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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5352470" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 205: May 1994part 5/6The game wizards: As hinted earlier, it's time for Ravenloft's new edition. Which means it's promotional article time, as is now the norm for their major releases of the month. In it we see a certain degree of sympathy for the devil, as happens far too often with vampires. Strahd tried to be a good and just ruler all his life. He would never have fallen if it weren't for that bitch Tatyana teasing him and then rejecting him! <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" /> Silly silly fangirls. That aside, this basically just fills in what's been happening over the past few years in game metaplotwise, and what's in the new boxed set. Nothing too surprising. Another healthy gameline chugging along here. We can move on and not worry about it collapsing when we take our eyes off it, unlike Azalin with his plots. <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" /> Dragon slayers: Council of wyrms! Another of the ambitious but ultimately horribly flawed products released during the final days of TSR. And another article of cut material directly from the official writers. Now obviously, in the CoW setting, dragon slayers are intended as NPC's, but in most other campaign settings, they'd be just fine for players, if a bit specialised and not nearly as useful against any other type of monster. As with Spike's article, this is a grab bag of stuff, including a selection of expansions for the existing dragon slayer kit, a new kit, and a new monster. 5 new special attacks for dragon slayers are the first thing, which is aided by the option to spend your proficiency slots on getting more of them instead of weapons. As with any specialisation, this is cool, but facing creatures not subject to them will give you problems. More options give you more chances to screw your life up. Slayer-mages have some pretty extensive benefits and penalties, even more than their fighter counterparts. Not just good at killing them, they also get to communicate with them and control them. Well, as wizards, they are more prone to taking the wider view and thinking about things instead of rushing in. That doesn't make them any less dracicial though, as they need regular supplies of their body parts for their spells to function at full power. Let's hope the DM allows lesser draconic things like pseudodragons and hybrids like chimeras to count for that criteria, otherwise they'll have an exceedingly hard time at lower level, and missions'll grow tedious over the course of a campaign. Undead dragon slayers reuse the skeleton warrior picture, which makes sense even if it is a bit cheap of them. After all, they do have a lot in common, and are frequently called back from the grave by some jackass who doesn't really care about them. Another bit of crunch that won't be that necessary in most games, but it's nice to know it's there. Role-playing reviews:  GURPS Vampire: the Masquerade gets thoroughly praised for taking the great themes of Masquerade, and marrying them to the solid mechanics of GURPS, while being visually better than the average book in either line. Concepts that were originally shrouded in pretentiousness are clearly explained. And of course you have a far greater range of other genres to cross over stuff with. What's not to like? Now they just need to take those lessons and transfer them back to the main line next edition.  Dark alliance: Vancouver sets Vampires vs Werewolves to the fore, with the two factions fully aware of each other, and sharing the city uneasily. The kind of thing they'd consciously step away from in revised edition, this is marred by both silliness and vagueness, with much of the location stuff feeling like it was lifted straight from a tourism handbook. If you're going to do regionbooks, getting a writer who actually lives there does help. Caerns: Places of power does slightly better, but it seems like their best ideas are the ones that are developed the least. They're able to just throw away all kinds of cool adventure seeds, leaving it up to you to turn them into full encounters. Ahh, the folly of young game designers. Soon your skills will be greater, but your inspirations fewer, and you'll wish you hadn't been so casual with your talent in the past. Umbra: the velvet shadow shows that White Wolf can match TSR in their imaginative otherworldly realms quite handily. From the heights of the cosmos, to the lowest, most defiled atrocity realm, there's tons of highly adventurable locations for werewolves and mages to explore. The further away from reality you step, the freer the rein you have as a writer. House of strahd gets the full 6 pips on the review die. It was already a classic. Now it's bigger, better described, and with more DM aids to help the horror proceed smoothly. Good luck, you'll need it. Castles forlorn doesn't do quite as well. As a setting, it's pretty amazing, but it is very much up to the DM to construct an adventure out of the locations and denizens of this place. Just leaving them to wander around will be a confusing and frustrating experience, for it's not likely they'll figure out how to deal with this darklord permanently without a few clues. Well, maybe they can just escape with their lives to tell chilling tales instead. Isn't that the Ravenloft spirit? Bears Vs Sharks in Dragonmirth! Yamara and Stress try their damndest to figure out how to get rid of Ogrek. Twilight empire finally comes to an end, but is left open for a sequel. Did everything turn out the way the real big bad wanted it too anyway?</blockquote>

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