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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5471268" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 223: November 1995part 4/8Bazaar of the Bizarre: We riff off both Ed Greenwood and Tolkien here this month, with 9 more magic rings. We also see them reset the artwork to old skool style, which looks curiously clunky and blurry, as if it's been photocopied too many times and scaled up and down in a computer without proper antialiasing. More evidence that their budget is going doooooooooown. Still, they haven't come up with many hugely inspired items in the past few years. Maybe the ideas will be inversely proportional to the presentation. Rings of Assimilation let you fit other items into your ring slot. This seems like a waste in the case of ioun stones, but it might be handy for pearls, scarabs, and the like. Metamagic effects continue to develop in interesting ways. A Ring of Autonomy makes you immune to mind<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ing. Just what every adventurer wants for christmas. Few things are more valuable than assured free will.  A Ring of Cages lets you escape from said implements. It's very hard to detect too. Another failsafe that's almost too valuable really. Who could possibly say no? Rings of Life shield you from energy draining. Looks like antiscrewage really is the name of the game this month. I quite approve. Rings of Might give you power over all 4 elements. All purpose badassery makes you able to do without wizards little better. Hey ho. A Ring of Obstruction prevents you from casting spells. Like a ring of weakness, this will completely screw you over until you can get a remove curse. Doncha just love it when that happens. A Ring of Shields lets you make a magical force shield. This isn't too impressive normally, but will really save your hide if something tries to disintegrate you. Pray you or the DM remember this. A Ring of Swords makes a magical blade of various types. All are rather scarier than a standard blade, but it only has limited charges. Still, your own lightsaber is another one that seems very tempting to certain players. Are you ready to be generous? A Ring of Timelessness makes you immortal. It does not protect you from the mental pressures of said state, however. But what's a little insanity among friends anyway? All your buds'll be shades or liches or something, and I'm sure they'll be forgiving of your idiosyncrasies. Role-playing reviews:Bug city is the kind of adventure that completely changes a big part of a setting, turning chicago into a sealed off zone infested with giant insects, and trapping the players inside to survive however they can. This may involve resorting to eating the bugs, or cannibalism. Rick finds the whole scenario more funny than he expected, because it is just so over the top. Something of this scope could do with being even bigger though. We're not all entomologists, and could do with some more ideas on how the lifecycles of giant bugs differ from real ones. Still, it's entertaining as both an adventure and political commentary, and adaptable to other cities and systems as well. It's certainly different, and a lot more ambitious than another dungeon crawl. Will you derail your game with this unnatural disaster? Mystic China gives the palladium system it's oriental fix courtesy of Erick Wujik. The whole thing is fast-paced and easily explained, packing a ridiculous amount of info in and keeping the writing exciting at the same time. Rick gives it 6 pips, finding it lives up to the standard of Oriental Adventures quite adequately. Well, with source material this fun and diverse, it's not hard to fill out a book with ideas. Pacific rim is for Cyberpunk 2020. This doesn't get such a good review, the sheer size of the area means things are again sketchy at times. You'd best invest in some good real geography books if it looks like your characters are going to spend much time there. Tabloid! was released a good year ago now. Not sure why Rick is reviewing it here, but it is an entertaining idea. Still, since he freely admits that the system is exceedingly light, it's very much up to the DM and players, and their grasp of comedy to make it fun. All it'll do is get out of the way. You could play this premise under any system. More interesting are some of the supplementary reviews. The Marco Volo series gets bizarrely high praise. Well, I guess they read better than they play. Meanwhile Dirty secrets of the Black Hand gets described as humourless. Uh yeah. Shapeshifting alien-infected plants. A vampire werewolf who has to be constantly kept from suicide. A power that makes you act like a skipping record. A whole family of ghouls raised explicitly for the purpose of child snatching. Can you not see the funny side of that? I suppose by contrast with the Volo impersonator the humour  here has quite a bit more subtlety. But really, the vampire designers were having fun making this stuff too - I've seen their foreword dedications.</blockquote>

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