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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5114172" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 174: October 1991part 5/6TSR Previews: D&D continues it's revamp with the rules cyclopedia. The new basic set may not have made much impact, but this certainly did, even amongst people who have all the old boxed sets. (after all, if you've been playing regularly for 6 years, they're probably getting a bit ratty. ) Even now, it has enough devotees to jack the ebay prices up quite substantially. It also continues to fill out the hollow world, in HWR2: Kingdom of Nithia. Another once great culture preserved from the surface world. What strange stuff do they have for the salvaging? The Forgotten realms is still concerned with Maztica in FMA2: Endless armies. Foil a horde of giant ants using the battlesystem rules? That's a new one for the system. Let's hope it handles it and produces a fun adventure, because that definitely seems like a cool change of pace. Back in the Realms themselves. R. A. Salvadore tries to escape the endless Drizzt trilogies with um, a quintet about a cleric instead. Who's idea was that, and did they come up with the plot and realize it would take 5 books to tell, or decided to do a quintet first, and then churn out crap until the page count was filled? Meet Cadderly in Canticle. Times are about to get very interesting for him. Dragonlance isn't so diverse, with elves elves elves taking centre stage in both modules and novels. DLS4: Wild elves does what it says on the tin. Scott Bennie tries to make their trials and travails interesting to adventurers. Meanwhile, Paul Thompson and Tonya Carter complete The Qualinesti, the final book in the elven nations trilogy. They do like their boy/girl teams for writing Dragonlance stuff, don't they. I guess they're trying to replicate the magic formula of the original series or something. Ravenloft takes us to a blasted fantasy egypt, to face the deadly touch of the mummy darklord in RA3: Touch of death. Water shortages, mirages, jackals, vultures and undead. Thoroughly miserable place. And finally, on the generic side, the complete series kicks off again with PHBR6: The complete dwarves handbook. An arsenal of cool kits and other stuff to really fill them out. Certain players will be rubbing their hands together. Bazaar of the Bizarre: Ioun Stones! Another thing introduced in the earliest days of the magazine gets revisited in greater depth, with lots of new variants. Like Mind flayers, this is a very welcome returning topic. Like the card deck one from issue 148, this is essentially an ecology article, giving us some ideas of where they could come from, and how they got made. Be it the middle of a star, or the border between the plane of earth & positive energy, it takes quite substantial amounts of energy and pressure. A smart wizard might be able to custom make them, but they also show up naturally, which is pretty awesome really. And not only is this a decent enough ecology, but it also casually throws in 28 new varieties of stone to put in your treasure piles. So it's both good reading and damn useful in actual play, providing you with treasure and plot hooks aplenty to keep your game well fuelled with adventure. The dragon's bestiary continues directly on from the previous article, introducing a whole load of new creatures for the Quasielemental plane of Mineral. As with the paraelemental plane of ice (see issue 129) these guys have a strong crystaline theme, mostly being formed out of sharp geometric shapes, and aren't very keen on gross fleshy interlopers. (which will now be even more frequent since they now know there's not just vast quantities of gems, but Ioun stones to be mined round these parts) This looks pretty spiffy. Glomus float around and use their many spikes to deal with anyone who disrupts their inscrutable cogitation. They reform if you don't smash them thoroughly enough, so be wary. Shard also demonstrate that even weak planar monsters are pretty scary for mid level adventurers. They might be only flying crystals, but they're both sharp and dazzling. And they often appear in large numbers. They can certainly turn an invading party into bloody ribbons. Spined shards are even more unpleasant than their single crystaled relations. With multiple attacks, blasty effects and an anti-magic field, they have a bit in common with beholders actually, even if they look quite different. Well, Tasmanian devils aren't less scary because they're very different from wolves. Chamerol are enormous tentacled rock-tree things that grow right on the positive energy border. This means they have no shortage of fuel to grow to truly ridiculous sizes and spread their roots through the tough rock beneath them. Wonder what the things that parasitise their innards look like? Energy pods look like more substantial relatives of xag-ya, feeding of both energy and minerals. Watch out for the explosive effects when you damage them. Trilling chrysmal look like those biology textbook pictures of viruses, with a hexagonal body and spidery legs on one end. They're pretty cute, but have powerful offence and spell reflection abilities. Be glad they won't be laying their eggs in you. Crystalle is a nicely old skool elemental ruler, with plenty of magic abilities, and a haul of ioun stones that'll make even archmages jealous. He's certainly not unbeatable, but with all his equipment, money and servants, it'll be a big ugly adventure to get to take his stuff. Combined with the previous article, this adds up to a rather idiosyncratic special feature that does quite a bit to fill in another obscure corner of the planes. Something they don't do nearly enough of, and that I'm pretty fond of, so I'm definitely giving this set high marks. It's a big strange universe out there, and if our game can reflect at least a small fraction of those environments and the theoretical creatures adapted to them, it'll be a lot more interesting than another delve into our own tedious minds.</blockquote>

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