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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5056742" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 165: January 1991part 5/6The marvel-phile: Hmm. A whole team of female villains, none of which are actually particularly sexy? That is rather unusual. Say hello to the Femme Fatales, another recent addition to spiderman's rogues gallery. Knockout, Whiplash, Mindblast and Bloodlust. Individually they seem like one-trick ponies, with one name appropriate power each, (the usual rule of bad puns is very much in effect here) but together they're actually a pretty decent team, both in terms of tactics and personal dynamics. Since they're fairly street level, they'd make a good fight for a team of novice heroes, like many PC's. As both one showing characters I've never heard of before, and above average in-game usefulness, plus a few neat quirks, this is a well above average installment of this series, that I quite enjoyed reading. Let's see each other again some time. Maneuvering for victory: Hmm. Two years into 2nd ed and they're still publishing quite a few articles intended for 1st edition. That does say a lot about the current editorial regime. And this is rehashed in another way, because they did something very like this in issue 127's fighter special. Only this is less advantageous than that, and incompatible with it, as while the previous one gave them extra resource slots to select special maneuvers with, this one requires you to spread your weapon proficiency slots even thinner than they already are, which does get very awkward indeed. It also allows you to spend slots to improve your ability scores, which is incredibly problematic as a resource distribution choice. This is definitely one you should approach with great caution, for several of these are rather game-changing, but you could also wind up without essentials if you get seduced by the shinies and spend all your slots on them. And we know that having a character that is over or underpowered causes problems either way. So this is a textbook example of rather dubious crunch from the magazine, that you incorporate at your peril. Square pegs and round holes: Just 4 months after the last one, we have another article on putting modules into your campaign. This is a slightly more general one, helping you to rebuild them for an existing campaign. Ironically, of course, it's often harder to use the more recent ones in your existing campaign, because they have so much more setting detail that needs to be there if they are to work. This means you have to change things to integrate them, and quite possibly more things to get them to make sense. Even if you're playing in the Forgotten Realms or something, you may have to do some tweaking from canon if your players go to places out of order. (Dragonlance in particular is a nightmare for this. ) Course, if you're the ambitious type, you can not only convert them from different worlds, but different genres entirely. The process may actually involve more effort than just writing a whole new adventure on your own, but hey ho, It all depends how good you are at fudging and twisting existing things around. A challenging article, this does have some nice advice and statistical help, but it certainly doesn't answer all the questions you'll face when you try and convert a Call of Cthulhu adventure to D&D. Still, it should help in making sure no two experiences are alike, since no two DM's will handle the conversions and integrations in the same way, and characters from different rulesets do have radically different abilities. Another one wasn't too interesting to me, but hopefully got some people to push their boundaries, back in the day. The game wizards: We've already mentioned it twice this issue already, but welcome back to the fiends. And hello to the blood war. Funny that such an iconic bit of D&D's setting didn't actually appear until second edition. And ironic that their temporary forbiddance has actually made them a bigger deal in people's minds. This does their reputation no harm at all, pointing out just how useful their spell-like abilities are, especially their teleportation and gating capabilities; and warning you to use caution in incorporating them into your game, make sure that even the appearance of a minor one is a big event for the players. With this kind of buildup, it's no surprise that they'll wind up one of the most common adversaries in Planescape, and make more than a few appearances in other campaign worlds. It's almost a textbook example of publicity via counteractions. Whether this was intentional or not, I'm not sure, but I'm sure upper management :rumble of thunder: doesn't mind too much as long as this makes them a good chunk of money. In any case, I doubt this will end the debates in the forum. Another fairly interesting installment in this thread of drama, as they change the rules of the game on us again.</blockquote>

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