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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5008887" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 157: May 1990part 3/6Forgotten Realms starts the empires trilogy, the tie-in novels to the Horde invasion expansion. Will you explore the newly revealed lands, or will they come to you, raping (oh wait, we don't do that in 2nd edition) and pillaging their way through your country and campaign with their metaplot developments. Where there is one Sumotori...... There's bound to be another: In the grand tradition of the bounty hunter, we have two competing versions of the same class in quick succession. Sumo wrestler as a PC? A rather silly idea, but they are oriental, look badass, and have a recent TV series bringing people's attention to them over here. So Stuart Wieck and Len Carpenter follow in Brian Blume's illustrious footsteps. This could definitely be fun to watch. Stuart's version are highly specialised grappling based fighters. Like Monks, they do have some fairly effective MA based effects, but this probably won't keep them up with fighters in the wider world, since they can't use armour or weapons. They are serious tanks, and the combination of high HP & No of attacks, and so-so AC means they make a good way to draw fire if backed up with a healer. While comical, they wouldn't be completely useless, and their skill at grappling and bonus xp gained from winning fights means they might work in an urban game where a lot of the time you want to capture rather than kill. Len's sumo warriors have many similar points, but are rather weaker (unless you take literally the typo which gives them 211 attacks per round, which I assume is meant to read 2/1), requiring more XP per level, getting smaller HD, less flexibility, and having a hard level cap of 8. Unsurprisingly, Len makes a stronger case for keeping them as NPC's. However, they do gain rather more miscellaneous powers scattered through their description, which may well add up to greater effectiveness than you'd think. It still wouldn't be completely predetermined in conflict between the two schools, but you would have to do some fudging, as the systems for battle are also somewhat different. Still, overall, lower basic power and more complication in remembering all their features adds up to a less elegant and desirable class than Stuart's version. On the other hand, since they're both underpowered really, perhaps combining the best features of both would result in a competitive adventuring class. Hmm. Was anyone zany enough to try these guys out in their campaign back in the day? The voyage of the princess ark: A rather interesting genre change this month, as the ark ventures into the vulture peninsula. This, it turns out, was actually accurately named by the old map. Not only is it infested with vultures, but it's also the home of a race of vulture headed men cursed with eternal reincarnation retaining all their memories. And like way too many vampires, they spend a lot of time moping about their immortal existence as eternally shunned carrion feeders when they really should be doing cool stuff with their endless lives and quite considerable magical powers. As they're near impossible to get rid of permanently, they make great recurring adversaries. Definitely an interesting entry, showing how varied mystara can be. It's filled to the brim with odd places for you to adventure in and solve the problems of, and can do comedy, tragedy, horror and high fantasy. Which will their wanderings result in next time?The best of dragon games! A compilation of six of the most popular games from the magazines history. Is there nothing they can't compile these days? Computer programs, maybe. It's been years since we saw one of those in here, and they messed them up most times they tried them. The ecology of the Wemic: Ahh, cat-people. Always a popular choice. As are stereotyped noble savage cultures. And with this ecology, you get two stereotypes for the price of one, if not more! Just the thing for those of you out there who enjoy playing cat people and acting out their feline behavioural traits. One does not have to look far to see that the roleplaying and mad cat lady demographics have a reasonable degree of crossover. (there are still people who'll rant about the crap deals the Bastet got in the NWoD and refuse to play it because of that <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" /> ) Like the Satyr one, this is interesting, and sometimes amusing, but not entirely pleasing, largely due to the degree of fanservice pandering involved. It's also hampered by one of their more annoying cases of page-chopping formatting, with bits scrunched between adverts and inside other articles. Part of D&D's downfall over this decade will be the rise of other games that cater better to certain kinds of players and luring them away. Hmm.</blockquote>

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