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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4834709" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 126: October 1987part 3/5Hearts of darkness: Ahh, vampires. The first thing most people think of when you say undead (and the other third or so will say zombies) They've turned up fairly frequently in D&D, and will continue to do so. Here Tom Moldvay gives us some real world mythological stuff on vampires of various eras and areas, before turning his attention to the most famous vampire of all. Dracula. We then get (typically twinked out) stats for him, plus a few more vampire variants, Vyrokolakas, Baobhan Sith, and Ch'ing Shih. As with the Witch article last year, there is a bit of repetition, but it's been so long, the magazine has changed readerbase enough in the interim,  and the production values have improved enough that this doesn't feel too egregious. You can both use the stuff from the article as is, and develop the ideas referenced further to create your own cool variants on the lifesucking monster theme. Solid, but not too innovative, it'll keep the punters coming in. Dead on target: So some people aren't finding undead scary enough. How can we make them more so? How about by making their weapons even less effective if they aren't the right type. Skeletons and zombies already have the bashing vs slashing thing. Lets encourage people to need a whole golfbag of weapons of different shapes and materials if they don't want to be ineffective and have a very hard fight on their hands. The kind of thing if you want your game on the gritty end of the scale, and want to encourage players being cautious, paranoid, and carrying ridiculously huge backpacks. Since I'm not currently in a gritty mood, I'm not that enthralled by this. Use with caution, for if applied wrong, it will result in frustrated, bored players. A touch of evil: Vince Garcia continues to rise as a writer this month, with a whole load of adventure seeds based around the various types of undead. Every AD&D monster gets a look at their origins, and a way to use them, many quite clever. Since many undead look quite similar (and that's not even getting into the whole pseudo-undead rigamarole), you are quite justified in playing with people's expectations. Tactical advice for death knights. Trickery from crypt things. Attacks from behind by mummies. Attacks that only paralyze particular body parts. And all manner of other things that I won't spoil you on, because I plan to use them myself. A tremendously fun article to read, that looks like it'll produce pretty fun results, easily integrated into actual play as well. Easily our strongest article in this section, putting not just one, but lots of new spins on our familiar faces. The game wizards: Steve Winter takes over from Zeb to give his perspective on the work on second edition. As he's the editor, and the editing is the aspect that they most want to improve over the first edition books, he has a pretty important job. Fortunately, technology has advanced quite a bit since 1979, so they can write it all up on computer, and shift paragraphs around with a simple copy/paste action. However, despite wanting to make an efficient, nicely organized reference work, they are not unaware of the fact that if you make something too slick and glossy, it actually becomes less appealing to many people, and they'll actually sell less. Which puts them in a pretty pickle. Still, it shows a pretty high level of insight for people in their position, and shows that they haven't been taken over by marketing executives making changes just for the hell of it, as happens far too often in the film industry. Very interesting in terms of revealing the though processes of the people behind the update. Hopefully the responses they get in future issues will be just as interesting. The ecology of the shade: So life sucks, and you feel the inevitable pull of death and decay on all you see, including yourself. You want to escape it, but undeath does not appeal to you, as you will still decay physically, or be forced to slake foul thirsts upon the living, and lose much of your free will. There is another way. A middle path, if you will. Combining light and darkness to produce shadow, and then infuse that shadow into yourself. You will become an immortal shadowy being, able to step into shadows and disappear, venture to and from the plane of shadow virtually at will. And you still keep all your class abilities. The price is that bright light will pain you, and you will become prone to brooding in the shadows, suspicious and misanthropic. Not really a sacrifice for many adventurers, is it? Go, go, mysterious badass brooding loner prana. On the other hand, while they've picked a cool monster, and it has some nicely evocative, understated fiction, this article decides to nerf them by instituting a charisma drain, and prevent them from advancing in levels afterwards, which of course makes them much less appealing for PC's. If I get to use them, I don't think I'll be using those options, thank you very much. I like my transhumanism, and the prospect of my PC's engaging in transformations like this is something I'd like to encourage, not make pointless. So an interesting article, but not one I entirely agree with.</blockquote>

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