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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4682918" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 97: May 1985 part 2/3Only train when you gain: Ahh, one of our perrenial topics. How do you handle training in the game. Should it be easy or hard. Expensive or not. How possible is it to innovate and develop in the field without help from anyone else. Let's see what this writer has to say about it. He definitely doesn't seem happy about the current assumptions. Unless you're pretty generous with your treasure, you may well wind up wasting a load of time grinding to get the money to advance after you have the XP. This doesn't seem right. Instead, lets save the training for when you actually gain new powers, rather than just improving the current ones. Seems a bit of a long-winded way to say it, but it's a sensible thing to say. Bit meh, really. The ecology of the gorgon: Another petrifying monster gets special attention. Well, would you ignore it if it was wandering around your neighbourhood? As ever, Elminster draws upon his huge network of sources to present the information to Ed. As with the cockatrice, he decides to make their petrification a voluntary action. (which I vaguely disapprove of as it makes it entirely a combat power, and removes the inherent tragedy that the other route provides for. ) That sylistic disagreement aside, it's as well written and thought out as ever. Particularly amusing is the gorgons relationship with rust monsters, who will eat their skin (gross) given half the chance. And isn't fun stuff like that what ecology is about. Not just what a creature does, but it's relationship to other creatures. Once again, he's turning in pretty sterling work. For a fuller background: Paul Crabaugh again contributes this month's dragonquest article. Some random rolls produce stupid results. This needs fixing. Lets revise the social class tables, and add a new variable. Nothing wrong with that, and the way it's written is laced with dry humour. A little fun makes an efficient article go down even more smoothly. As long as you don't mind some characters starting out with definite advantages compared to others from random rolls, you should enjoy this. Pages from the mages IV: God, Elminster appearances really are increasing in frequency of late. I guess Ed's realized that quite a few people like him, and is starting to play to the crowd. Before long, his antics'll be overshadowing the game information that he imparts. We're also seeing the same place names turn up repeatedly on a regular basis now, as he develops the Realms in his own mind as well as ours. This installment's pages are Bowengles book, The spellbook of Daimos, The book of Num the mad, and Briels book of shadows. Between them, we have nine new spells, plus a recepie for making homunculi, and his usual array of amusing histories, offhand comments about people and places, and other things that can provide enough plot hooks for months of gaming. It may not all tie together, but that's the nature of a real world. There's bits all over the place, some of which connect, some of which don't, many of which seem to make no sense. You can't tie it all up into a neat package aimed purely at gamability without losing something. The only good captive: Oh, now this is a topic rich in ideas, that D&D really doesn't support at all. Lew Pulsipher floats the idea of keeping captives more, instead of just killing your enemies. It often allows you to get more financial benefits than just killing them and taking their stuff, allows PC's to lose without spoiling the game as much, and opens up tons of interesting roleplaying possibilities. You could be stripped of your stuff and sold into slavery (hey, a chance to use the earlier article on improvised weapons), held for ritual sacrifice, tortured, and forced to spend time with people you wouldn't normally give the time of day to. All cool stuff, that even Lew's advice probably can't make work against the rules of the game, and built up player expectations. Maybe we should consider moving to another one for a while, enjoy the change.Blueprint for a big game: Jim Dutton, the head of the new AD&D PbM game, talks about the creation of the structure for it. This is the kind of thing that causes substantial logistical hassles. You have to structure your world building in a very different way to tabletop, and build up a lot more before you start, because winging it when you have hundreds of parties wandering around a continent is a recepie for disaster. While this gives you lots of advice in how to build your own game in an organized fashion, it doesn't actually reveal that much about the setting of the PbM game (spoilers, blah blah), and the way it's written is rather dull. Someone is rather better at technical writing than fun fluff details. Anyway, did anyone play this back in the day? What was it like? Just how much did they have to change the rules to make the week-long turn cycles work. Reviews: Element masters is a rather curious sounding RPG. Each character is the chosen of one of the four elements, and must master element magic if they are to save the world. Looks like a rather crunchy game, with a long skill list, hit location system where each body part tracks damage separately, lots of weird monsters and implied setting detail, and good examples of play. As long as you don't object to the focussed premise and high crunch level, this looks like quite a good game which can support a decent length campaign. Starstone is a generic RPG module. As with other system free modules around this time, it has to make up for it's lack of crunch by having stronger characterization setting and relationship details than similar D&D modules. It's main flaws are in making the plot solid enough that the PC's want to stick around to solve it, and it refers to an as yet unwritten other module, which everyone knows is an irritating sales ploy. Despite these, the reviewer still recommends it.  Bandit gangs and Caravans is the 10th thieves guild supplement. It gets a rather less enthusiastic review. The law of diminishing returns has set in, and the combination of copypasta, and reduced size compared to previous books is making the reviewer irritable. Which is a shame, because there is some salvagable stuff in there, such as the mass combat system. Judges Guild needs to shake up their format to freshen things up again.</blockquote>

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