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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4941287" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 145: May 1989part 2/5Shadowrun! Another awesome game coming soon. Nice understated teaser advert as well. I'm guessing that they'll have more illuminating previews later. A castle here, A castle there: Looks like the joys of random tables will continue even into the new edition. Here we expand upon the fairly basic tables in the old DMG, (after all, the new one isn't out yet) adding stuff from Unearthed arcana and Oriental adventures, and allowing you to quickly determine more details about it's construction, inhabitants, surroundings, and relationship with the rest of the world. Quick, but perfectly decent, this is yet another nice little time saver for me to pull out and use in my games. Holding down the fort: A bit of rehash here, as they give us another events table for those of you who've settled down. If you won't go to the adventure, the adventure will come to you, with all kinds of natural and political inconveniences cropping up with tabloid filling regularity. You have to maintain the place, monsters show up and try and kill people, armies attack, assassins infiltrate, and the court in general bickers and machinates ad nauseum. A few months of this kind of stuff, and many players'll be itching to sell up and set off again. The frequency of events is rather higher than on most tables of this sort, to the degree where it would be exceedingly hard to stay on top of things, no matter how high level you are. Interesting, but not the best example of this kind of thing I've ever seen. You'll have to push yourself a bit harder to come up with a really expansive and statistically well distributed one of these that I'll really want to use in my game. Strongholds three: A very useful article here. Arthur Collins does exactly what you'd expect from the title, and gives us three very different strongholds to insert into your game. All are logically designed to serve a purpose, and be advantageous to the people living within, rather than just some dungeon crawl. Littlefang is designed to give you a tactical stronghold in mountainous terrain, letting you control a travel route and bombard anyone who attacks with missiles while they have a tricky time even getting to the walls. Are you ready to pay the toll? Niriath Henning is a castle glamoured to appear as an elf hill. While designed to be aesthetically pleasing, with plenty of open space in the courtyard, it's certainly not without mundane defences either, and since it's inhabited by elves, expect lots of spell based attacks. Goldworthy castle, on the other hand, is designed as an exceedingly tough conventional fortress. Hard to get into, and easy to attack out of, it has extensive walled courtyards between the outer walls and the actual castle, so even if you penetrate the first line of defense, you're now being bombarded from all sides instead of just one. Since this is basically three half-adventures, (just give them a location, flesh out inhabitants and add plot) this is pretty handy. As they're pretty good as well, I have no hesitation about using them. He is becoming one of their more notable freelancers. Your home is your castle: So why bother to build a castle anyway? It's incredibly expensive, takes quite a bit of maintenance, and they're frequently dank, drafty, miserable places. In case you'd forgotten, the big reason is so you can protect yourself, and possibly the local community if you're the benevolent kind of lord. (and even if you're not, you'll still want to keep anyone else from ravaging your dominion.) Anyway, this is lots of info on making your own realistic medieval castles. Just the kind of thing Katharine Kerr used to specialise in, and indeed, she gets mentioned in the bibliography. This isn't as fun as the previous article, but of course stuff that requires you to do a load of your own work to make it into something you can use in a game. Oh well, It's still pretty decent, with more well integrated illustrations. You can't use prefab stuff the whole time and be called an expert game master. Bazaar of the Bizarre: 16 new items which are suited to this month's theme for your enjoyment here. Some of them, of course, are cursed; using their resemblance to other items to make a sucker out of you, and ruin your home. Still, the abilities to create teleportation portals so you can get around conveniently, keep your house lit for long periods of time at low cost, ward it from enemies, summon an army, and ensure that you always have a decent water supply are certainly not to be sneezed at. They also include two new spells, Balliant's Stonestrength and Stonesplit. If you want to have a siege, knowing these would be damn handy, whichever side you're on. A pretty good collection, with several items that have a whole bunch of inventive exploits you can pull. If you've made it to high enough level to settle down, giving your players some of these will definitely be appreciated. A pretty good finisher to the themed section.</blockquote>

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