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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4732869" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 108: April 1986part 2/4Cantrips for clerics: Well well. It's been a few years, but they finally get round to including minor magics for divine spellcasters as well. Pretty much as you would expect, minor, but still pretty useful powers that can be used to make your everyday life go much smoother, and might well save your life in a pinch if applied cleverly. Arthur Collins presents this with his customary flavour of humour, making powers that are specifically useful to the traditional jobs of clergy, and in particular the dull things novice priests have to do as part of their daily chores. This is a nice addition to the game, that I would delight in my players using, and finding clever uses for. A different design: Tournament adventures. I think this is the 4th time this topic has shown up. And as ever, the conception of what makes a good tournament adventure, and how it should differ from a regular one has evolved somewhat since last time. Of course, there are plenty of bad tournament modules out there that don't adhere to these guidelines, with convoluted backstories that take up over half an hour of explaining before you even get to play, insufficiently clear guidelines on what you're supposed to be doing, poor playtesting meaning they're too big or small for their tournament timeslot. And that's not even getting into all the crap that poor GM's or other players can subject you to. So please please playtest your tournament adventures because if they don't work, we can't houserule them like you could at home. This goes double for multi-round adventures, which are a huge logistical hassle, and really need to be finely tuned if they are to work as intended, and not overrun or have too many people drop out at each phase. And if you're still willing to give it a try after all that, please apply to become a tournament GM at this year's gen con <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=";)" /> As you may have noticed, this concentrates more on what not to do than what to do, and comes off as a politely couched rant. Still, bitching is always entertaining (at least, until they get drunk and start repeating themselves. ) so I rather enjoyed reading this one. Don't let the piles of dross drag you down. The judge Dredd RPG. Another game that would spawn multiple editions. Are you ready to lay down the law?Palladium goes onto the high seas. Agents and A-bombs: Ahh, nukes. One of the things that in most games, the writers tell you to never let the PC's get their hands on them at any cost, and if they go off, it's instant death, no roll. Rather spoilsporty behaviour, really. Top Secret is not an exception to this rule. However, sometimes the PC's will fail, and power stations will meltdown, or a nuke will be launched at some city. So rules for the aftermath would not go amiss. How harmful exposure is, how to avoid it, how to spot trouble. It also talks about nuclear scenarios, and the ways players could become involved in them. Terrorists selling nuclear material on the black market, hijacking of missiles in transit or nuclear subs, spying to make sure the ruskies are adhering to the treaties. There's plenty of fun stuff to do once you get over your fear of instadeath. A fairly decent article. After the blast: Roger Moore follows up on the previous article with a short one about just how large an area is actually affected when a nuke goes off. Where does instadeath end, and simply very likely to die horribly begin. We have fairly finely graded sets of radii, along with top secret stats for how agents will be affected. Since lots of these measurements are in real world numbers, this is relatively easily adapted to other games as well. It doesn't quite make this a full special section, but it does fill out the previous article nicely. Which means this kinda straddles his roles as writer and editor. Hmm. Interesting. The plants of Biurndon: Another writer copies Ed by talking about stuff from their own campaign world. Plants are an oft-neglected part of your campaign building, and can be pretty damn useful if you know how to use them. This is the kind of topic that can fill entire books in the real world, so a few pages will never give you the same kind of depth real plants attain. But the author tries gamely, giving us plenty of in-setting writings (which also reference other in-setting stuff amusingly) before letting us in on the behind the scenes statistical stuff. While actually pretty good, this does feel very pastichey, as if the writer is actively trying to imitate Ed Greenwood's writing style as well as his methods. And we all know that kind of imitation is not the way to great success. You'll end up being the Jobriath to Ed's David Bowie. Develop your own voice. It does help.</blockquote>

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