Another interesting historical footnote for y'all. Anyway, star frontiers continues to get plenty of coverage around here, with details on how interstellar government is handled there. From loose trade agreements to centralized authoritarian rule, they can vary widely. On the plus side, this is system free, so it's easily applicable to other games. On the negative, this is another case where they really don't go into enough depth, due to the short pagecount, and as a result all the advice feels very familiar, just reskinned slightly. Not a useful article to a longtime reader. A second bit of fiction this month, The gun that shot too straight by Ralph Roberts. So you've developed a gun that has unlimited range. Just how unlimited? Oh dear oh dear. This could get ugly. A textbook example of speculative sci-fi, where the protagonists take a back seat to the conceptualizing. Which is a decent way to finish of the magazine.  Wormy is just plain awesome this month, as multiple plot threads get developed upon. Snarfquest shows us a map of his world. Dragonmirth shows us a variant on the trojan horse. Well, this has certainly been an interesting issue. Never thought I'd see Katharine Kerr flipping out and being a downright spoilsport.  Even if the average quality of articles isn't quite as high as the last three, there's certainly lots of weird and wonderful stuff happening in here. The monsters are good, the reviews are well above normal quality, the fiction is cool. It's just the full sized articles that aren't always the best. Keep the surprises coming, guys. Controversy like this is fun to rediscover.</blockquote>

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