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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5356202" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 206: June 1994part 4/6Karamiekos, Ho!: So Mystara has finally finished gearing up to go advanced, during which they've been absent from these pages for 5 months. Will Jeff Grubb be as regular and enthusiastic a poster as Bruce Heard was? He certainly managed a pretty long enjoyable run on the marvel-phile. Straight away, we see that Jeff has brought things into AD&D land by using the same technique now common for Forgotten Realms correspondence. Say hello to Joshuan Gallidox, our latest 4th wall breaking character to pop into the offices unexpectedly. Only this one's a halfling. Exactly how he makes the crossdimensional trip is not explained, but there are plenty of magical items he could have come across. He’s not quite as scary as Elminster, but he is pretty prone to self-aggrandisement. I suspect Halflings may not be as crucial to this story as he makes out.Second, of course, is the timeline advancements. The black eagle barony is free! Good has triumphed and the kingdom is just again. Er, sort of. Ludwig and Bargle are both still at large, the place is still a shithole, and the interim leader is thoroughly ineffectual, but these are all presented as opportunities for PC’s. The rest of this article fills us in on the other changes around this region. Jeff’s writing style is as fun and readable as ever, and this certainly looks like one of the better attempts at keeping the world living and moving forward. But still, you should be careful putting it into existing games, especially as the original overthrow scenario was presented as something the PC’s would lead. So this is another well-written article, that may or may not be good for your game. Now, where do we take the world from here? The dragon's bestiary: Great, more irritating faeries. We had some of those last year too. Looks like this year has seen a drop in both the number and quality of monster submissions, just as the ecology series did a couple of years ago. This is a bit worrisome. Brambles are meaner relatives of Gorse, and have a similar spike fetish. A good reminder that fae creatures were associated with thorny bushes long before C:tL, and they make both good protection and a decent home for the buggers. As usual, laugh at them at your peril. Dobies are essentially incompetent brownies. They mean well, but having one of these in the house means botched chores everywhere. And trying to get rid of them may well make the problem worse. What is a poor farmer to do? Faerie fiddlers are another predictable mythic entry. They can make you dance uncontrollably, and distort time so a night lasts for years outside. Now there's one that can really have interesting effects on your game. Can you turn this to your advantage, or will it really mess up the game? Elminsters notebook: Ed once again shows us how to pack a campaign’s worth of adventure seeds into a single page. Another evil wizard from the distant past, and their somewhat dubious legacy is detailed. One of the biggest problems as a solo wizard vs a party is only being able to cast one spell per round, especially as wizards are somewhat squishy. What’s the solution? Orbiting undead skulls that are hopelessly in love with you! Unorthodox, but it certainly did the job. At least until hubris lead her into taking on a god and failing. Another example of how a greater number of high power characters and creatures actually results in the realms being more stable than krynn or oerth. Try the same trick on the krynnish gods and you might well succeed. So it looks like he’s once again playfully showing off his system mastery and inventiveness, while ironically pointing out all the cheap tricks in the world will not save you if the DM decides to invoke a deus ex machina.  There’s a definite multilayered irony there. As usual, his output is pretty great.</blockquote>

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