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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5411367" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 216: April 1995part 3/8April fools Faxions: Oh boy. Some philosophies are just too out there even for people in the planescape universe to take seriously. That's quite an achievement. April fool. The kind of april fool you could well include into your game if you handled it right, but nevertheless, this is primarily intended for humour's sake. Handle with caution, especially if your players are sensitive or humourless and involved in the industries parodied by this. The Beautification League think that aesthetics are all-important, morality is irrelevant. Of course, there is still a degree of internal dispute, but most are not keen on the current chaotic and frequently spiky decor of Sigil. They may be annoying, but they can spot secret doors and hidden compartments like no-ones business with their keen sense of the out of place. Thats a benefit worth acting like a snooty fashionista for in my book. The Free Flora Collective is a group of sentient plants fighting for their rights. This isn't making much headway in sigil, where people have no trouble treading on anyone whop doesn't stop themselves being walked over with force, and the biggest plant, razorvine, is not a valuable member of society. I lack the wit to come up with suitable plant related puns for a shaft filk at the moment, so I don't feel inclined to support their cause. The Herbivorous Assembly think that the most humane and healthy thing for intelligent beings to do is stop eating animals and live in harmony with them. This ironically puts them in direct conflict with the FFC above. Develop synthetic foods to solve the problem. The Wizards of the Black Teddy are an order of scantily clad dominatrix wizards, wielding the power of cheesecake to their advantage. Sounds more like a kit than a faction, given it's narrowness. Still, I'm sure they have no shortage of men seeking to be "auxiliary members". They shouldn't expect to get the faction benefit though, no matter how skimpy the leather thongs they're wearing. <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" /> The Apathetic Alliance are the Bleak Cabal on steroids. They can't even be bothered to rationalise the futility of the universe, and just sit around doing sod-all. They won't even notice if you attack them with nonmagical weapons, such is the strength of their apathy. This would obviously be pretty broken in a serious game, especially if you min-maxed them by pumping their wisdom up to 18 to mitigate their drawback. But surely no serious DM would allow that. Maybe, but don't call me Shirley. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> Paranoia skips two editions and goes straight to number 5. Is it still funny? That's for you to decide. Bards on the run: More filking. Some fairly obscure choices to mock this time. I can only recognise two off the tunes offhand. Wait a minute, is that the American national anthem? Ouch, man, ouch. Even Magic:the Gathering doesn't deserve that. So yeah, this is as excruciating as ever, while also managing to be moderately topical. April fool. Paths of power: Back to the serious stuff. Now this is one of the more impressive attempts to rework the D&D magic system into something a little more literary feeing. It's been rather a while since they really tried altering the magic system, and the usual request, which they resolutely ignore, is for a spell point system like most other games use. This gets rid of the artificialness of having casters forget spells, while still constraining their options on a day to day basis. Spells are divided into paths, similar to rolemaster but a bit less regimented, with some paths having multiple or no spells in a particular level, and many spells appearing on more than one path. This is a feature, not a bug, with forking from one path to another being a good way to pick up cool new stuff without an external teacher, via scientific extrapolation. This has a whole bunch of interesting emergent effects, and many of them are spelled out in the article, showing they've really thought about this one, and hopefully done a bit of playtesting. I think this actually qualifies as a classic article, with both neat fiction, and very adventurous crunch. Don't see nearly enough of those these days. Ok, so it'd need a whole new campaign ( or at least region of the world where everyone does things differently) to really take advantage of it, but that's not insurmountable. Hopefully at least a few people tried this one out, given the demand for stuff like this.</blockquote>

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