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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4865501" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 131: March 1988part 3/5Lords & legends: Two original characters are introduced here this time round. Both of them are dwarves, and both of them have forumite namesakes around these days :waves:Kordan Badaxe is a blue-eyed boy with twin returning magical axes. He's kicked the ass of many a giant, and freed slaves to earn his name. Gnarly Bones is an outcast dwarf, who's lost his beard. How very tragic. He's also had a pretty eventful life, going from hedonistic outcast, to responsible leader, with occasional relapses. A good demonstration of just how different you can make two characters, despite them being the same class, race and level. This is considerably better than their usual fare of twinked out literary adaptions. Now that is an unexpected further benefit of this theme. The ecology of the Hook Horror: How nice. A second of these articles in one issue. This one hews closer to the conventional ecology format, once again bringing in a story involving the guild of naturalists. Hook horrors aren't a world threatening problem, since they're essentially just humanoid crab thingies that don't even have proper manipulators to build stuff with. But as a part of the underground ecosystem, they have a fairly solid niche, eating fungi, climbing from cavern to cavern as they exhaust supplies in one area, steering clear of big cities full of drow and the like, and serving as vectors for disease of all kinds. So yeah, plenty of actual ecological info here, as they go into plenty of detail on it's lifecycle and relationship with other creatures. Remember, these caverns are living, growing places with their own food chains, even if the bottom layer is fungi that grow from geothermal vents and magical radiation. Think about that when designing your own campaign. Going somewhere and wiping out it's inhabitants will have knock-on consequences in all the neighbouring regions. This is a good way of reminding us of that without getting into heavyhanded preachy windbaggery. Once again, they've really served up the goods, in both fluff and crunch. The chasm bridge: An adventure? In Dragon magazine? Surely you jest. They've all been sent off to Dungeon, to be with their own kind. Nope. This seems to be on the level. I wasn't expecting that. I wonder if they'll put any more in. Or is this just a way of whetting our appetite and getting people who only buy Dragon to diversify, boost their overall sales? Anyway, this is an interesting little 8-pager, joining in with the underdark theme. Intended for a team of level 4-6th level adventurers, but fairly easily adaptable to higher or lower level ones, this is more a single encounter than a full-on module, but it's a lot more detailed than the ones in the past, with lots of attention paid to backstory, roleplaying of the various creatures, and their combat tactics for when things get ugly. It can be a one-shot encounter, or if the PC's go spelunking regularly, it can become a regular crossroads full of recurring NPC's. Once again, they've made this section highly accessable in terms of quick plug-in and playability. You can get a lot out of this. And so we draw to the end of one of the most impressive, broadranging, and widely applicable themed sections the magazine has ever done. Roger's really rolled a natural 20 this time. TSR Previews is back! Bout time. Of all the silly things to cut. What was the logic behind that? Since they've been away for a while, they fill us in on what came last month, as well as this month and next. February sees Castle Greyhawk. Explore the Hil-arious dungeon below the titular castle of the original campaign world. Shoulda saved this one for April. We're also getting one of the bits of rehash several people have asked for. The Art of Dragon magazine reprints lots of the best pictures, plus 4 of the short stories as well. A chance for the usual suspects to make some more money from their art. In solo gamebooks, we have Marvel gamebook no 8: Guilt by Association. Daredevil has to balance his day and night jobs do-gooding if he wants to make the maximum impact on the criminal population of hell's kitchen. And finally, we have The crystal shard, by R.A Salvadore. Say hello to Wulfgar and his sidekick Drizzt. Soon the billing positions will be reversed. Just you wait. In March, our D&D product is The elves of Alfheim. Another part of the Known World gets filled in, another formerly monolithic class/race gets several new variants. Cool. AD&D is still Forgotten Realms heavy, with FR3: Empires of the sands. Head south to the lands of Amn, Tethyr and Calimshan. The ones that are going to seem rather redundant once Al-Qadim appears as it's own gameline. The Dragonlance chronicles get compiled into a single book. Probably cheaper than buying them individually, if you're curious, this is the way to go. In our solo gamebook lines, we have Shadow over Nordmaar, AD&D adventure book 16. They get increasingly formulaic in their descriptions of theseFinally, we have The demon hand, Greyhawke (sic) adventure 5. Rose Estes continues spinning tales which will take the world ever further from Gary's conception of it.</blockquote>

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