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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5066308" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 167: March 1991part 3/6TSR Previews: The forgotten realms is double billing yet again. LC3: Nightwatch in the living city sees Ravens Bluff go mainstream. (I don't remember seeing LC 1 or 2 advertised here) Now you don't have to be part of the RPGA to do some heroic acts around here. Far to the west, Doug Niles finishes the Maztica Trilogy with Feathered Dragon. Didn't we just find one of those in the hollow world? Man, this stuff gets tricky to keep straight. Greyhawk starts something a little bigger than a trilogy this year. WGS1: Five shall be one. Carl Sargent sends you on a macguffin hunt to retrieve a series of magical blades. This one any good? Dragonlance also seems to have realised people are getting tired of trilogies. Instead, they're starting a sextet. The meetings series sees us go right back, prequeling the prequels, to when the heroes of the lance first met. Man, they're really milking the past in this setting. Next thing, we'll be having whole books on their childhoods. Flint, Tanis, and Laurana are first up, in Kindred Spirits. Spelljammer gets a second Monstrous compendium appendix, MC9. There's a lot of weird stuff up there. Not that they're spoiling what they are exactly. This should be fun. Lankhmar has a second anthology of short adventures. LNA3: Prince of Lankhmar. Set in the city itself, it sounds as if there may be interconnections between them. Again, could be fun. And our standalone book this month is Sorcerer's Stone by L. Dean James. Not a very edifying title, but the synopsis doesn't seem too bad, if a bit stereotypical. Just another tiny piece of the endless wash of product these days. Arcane lore: Yay for problemsolving! A few months ago, it was pointed out that Necromancers have some serious problems with spell selection at low level. Their favoured school, while useful, is not nearly as well exploited as it should be. So this is damn helpful article, with quite a few spells that would make it into future sourcebooks. (in particular, I think all of them were in the Complete Necromancer's Handbook. ) I quite approve. Animate Dead Animals is ridiculously effective for it's level. Unless you need them to have hands, I'm not sure why anyone bothers with regular skeletons & zombies if they have this. Spectral Ears & Eyes are cut-price versions of Clairvoyance and audience, since you need an undead creature to share the senses of. Spectral voice lets you speak through your minions, as well which is basically a crap version of ventriloquism. Still, remote control of your minions is not to be sneezed at, especially at 1st level. If you use these wisely, maybe you'll survive your first adventurer encounters and get to be a proper evil overlord. Skeletal Hands also gives you useful remote manipulation abilities. Not hugely useful in combat, this'll give a wizard who's to lazy to get up from sitting in front of the crystal ball a decent alternative to unseen servant. (in case they can't access that) Bone Knit lets you heal skeletons, or even give them regeneration. Now there's a visual that always makes players worry. Just how much effort are these undead going to take to put down? Sometimes, in the movies, no amount of hacking'll do the job. Kill it with fire or drop them in a pit instead. Ghastly Hands lets you paralyze things with touch like a Ghast. This feels very much like a way of compensating for the fact that Hold Person is an Enchantment. If you have no hammer, then maybe a screwdriver will serve if you use a little cleverness. Skull Trap is like Fire Trap, only more obvious, and using negative energy rather than fire. Another reason you should be very wary of any skulls just left lying around a dungeon. How many spells need a good skull to work? Transmute Bone to Steel doesn't actually do that, just makes it as tough as, like those wood/iron transmutation spells druids got. This is fairly high level for a moderate buff to your undead minions. Still, it is reversible, which is exceedingly good for dealing with Iron Golems. Undead Servants makes your rotting minions somewhat intelligent and programmable with complex instructions. This is pretty weak for it's level, and may actually be a nerf in disguise, since animate dead never strictly defined how much memory for complex instructions undead have in the first place. Since the low level ones are quite powerful for their level, this does make me wonder a bit. We really could do with better power benchmarks for spell levels than highly subjective eyeballing.</blockquote>

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