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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5567196" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 234: October 1996part 3/8The book of souls: The Forgotten Realms has been detailing the spellbooks of it's wizards semi-regularly for ages, and Greyhawk has got in on the act a few times. Now it's Ravenloft's turn. Of course, this being Ravenloft, there's no free lunches. In fact, there's not even any new spells here, merely a rather extensive description of how owning this book will take you over and corrupt you, and how much of a nuisance it'll be to get rid of. You know, that's both stereotypical and not very tempting. You have to mix both good and bad aspects if you want people to not drop you first chance they get. I don't really feel this works for me. You aren't giving me a reason to care before you screw me over. So I shall shrug and ignore you. And the drama llama will have to go hungry. Crypt rangers and defenders: A couple of undead focussed ranger kits continues the theme. Not the ones hinted at in the complete ranger's handbook though, as the writer disagrees with Rick's ideas of what rangers should be allowed to do. Interesting. Always amusing to see disagreements amongst writers for the magazine. Crypt Rangers are one of those specialist hunter kits that get substantial concrete mechanical benefits, for no drawback other than spurious social hindrances and a woe is me, the challenges I have to face are so much harder than other adventurers sob story. Those are getting increasingly common in the magazine, and I'm really not convinced. We all have challenges, and at least you have good odds of being able to pick your fights and be well prepared against them. I'd say you're in a pretty good position really. Crypt Defenders are rather less player-friendly, as they're one of those kits that are bound to protect a certain area, and all their benefits only apply in their home turf. They're still all mechanical benefits for purely roleplaying hinderances though, which you know I rather disapprove of. So this is a second failure of an article in quick succession.  Undead again: Another chance for a tie-in article. Making undead playable has been proving rather profitable for White Wolf for several years now. Now TSR has finally played catch-up, albeit in a rather odd way, bundling the rules for undead PC's with some rather large and awkward metaplot events. And here's a few more undead types given PC writeups, somewhat more obscure than the ones in the main book. After all, D&D has produced a lot of weird varieties of undead over the years. Who's to say you shouldn't get to play them? Boneless are one of the most disturbing and tragic undead types out there. It'd take a fairly open-minded person to accept that happening to your character. But hey, you get to ooze through letterboxes and grapple people like a snake. If you're going to be a monster, why not go the whole hog? And if you happen to meet your skeleton, which has also been reanimated into undead, you have the perfect setup for a really weird buddy/evil twin scenario. So many ways that could play out, many awkward or comical. Crawling Claws as PC's? You can finally play Thing?! AWESOME!!!! Obviously they have pretty substantial limitations in what they can do, but still, this is definitely a squee moment for me, and quite possibly Ed Greenwood as well. Since they can climb well, move fast and fit in all sorts of places a normal character can't, they can definitely make a valuable and unique addition to a team. And when they can't, just pop them in your pocket, and they'll be no encumbrance at all. Penanggalan got a whole article to themselves last year, so I'm not too surprised to see them turning up here. They're in a rather odd position, as they're basically normal during the day, and then off trying to satisfy their hungers in the nighttime. It's actually a pretty awkward lifestyle, and you really have to work to keep your problems a secret. Still, at least you have that option, unlike the other ones detailed here. All in all, this seems pretty damn cool. I definitely like this article, even if I'm not fond of the hassle it took to get here.</blockquote>

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