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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5071603" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 168: April 1991part 2/6Bazaar of the Bizarre: Looks like we have a surplus of suspicious magical items this year, with a second article doing much the same as the last one, only with less style. They must have got a job lot off the back of a lorry, quite possibly courtesy of Bargle & co. Mirrors of Sophistication give any woman perfect hair - for a dwarf! Now that's just plain mean, like those girdles of gender changing. Beware your hair indeed. Still, at least this one wears off eventually. Rings of Ice do what they do, albeit a little too well. If you're not actually in serious hot water, keep it in your pocket. Elixir of additional weaponry is also pretty damn handy - for Drow. Anyone else may have some serious issues with growing additional evil arms. Elixir of reduction is like a potion of diminution, only permanent and not affecting your stuff. This is obviously a serious issue if you're not expecting it, for there are many creatures that would enjoy eating a tiny naked man lost in a dungeon. All those clothes can stick in your teeth and be a right pain if you don't have hands. Scroll of Transmutation are another joke which works by playing with expectations. Like rust monsters and energy draining undead, this one will provoke massive amounts of terror in adventurers for all the wrong reasons. The Orb of distant viewing is probably the dumbest and most meta of all this collection. All it shows are I love Lucy reruns. I am not amused in the slightest. Still, that aside, these two collections have once again improved on the last two years, in that most of the items feel like they could actually have been created by people for a reason, rather than just because the gods of the setting want to watch and laugh as the people who find them suffer. They could be incorporated into a serious game and not ruin it automatically. Forum: Andrew Cairns gives an interesting motivational speech about what D&D can be, the stories it can tell, the lessons it can impart. If you do it right, it shows the players that working together and learning to understand people is an important part of life. If done wrong, it teaches that casual racism and killing is a quick path to profit. Hmm. Well, its certainly a way of thinking about it.  Since the trend over time has definitely been to making other races playable and comprehensible, I think that your worries aren't substantiated. Joseph Dineen contributes his own opinion on the impact spellcasters have on warfare, using not just D&D, but WHFRP and Palladium as well. So he suggests some tactics he thinks would work for a city equipped with a decent number of mages in their guards, and expecting likewise from any attackers. I guess WHFB is one of the better systems for trying things like that. Jules Jones gives a whole bunch of (unofficial) rules clarifications, which look handy for curbing some of the excesses of twinks. (although ducks really shouldn't be able to hover <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" /> ) Now, if we could only do something about the orientophillia. They're already more powerful than regular characters, you don't need to give them more options. Scott M McDowell talks about his rather messed up gaming circle and his attempts to get them under control. They seem to be improving, but it's a slow process. Still, it makes for good stories when they pull ridiculous crap. Jasen Cooper extolls the badassedness of dragons. Blah blah, tactics, excellent senses, should be nearly impossible to defeat. Yeah, we know, we get told so nearly every year. Are the upgrades they got in the edition change not enough for you? On a similar note, Matt Bonnan wants dinosaurs given the credit they deserve. Our knowledge of them continues to advance, and the idea that they were all stupid, sluggish and ungainly looks increasingly tenuous. They never stopped being cool even so, you know. I suspect this means we'll be seeing another article or two on them in the near future. Issue 112's attempt at definitiveness could satisfy the public appetite for only so long. Saddam Hussein and George Bush get lampooned in Mid-East Peace. I think that's something we can all get behind.</blockquote>

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