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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5201996" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 185: September 1992part 2/6Mastered, yet untamed: More Dark sun monsters, and official permission to use a few more from other settings as well here. This time, the theme is stuff that you can domesticate. Even in a place as hostile as Athas, people can learn to work together with various animals for mutual benefit. And then eat them when supplies get low. <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" /> Just watch they don't get you first, for they're no pushovers. Baazrag are one of the few Dark sun creatures that isn't big and scary. In fact, they're almost cute. They might be only 2' long, but in packs they can make surprisingly good draft animals, like huskies with armour plated heads. Heavy Crodlu are considerably less cute than chocobos, but serve about the same role. The athasian equivalent of draft horses, they can be pretty nasty, with a full 5 attacks per round. Train them to fight and any bandits attacking your merchant train'll have a rough time of it. Drik are enormous, foul-tempered, flat-shelled turtles. This means you can set up little structures on their back easily, but also makes them a serious hazard to their handlers. Everything has to be a little more badass in Athas, doesn't it. Jalath'gak (bless you. Get well soon dear.) are enormous flying insects. They don't make that brilliant draft animals, but the thri-kreen obviously prefer them to the reptilian ones earlier. And they still can work perfectly fine as flying mounts for combat. 7 attacks? That could strafe a whole party effectively. Ruktoi are basically silt-based crocodiles. They do the old ambush predator thing of floating just below the surface, then grabbing you and pulling you under to suffocate. The lack of water in athas certainly doesn't keep these nasty tricks from working. Another one you can theoretically domesticate, but good luck not becoming dinner if you slip up. Rather a recurring theme really. Watroaches are simultaneously a giant beetle, and a ton of little beetles that form a hive. This is pretty interesting really. They can't be tamed, but hollowed out undead watroaches are another nasty mobile siege engine that can really make a mess of the enemy's defences, since building materials really struggle to keep up with the creatures around here. Everyone ought to move into bioorganics, because stone weapons just can't cut it against these creatures. Twenty tricks for castle defense: An article that obviously springs from the recent forum debates. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Roger probably finds it quite nice when someone sends in something forum related that can be broken out and make a full article in itself. It provides a continuity to the magazine that just including whatever seems cool at the time lacks. Mixing magical and mundane tricks, this is primarily intended for the defender, but many of the tricks would work just as well from the other side too. Staying on top of things while keeping the enemy off guard and reacting to you is always a wise choice to make. Hitting them in the infrastructure, breaking morale and using assassins rather than head-on fights also seems more likely to win, and with less bloodshed for both sides too. (and people say paladins are the good ones. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="O_o" title="Er... what?    O_o"  data-smilie="12"data-shortname="O_o" /> ) This is a good one, compressing lots of useful stuff into a small package, while coming up with some of it's own ideas. Sun Tzu would be proud. Fiction: Water and ashes by Allen Varney. The story of the founding of the Veiled alliance. Since Allen just wrote the sourcebook on that, this smells like cut material, as for whatever reason, the editors decided not to include a short story this time. Not that I blame them, as this isn't the most enthralling little bit of writing they've included. In fact, it all smells a bit anvilicious, with very little actual agency demonstrated by any of the main characters. The founding of the alliance comes to look like more of a quirky accident that was run with than a deliberate attempt by anyone to oppose the sorcerer-kings. And the way morality is handled is oh so very D&D and unnaturalistic. It looks like the skills needed to be a good game writer and reviewer, and fiction writer do not always correlate. So we have here a textbook example of bad gaming fiction. Don't like this at all. The voyage of the princess ark: Bruce makes up for last month's laziness with quite a long and interesting adventure. Heading north, the Ark encounters the three very different nations of lizard people. Shazaks, Gurrash, and Cay-men. Haldemar gets captured, again, and is going to be sacrificed to the Gurrash's monstrosity. Which turns out to be a Neh-Thalggu, played for laughs as it suffers an attack of multiple personalities from it's contained brains. We get more hints as to the upcoming big metaplot events. Haldemar remains skeptical. Mystara, losing all it's magic? surely not. This would ruin Alphatia. Even if they're lying, it would probably be a good idea to investigate further. Unsurprisingly, OOC, we have more history on the races of lizard men and stats that make them playable as PC's. Uplifted by the Herathians to serve as slaves, and then kicked out when they proved not useful, they've built their own little cultures in the swamps and forests. Not very impressive ones, mind, but a definite improvement on regular lizard men. They have rather interesting stats, with negative levels, intelligence that starts off really low and increases as they gain levels, and yet another different way of handling things if they become spellcasters. Bruce does seem to enjoy experimenting with these exception based race/class combos. And so once again we have some cool new stuff opened up for us to experiment with. He does seem to be doing that more and more frequently. Guess it's what the people want. You know, by this stage it would be simpler to have separate races and classes like AD&D.</blockquote>

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