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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5478299" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 224: December 1995part 2/8The Castle designer's guide to coping with magic & the supernatural: Ah yes, let's bring back a topic that got a whole series of forum letters a few years ago, turn it into a full article. A fairly familiar path by now. So magic massively changes how sieges and the like work, on both sides of the conflict. Bypassing walls becomes simplicity itself with flight and teleportation, a single creature immune to nonmagical attacks can wade through a force of regular fighters and laugh. But spellcasters run out of stuff to do quickly in a protracted battle, and there are mundane tricks that still work surprisingly well. Archers are a great equaliser, taking out high level characters by sheer force of numbers. Lead always cramps the style of divinations and ethereal marauders. Well constructed domes on top of your towers allow you to shoot out while not leaving you vulnerable to flyers. A 6 pager with several illustrations of stuff described, this is definitely a case where they've tried to come out with all guns blazing. And it does a pretty good job, tackling most of the annoying things wizards can do to ruin your day, if not in as much depth as they could. A good engineer certainly isn't helpless, even if their services will cost rather a lot. And there's still plenty of room to expand on this, which hopefully we'll see in the forum again. Symmetries and patterns. As long as people have ingenuity, there'll be new tricks developed on both sides of this issue. I somehow doubt it'll ever get as filled in as their lists of monsters and spells. Elven cities & settlement: A random elven settlement generation table?! Ok, that's definitely a new one, even if it's two constituent components are not. At less than half a page these tables are more to spark your imagination than provide a complete setup. And spark my imagination they do, partly because of the very odd demographics you'll get if you apply them strictly. So I'm not sure if this is a success or a failure, because it is pretty interesting, but I can't imagine using it regularly in my campaign. Maybe they didn't do the math. Maybe their conception of what elves do in their day-to-day lives is a bit different from mine. And what dice do you roll to get a result between 70-200? So mechanically, this is a bit of a fail. If you're going to be more specific, that gives people concrete things to analyse and find good or bad about your work. And let's face it, their mechanics editing still isn't great around here. Make changes without making the preparations to adapt, and you will have a hard time getting used to things. Descent to undermountain: Another AD&D computer game, another promotional article. We've already seen undermountain get a rather large boxed set, and plenty of adventurers have visited, it's an obvious choice for an action focussed AD&D conversion. This time, they're using the Descent modelling engine and getting on the doom bandwagon, with a 1st person 3D adventure game full of action, puzzles, and mutiplayer competition. That's the theory anyway. Googling shows that this was shunted between development teams, arrived late, was unfinished, completely cut out the multiplayer element, had crap AI, and was generally a bit crap all round. And since it's still a good year before it's actually released, we may well see more promotional articles in the mean time, or maybe stuff in the rumour mill about how it's going (wrong). This definitely has potential for a little morbid amusement.</blockquote>

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