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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4973747" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 151: November 1989part 3/5Soldiers of the law: Freeze, scum! Law enforcement is just as important in oriental lands as western ones, despite the lawful alignment restrictions of many classes. Far too many samurai, monks, kensai and sohei put their own personal codes of honor above the law of the land. And for Yakuza, that is pretty much a given, and entirely to be expected. Whatever force is responsible for judging who is what alignment obviously has no objection to this state of affairs, or they'd all be losing their powers a lot more than they do. But enough of the metaphysics. This is about how they deal with the consequences of this on the ground level. Often, they don't manage too, with yakuza gangs becoming the de facto law enforcement in less salubrious areas, settling disputes with ruthless efficiency. Where the ruler does have a tight grip on the population, they have to balance the need for non lethal enforcement of the law with ruthless effectiveness to deal with the more powerful characters wandering around. This article is useful for both DM's dealing with players, and for setting up a campaign where the PC's are the law enforcement themselves. Full of quickly set up encounters, this looks like quite a helpful one, giving you stats, new honor awards, and new ways of applying familiar classes. I look forward to an opportunity to test it. Earn those heirlooms: Hmm. Someone thinks that some OA characters getting cool stuff as an inheritance at random is unfair, and makes them overpowered compared to both western characters and the rest of their party? Well duh, that was entirely the intention. You did see the bit at the front encouraging you to use twinked new ability generation methods when playing oriental characters, and compare the descriptions and powers of the oriental classes with their western counterparts. Fairness was not a particularly high point on the agenda, while randomness was. But some people are obsessed with bringing balance to a system, even when it's such a big task as to be pretty futile. So it is here, with a system to nerf the inheritance rules. A not particularly great one, using unneeded mathematical steps that could have been handled more elegantly by simply setting the numbers differently instead of having to do extra steps of addition and division. Worra loada point missing crap. No desire to use this one at all. TSR Previews: Buck Rogers' first trilogy draws to a close, with Armaggeddon off Vesta. It ends dramatically, of course. But the bigger question is if we'll see another one. Both our AD&D products are Dragonlance ones this month. Well, FR was over represented last time. Guess it just turned out that way. DLE3: Dragon Keep finishes their new series of modules, where you save the good dragons of Krynn. Nowhere near as epic as last time. Bigger, and even less directional is Time of the Dragon, the new boxed set. A whole new continent for you to play in, that will be relatively free of metaplot meddling. Top secret also completes a trilogy this month, TSE3: Web Wars. This is what happens when you set your schedules at the start of the year. Will the villains have a secret escape route ready so they can scheme to defeat Orion another day? D&D tries to cater for that tricky second adventure market with B12: Queen's Harvest. Head from Thyatis to Karimeikos and gradually take the training wheels off. Marvel Superheroes gives us MU5, the fifth part of the gamers handbook. Less than half the size of the first four, this brings you up to date. You'll have to do all the alphabetical insertion to the main binder yourself though. And we also have one independent book as well. Too, too solid flesh by Nick O'Donohue. Shakespearian sci-fi murder mystery? Sounds interesting and a bit meta. The dragon's bestiary: Wang-liang are our sole submission here this month, albeit a rather long and detailed one. Closely related to ogre magi, they're another vaguely demonic looking creature, with a huge grudge against humanity because they know our greater breeding rate is going to push them to extinction eventually. By many standards, they're not bad creatures, with plenty of honour and a commendable lack of greed, but of course, shapeshifting and tricking people with the intent of making their lives a misery is not good for the alignment. This is one of those contributions where the writer seems a little too attached to their creation, giving you lots of warnings on how not to use them, and how awesome their elders are. I do find this a little tiresome. But then, I'm an honourless human dog, so what would I know. Let's kill 'em all! To arms! Don't forget the invisibility penetrating glasses! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />  The ecology of the Yuan-ti: After a year that's been fairly light on ecologies, here we have a double whammy. This is promising. Rather a far-reaching ecology here, as they give them a life cycle that is an enormous great plot hook to adventurers. Unfortunately, it's also the kind of hook that'll turn them into one adventure ponies, as a thousand year cycle sounds cool when it's in a book, and you can be sure it's the protagonists that get to do the acts of big heroics, but is problematic in an actual sustained campaign world. And indeed, while the Histachi would make it into the next edition, quite a bit of the other stuff here would be ignored in favour of allowing the yuan-ti to mate directly with humans to keep up diversity in their bloodlines. Once again, I'm not very keen on this one, and despite being in the oriental section, it doesn't seem connected to that theme either. What is going on here? How did one of the strongest and most consistently entertaining parts of the magazine turn into a liability like this? Most bemusing. The beastie knows best: Welcome, one and all, to the second annual beastie awards! This year, we keep it in house, with the big winner being the Pool of Radiance Computer game! If you haven't got it already, we recommend the Apple version in particular. Second in our esteem is Ultima V. Despite being well over a year old now, it's still garnering considerable amounts of votes. Will it and it's successors continue to get critical and commercial acclaim? Dungeon Master also wins awards for the second year in a row, and Tetris, Sim City, Gold rush, and lots of other familiar names from last year's reviews get their just deserts. Not a huge amount of commentary I can do on this one, so I'll leave it at that. If you can think of anything that was unjustly passed over, I'd be interested in hearing about it.</blockquote>

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