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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4888658" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 137: September 1988part 2/5What's for lunch: Hunting for food. A decidedly tedious business in reality, for finding easily edible plants is harder than it seems, and catching animals requires a lot of patience and luck. It's already been covered in one of the duller 1st ed books, the Wilderness survival guide. But no, someone's not satisfied, and wants to give it even more detail. Cue lots of tables of the natural animals common to various climates, and more than a few statblocks for creatures not covered in the MM's. Yeah, this is still dull stuff, and is problematic because of the usual difficulties in integrating the fantastic and mundane creatures in D&D settings. One to pull up when needed, and then pay no mind too the rest of the time. Treasures of the wilds: Just how much is the stuff you find in the wild actually worth? This is a tricky one, because unlike gold and jewels, the value of harvested plants, furs, meat, etc is very time dependent. A day makes the difference between highly valuable and manky, especially in warmer climates. Perhaps ivory would be a better choice. Course, if it's maximum money to weight ratio you want, poison harvesting is the way to go. This is another one that doesn't make hugely interesting reading, being more than half tables, but would probably save a bit of time if you have the kind of adventurers that collect anything that could remotely be of value. Looks like we're gonna have to deal with quite a bit of grinding here if we want to level up again. The ecology of carnivorous plants: Hmm. This is an unusual one. An article coving a whole range of flora with only one connecting factor. They like to eat adventurers. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> This article goes into an indepth look at real carnivorous plants, and then extrapolates from there when talking about fantasy ones. Most of them come from harsh environments where soil and sunlight are not sufficient to grow healthy plants. After all, nature is lazy. It won't evolve energy intensive adaptions unless there's a real advantage to doing so. And movement via highly selective growth spurts definitely falls into that category. This is another nice reminder of things I learnt in school, and haven't thought about since then. Another bit of pure pontification, this is both longer and more rigorous than the carnivorous ape one, but has less humour in it. Overall, it's a fairly so-so ecology, focussed a little too much on the biology of the creatures, rather than how they can be used to challenge (and be exploited by) adventurers. Gotta keep your playability in mind, especially when dealing with stuff we can get entire books of real world info on elsewhere. Time-life books are advertising in dragon magazine? Way to lower the tone of the whole neighbourhood. Superlame. Weathering the storms: Looks like table central is continuing this month, with a second article for high detail weather determination. (see issue 68 for the last one. )    And I'm afraid this is still dull, heavily realism focussed material that you could spend hours fiddling with, but would be unlikely to improve your game much. This is proving to be a very tiresome issue indeed. What are we to do with them? Into the age of mammals: After the dinosaurs died out, there were several eras of time, filled with weird creatures that don't get nearly as much attention. Which means a rich seam of stuff for you to mine and surprise your players with. This article focusses on the cenozoic era, giving us info on 29 different creatures, 14 of which are new and get full stats. The rest are already statted creatures or variants on them, giving us more info on their place in that era. This is easily the best article so far this issue, with lots of fun little biology tidbits. Since we already have lots of stuff for dinosaurs (issue 112 and others) and more recent ice age stuff, (issue 68 again) putting in a substantial "lost world" region to my campaign increasingly seems both a desirable and achievable thing to do.</blockquote>

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