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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4967573" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 150: October 1989part 3/5The dragon's bestiary gives us tons of cool information on illithids and their relations. As creatures from another world, even when they've evolved to fill niches analogous to our own, the under the hood means of doing so and physiology is quite different. As well as talking about the existing monsters that are native to those lands, they give us a rough template to convert earthly creatures into their gruesome sunset analogues. So high level adventurers now have a whole new environment to venture too when mundane wilderness encounters no longer offer any challenge at all. This is very pleasing indeed. They've already had an ecology, but this really builds them up quite a bit more than the old one did. And they include a bunch of new monsters as well. Cessrid are essentially Illithid dogs. They have hairless slimy bodies, webbed feet, and sharp beaks surrounded by tentacles, but the hunting principle is the same. They're as smart as the average person, so their tactics'll likely be pretty advanced as they stalk you and rip you up. They remember to reference the Gith dogs from issue 117 and their relationships, which adds to the awesome quotient another little bit. Embrac are slow moving carnivorous trapper creatures. They may not actually be plants, but they definitely make me think of Audrey II. Like everything else here, they're smart and psionic enough that you have a chance of negotiating with them. Kigrid are the illithid eqivalent of pigs, large omnivorous scavengers that'll rip you up and eat you, and probably much of your gear as well. They might be smarter than you, but their perpetual hunger means they don't get much time for philosophising or scheming. Saltor are the illithids equivilent of baboons. Knuckle walking slimy skinned, tentacle mouthed monstrosities, they too like to eat brains if at all possible, and implant their young in your head. They can read minds and levitate. They'll also stoop to throwing rocks at you, and are often capable of dimensional travel, so don't think you can outmaneuver them easily and pick them off from a distance. Seems like you'll be challenged well into the teens if you venture to these realms. The sunset world: Stephen Inniss continues what he started in the last article, extensively detailing a possible homeworld for the mind flayers and similar dungeon based abberations. Actually, it seems like he probably intended them to be the other way round, with this giving the elaborate descriptions, then that filling in more crunch, but so it goes. Silly Roger. He starts from a fairly solid scientific base, that of a tidally locked world orbiting an ancient red star, and then starts building up the fantastical elements, all the highly evolved and psionically capable creatures that are perfectly adapted to this brutal environment, and pretty effective when invading the underdark of your home world. They may not be able to stand the yellow sun, but with minds like theirs, you can bet they have some scheme to extend their dominance over the entire world, enslave us like they did the gith all those years ago. Only this time, they ain't gonna screw it up. Combining a fictional account with some complex and well thought out biological details, this has both useful information and drama in spades, massively surpassing their original ecology in depth and inventiveness, if not humour. Between the two articles, this is probably the best contribution he's ever made, avoiding the dryness he is often prone too, while retaining his skill at detail creation, and a classic pair who's influence is still seen in mind flayers today. If the rest of the issue can live up to these standards, it'll be another top tenner to celebrate. Fangs alot: As they mentioned earlier, the proper revised vampire stats. Woo. Not much to say here. Extensive collection of powers and weaknesses, horribly unfair energy draining, eastern variant able to become invisible, you know the drill. Now let's chill for a bit. Or maybe not. We must be eternally vigilant against further errata attacks! Errata attacks, errata attacks. We must defeat those errata attacks. Great. That's going to be stuck in my head all day now. Palladium fantasy takes us to the frozen northern wildernessThe well-rounded monster hunter: Call of Cthulhu once again makes an incursion into the magazine. Seems fitting, as illithids and their slowly dying world do have a definite lovecraftian influence. On the other hand, the subject isn't particularly connected, since it's just adding and clarifying a bunch of skills. Like far too many systems with lots of finely granulated skills, BRP is prone to having skills added in modules with little explanation, that would often seem to overlap with existing ones.  The more of these are added, the less competent existing characters become, and the more scope for confusion, with characters being useless at something they really would need for their job, and some being simply better than others, because they picked the broader sounding names for their skills. Man, what a headache. There's also the problem that in roll-under systems, people tend to stick with the fixed difficulty level determined by the stat, rather than properly scaling the DC's. Both issues many more recent games successfuly avoid. With mathematical analyses and ideas to fix these problems, this is a quite well done, but not hugely interesting article. You'll need a bit more humour or genuine inventiveness to get above solid.</blockquote>

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