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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5333038" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 202: February 1994part 2/6The legends say: We've had some fairly general roleplaying advice, now it's back to examining a specific class feature in great detail. This time it's bard's lore ability. It's a mildly problematic one, because you have to either invent histories for all the magic items in your game, or be rather good at winging it. Or create a random table of historical details, and cross things off as they come up, with is even more work really. Maybe you shouldn't have so many magical items in your game in the first place. <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" /> It also suggests that you shouldn't make all the legends true or complete, which may be a bit problematic, but will make things more interesting. So this is pretty far towards the fluffy side, but not terrible advice if you like that sort of thing. Can't see it appearing in later editions though. The master's hand: Another bit of purely fluffy roleplaying advice, presented in the form of 2nd person IC narration. Zeb Cook has lots of fun presenting real world thievery and con tricks, showing how a poor street rat can survive and prosper while staying one step ahead of the law. Ironically, the best way to do that is not to look notably ragged and suspicious, so you can walk past someone, have their purse and be long gone before they suspect anything. And the really big hauls involve actually playing on their naiveté or desires, getting their trust temporarily and then exploiting it, preferably in a way that leaves them embarrassed to go to the law for revenge. Having accomplices you can trust but pretend not to know mid heist goes a long way towards making your role convincing. It's all a surprisingly social business, especially once you get into the organised crime aspects, which is where the really big profits lie. If you want to be outside the law, you've got to be prepared to live by a code and be trustworthy to those close to you to stay out of prison in the long term. Ironic, isn't it. Anyway, this is a good deal of fun to read, showing much of the same spirit of cynical IC delivery as his upcoming planescape work. It may not have any mechanical stuff, but this is very solid stuff to draw upon to help you build a convincing larcenous type. And much more entertaining than Wolfgang's spin on the same topic. Wahoo! Attack of the little people: Minis may be on the decline in many respects, but it looks like one field is still a growth area, so to speak. 15mm minis are obviously a good deal smaller than the standard 25mm ones, but that is actually a real advantage if you want to hold really big battles. After all, scale to area is quadratic, and having them at .6 the size means you can fit 2.77 times as many in your legions. It's not a bad idea at all, especially in these days of increasing prices, to trade visual detail for practicality. Course, their motivation for telling us this is not purely commentary, it's because TSR is moving into that market, with a fairly extensive line of licensed Ral Partha minis coming out over the year. So this is a fairly sneaky bit of promotion, trying to big up an ailing hobby and make more money for themselves in the process. There's still lots of people out there who want to combine minis with their gaming, despite it not being official company policy to encourage this. They'll rise to ascendance eventually. For now, we can watch them really work to keep things together and survive. Even WiLdEr Mages: Like Wands of Wonder, the wild mage's selection of random effects when they cast spells is big enough to be interesting for a bit, but introducing new and interesting ways for them to go awry after a few hundred spells comes as welcome. This eschews detained tables for a few basic pointers on how to make your own, and the probabilities with which they should occur. You should feel encouraged to whip up new variants on a regular basis, so the players never get complacent, and are always wary about unleashing the wild mage upon the enemy. But at the same time, positive effects should be slightly more common than negative ones, so they keep on coming back to them. It's all pretty predictable, making for another average middle of the issue filler article. The preservers choice: Or let's make screwing yourself over in the long term for short term benefits a little more tempting. Being a wizard is a bit of a mugs game in Athas anyway when psionics is far more common and less stigmatised. And the option that's less harmful to the environment has powerful enemies that want to wipe them out. It's all rather a pain. It's no surprise that even principled preservers might wind up using defiling in a pinch. So Rich Baker gets to work on making the fall and redemption subsystem more interesting. This is made more problematic by the odds of you becoming a full on defiler each time you use them pretty likely, so you're unlikely to be able to get use out of this article more than 2-3 times in a campaign. If it was bigger, this'd feel like a white elephant. As it is, it's a cool idea that deliberately makes itself inaccessible. I can't help but feel frustrated by that.</blockquote>

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