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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5599797" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 237: Mid 1997part 2/8Wild at heart: Well, at least it looks like we're getting a quite substantial themed section this month, even if it is on a repeated topic. Time to get close to nature again again again again. Here's a selection of nature related kits suitable for all classes. Ecofroofery! It's fun for the whole family! Not enough things you can say that about really. Ferals are warriors bonded with animal spirits. Oh, like we've never seen that before. Their benefits and penalties are also completely unsurprising. Basic animal specific abilities, eventual shapeshifting, temper control issues and excessive respect for their totem animal. Yawn. Greenfellows are rather more interesting. What happens to the kids swapped for changelings and raised by faeries? If they take a roguish path, and many do, they'll get this selection of benefits and penalties. If anyone can understand them and play them at their own games, it's these guys. Plus there's plenty of opportunities for roleplaying fun as they discover the human world as well. Ha. I suspect people wanting a SERIOUS game may object. Stridesmen are another potentially irritating kit for their tendency to just keep walking, and trust that if they turn up somewhere, they're not lost, they're exactly where their god planned them to be. They also need less rest than normal people, so they'll also be annoyingly energetic, wanting to press on when the rest of the team are tired and cranky. Mechanically, they're ok, but I can once again see this fostering party conflict. Maybe if they use their spells to buff the rest of the party they'll be able to keep up. Merlanes are wizards that specialise in genetic engineering. Finally, someone's taking responsibility for all the weird stuff you find in dungeons. And you can become one of them, with 8 new spells which allow you to transform and hybridise to substantial degrees, trace the ancestry of created creatures, and if needed, make them devolve back into their base form. I believe that's sufficiently awesome to redeem this otherwise somewhat sketchy article. Want want want! Man's best friend: Doggies! Man's best friend, supposedly, although I've always preferred cats. They've had a few appearances in the magazine (issues 67, 94, 103, 117) but maybe not as much as you'd expect given their real world popularity and potential usefulness in dungeoneering. After all, they get bred for all sorts of applications in reality, including digging, hunting, tracking and guarding; that would be useful for a dungeon explorer. They'd be more versatile and less trouble than mules, that's for sure. Here's an attempt to mechanically codify how much they can learn, and how long it takes to teach them. I have no idea how true to life this is, but it does seem quite solid mechanically, even if it won't really allow your companions to scale up with you as you face challenges together. I suppose they're just not that analytical and gamist yet. In any case, it's a good reminder that there's stuff in the players handbook that will not only be helpful, but also give you a ton of roleplaying hooks if you drop a little money on it. That you'll probably have to deal with the tragedy of it being killed a few levels later will just provide more roleplaying hooks. On a waterless sea: Naval combat got an article a mere 5 issues ago. Now it's time for boating on Athas to get a good examination, with this solid 8 page look at silt skimmers. These take a good deal more effort to keep up and going, because silt varies widely in density and doesn't handle like water at all. Fortunately, they have psionics to help them out. Still, that does mean they'll have to trade navigators, or only go for short periods of time each day. So once again this demonstrates that life finds a way, but you certainly don't have things easy on Athas. (thongs, on the other hand, are not hard to come by if you take the artwork as canon <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" /> ) And a DM can make getting somewhere a pretty significant part of the adventure without resorting to fiat. With plenty of different tricks and options, I find this article both useful and likable. Even if you aren't using Dark Sun, you may want to make your world work differently from the norm, and this is the kind of thing that'll help you get ideas for implementing that.</blockquote>

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