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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4803703" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 121: May 1987part 3/4The life and death of a castle: Hmm. This is a topic we've seen covered before in plenty of detail for western stuff. (issues 80 and 89, among others) So it seems perfectly reasonable to examine how japanese ones differ from them. They may differ somewhat architecturally, but the basic tactical and socioeconomic pressures are much the same. You need to be able to see. You need to be able to defend your walls. You need to be able to dominate, tax, and protect the local population. You need to be able to live there fairly comfortably. And so forth. As with personal armour, they tend less towards singular big hard defenses (no castle can withstand a big earthquake) and more on an array of moats, trenches, and irregular wooden barriers that provide you plenty of cover and are a bugger to get through for enemy troops. It's no wonder they turn to ninja to penetrate these places and kill the bosses without huge losses on both sides. A pretty solid article that describes it's topic in an evocative, easily visualized way, this gives me some more evil ideas for designing my own world with. Mix and match tactics from various cultures to make your players decidedly miserable. Muahahaha, etc etc. Keep on building those fortresses. We'll keep on tearing them down. Lets loot and pillage the best bits and roll ever onwards. Palladium apologize for the long delayed release of book III, adventures on the high seas. Same as it ever was. Nice pic of a cyclops and griffon though. The geisya: Ha. Missing your bard role for eastern games? Take a courtesan adventuring. While certainly not badasses, with minor spellcasting and roguish abilities, and pretty good general and social skills, they'll be less useless than you'd think, especially if they're also ninjas. Don't neglect your social and support classes. Probably best suited to troupe play, where each player is controlling multiple characters and sometimes focussing on one or another of them, these are rather underpowered in combat, but also have extremely low XP costs at mid level. If you have the obscene ability scores needed, dual-class into them, then out of them after reaching 8th level if you want to remain a competitive adventurer. This fills a niche they didn't cover before, and maintains ideals of flavour over balanced mechanics, so even if it's not suitable for every game, and possibly a bit obvious, I don't object to it. After all, if you don't cover the obvious stuff, you don't have a solid base for other people to build upon. And you can nick the new spells for your bards and wu jen.  The Genin: There's always someone not satisfied with the established order, isn't there. For whatever reason, the writers of OA decided that all ninjas would be split-class characters, maintaining a convincing front as some other class, and ensuring they have a broad base of skills to draw upon to accomplish their missions and keep people fighting them off balance. But this writer wants to play a character who has been trained in nothing but the ninja arts since childhood, and has not bothered with such petty distractions. So here we have the Genin, which does exactly that, gaining all the powers of the regular Ninja, plus a few extra for being a specialist. They'll obviously advance faster than a character splitting their XP, as they have lower XP costs, and they'll probably have slightly better hp as well, but not be as versatile or able to operate independently for extended undercover missions. There's nothing obviously wrong with this mechanically, but like the barbarian cleric, this is very definite theme dilution, and is probably slightly overpowered as well (more tricks for less xp? shurely shome mishtake.) I mildly disapprove, as this doesn't display a huge amount of creativity. Give us something we couldn't whip up in a few minutes ourselves please. Sun dragon castle: This month's centrepiece is another build it yourself cardboard model. And the surroundings, in another attempt to push their boundaries. This is bigger than their previous attempts, and the instructions are considerably longer and more detailed as well. I doubt many people managed to put together successfully, and in any case, this eats up a total of 14 pages in the .pdf version that I can't get much use out of. So it's another worthy special feature that'll get oohed and ahhed over for a bit, and then forgotten, when more practical articles are still being used years later. So it goes. Fiction: Love and ale by Nick O'Donohue. A Dragonlance story here. Been a while since we had one of those. This is one of the ones from Leaves from the inn of the last home, designed to show the softer, small scale side of krynn. See young Tika go through romantic woes, kender be their usual pestilent selves, and the small tragedies and triumphs in general of running an inn. Will this year's ale be a good batch? Will we be able to avoid having the place trashed by drunkards? Will we be able to spot thieves and con men? Not very dramatic stuff, but it has a certain twee charm. But then, Krynn has always done twee well, and the palatability of that is very much a matter of taste. I'm afraid it does not tempt me to pick up the full book. The marvel-phile: Jeff returns, rather apologetic for his frequent absences of late. This time, we have another case of a new character taking an old character's name. Ms Marvel is now Sharon Ventura, daredevil, wrestler, another recipient of the super-soldier serum, and currently a member of the fantastic four. (yeah, that's not going to last long) Jeff has obviously taken notes from his substitutes, because he includes advice for using the new super-soldier serum in your own game. A bit of a gamble, it could make you badass, or cause you to degenerate into a bestial monstrosity. Don't be too attached to your character concept if you try it in game. But it does make for good drama, and a good excuse for lots of super-powered mooks to challenge your team with. In a genre where you're supposed to be one of a special few, if you don't stick to genre conventions and continually kill your enemies, you'll run out of suitable challenges way too soon, so that's probably a good thing. A change has obviously been as good as a rest for jeff, as this is definitely an above average entry.</blockquote>

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