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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5012946" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 158: June 1990part 2/6The mightiest of Dragons: Oooh. A basic D&D specific article. The princess ark has company for a change. Their rather different approach towards the Planes, and supreme masters of the species is taken advantage of here, as they create a set of places that make suitably tough challenges for Master level adventurers, and a decent bunch of neighbours if you make it to Immortal. The D&D dragon rulers may not be as filled in as Bahamut and Tiamat, but they are rather more replacable, since killing them just results in another powerful dragon taking the job. Which means if you get the hang of these places, you have a nice respawning instance to grind for XP. <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" /> It's obvious that the writer has had to deal with players who think like that, and wants to discourage that kind of behaviour, as he taken pains to make these places extra tricky to get through, with large numbers of obscenely powerful creatures around before you get to the actual bosses. While this does fall somewhat into the old problem of making an infinite universe seem small, it lampshades it better than most of these articles. While not really big or good enough to be a classic add-on, it's still an interesting and fairly useful article, that helps give high level characters more to do. And as we know, that's always a problem, given how many adventures it takes to advance a level at that stage in the game. A spell of conversation: An odd little article here. If you want to talk with a dragon without them constantly trying to trick, enslave or eat you, what do you do? Generally, the answer involves proving yourself sufficiently badass that they take you seriously, rather than just yawning at the puny human and then terminally testing your capabilities. If you'd like to do so without having to engage in some impolite wholesale destruction as a demonstration, take this spell to enforce the pax. Like Protection from Evil, it gives a strong incentive to both sides to play nice, and penalizes you if you try and cheat and break it. Yeah, I can see the value in this, and it seems pretty thematic narratively. This is another one I have no problem with the idea of using in a game. Just gotta hope your players think of trying that approach. The dragon's bestiary: Gorynych are another mythological creature converted to D&D. Like hydra, they have more than one head, and can be an almighty pain in the butt, grappling you and then wishboning you apart with two of their heads. Like other creatures with no great amount of brains or magic, but lots of attacks, they seem well suited to being a good solo challenge for big mid-level groups. Pincushion them to death. Common dragonets, like common gulls, are slightly misnamed, as they are being outcompeted by more ferocious and specialised variants. Still, they seem like a good target for taming, and their breath weapon is delightfully screwage inflicting. Beware halflings riding one of these. A good one for low level adventurers who'd like to fight dragons, but really don't have enough raw power yet. A few flocks of these'll get their level up, while teaching them valuable tactics for the future. A perfectly decent pair of new monsters. That's not in the monstrous compendium: Another article, featuring more actual dragons. You know, you could probably have saved space by rolling them into one, which could then have been used elsewhere. But then the joke name harking back to the original introduction of the Gem dragons 10 years ago would have been lost. Still, this seems fairly positive. Pearl dragons do have a slight mechanical problem, in that the new HD calculations for dragons give them 0HD at hatchling age. You'll have to work something out. They get tons of spells, but no spell-like abilities. Unsurprisingly, they own tons of pearls. Jade dragons are supposed to be more powerful than emerald dragons, but actually aren't, being outperformed in terms of size and physical prowess quite handily. Whether their greater spell capability will compensate for this I am not sure, but it doesn't seem promising. Jacinth dragons are a bit more powerful again, but still weaker than any of the standard gem dragons, with a decidedly weedy breath weapon that won't be much threat to an equivalent level party. They do get a couple of innate powers, but really as with the other two of these, the real challenge will be choosing a good set of spells and using them to tactical advantage. These guys are not for a DM who just wants to throw some prefab monsters at the players. Overall, it's a pretty lackluster collection, that doesn't really seem that well integrated with the previous ones. A big part of this is probably due to the psionics rules not being out for 2nd edition yet, so they couldn't be used with it. And in general, the math seems a little off, as if the writer is working from 1st ed benchmarks rather than the updated ones. If they'd waited a year, they could have done a much better job on this. Now you'll have to live with them forever, including being reprinted in an official MC Appendix. Still, I suspect there'll be plenty more dragons in later years before this magazine's time is up. Mustn't let it get you down.</blockquote>

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