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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5244885" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 191: March 1993part 6/6The dragon's bestiary has another pair of fae creatures for our delight and quite possibly irritation this month. Faerie Phiz are magical faces that grow on trees, and sometimes other wooden objects. They can't move, but are tough, quite good spellcasters, and have plenty of ancient lore. This means they're perfectly suited to being almighty pains in the ass to adventurers seeking stuff, in Labyrinth-esque fashion. Asrai are the even weedier relatives of nixies. All it takes is direct sunlight or removal from the water to kill them instantly. Poor little things. They'll never be able to break out of their habitat and become adventurers. So they'll just frolic in the water and provide you with a flavour encounter. Bleh. Unearthed Mundana: Aka don't make all the cool treasure magical. Be it mechanical, highly valuable in terms of materials, or merely the information contained within, you can add more contrast to your game by not falling back on the lazy option of giving it plusses and a pretty glow. Still, this does seem more focussed on wizardly types, with scrolls containing various kinds of esoteric info having a very prominent place in it's lists. The remainder seem well suited to roguish sorts, with plenty of things with hidden compartments, tricks, and subtle ways of enhancing your offensive capability. Like the intelligent items article, this is a decent reminder of one of those things that is fairly obvious, but can sometimes get lost in the pursuit of shinies and the need to escalate your campaign to keep the players interested. You need the low key stuff to provide contrast, and make the special bits truly special. Don't forget it. Dragonmirth upgrades their crystal balls again. Yamara continues to be dreadfully meta.  Twilight empire looks like it might get to the climax soon. But will Robinson's daughter want to go back to earth and live a normal life anyway?Through the looking glass has painting advice again, for the first time in rather too long. Unfortunately, it falls prey to their current push to go back to basics, get in the complete newbies. So here we have advice about the essentials of what you need to buy, how much it will cost, and what exactly you do with it, taking you from beginning to end, and including photographs that document these steps on a minotaur warrior wielding a big red shield. Which means that it's both quite well done, and more than a little tiresome to me. When I remember the quite advanced bits of painting advice from the early 80's, this just doesn't hit the spot by comparison. The mental equivalent of another grotty goblin fight after saving the world repeatedly. Give it to someone who needs the XP. TSR Previews: Al-Qadim gets another boxed set, A dozen and one adventures. Guess their budget doesn't run to the full thousand. As is often the case with these products, the adventures can be played one at a time, but have easter eggs that combine to a bigger whole. Speaking of a bigger whole, north in the forgotten Realms, they're reaching the 6th book in the harpers series. Crypt of the shadowking by Mark Anthony (srysly?) The Zhentarim are actually being surprisingly successful for a change. Guess the harpers'll actually have to do some work foiling them. Dark sun sees the PC's having to do some nasty compromises in DSM1: Black flames. How does a would be Dragon position itself as the lesser evil? I'm interested in finding out too. Greyhawk finally gives us a whole sourcebook focusing on Iuz. WGR5: Iuz the evil! Well isn't that nice. Another enemy you aren't supposed to be able to beat, but really should. I'll bet the Dark sun head honchos could kick his ass without breaking a sweat. Dragonlance, having milked the origins of the heroes dry, now focusses on the villains. Before the Mask by Michael and Terri Williams shows us the origin story of Verminaard. What childhood tragedy drives his evil? Who did he screw over in his rise to power? Can you be bothered to find out? Generic AD&D stuff this month is GA2: Swamplight, and the deck of magical items. Another little standalone adventure, and another compilation of stuff making it easy to find and equip items for the anal or just fast and furious among you. D&D has DMR2: Creature catalog, and part 2 of the penhaligon trilogy, The fall of magic. Didn't they just lose all magic for a day recently anyway? Anyway, with lots of monsters being reprinted as well, this doesn't look very imaginative. They seem to be a little unsure what direction to take this in now. A fairly good issue, with plenty of neat stuff to offer, especially in the features. They're once again trying to ensure that they deliver new crunch on uncovered topics, keeping the magazine useful for even long term readers. Obviously they don't always succeed, but this time I found there was rather more successes than failures. Plus with the start of a new column, and a less obvious, but still significant historical development, this is another above average one in terms of actually progressing D&D's history. I guess I'd better see if next issue is another arc episode, or just goofy filler, quite possibly involving hot springs.</blockquote>

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