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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5648773" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon magazine annual 1997part 3/8Ew. Eating spaghetti through your armour. What delightful imagery. Aaron Williams again brings the funny. The dragon's bestiary: Ooh. An arctic themed collection of monsters. Haven't had one of those since christmas 1980. We could probably do with some more of these to fill out our encounter tables. Let's get a cataloguing. Snow spiders are a lot more social than you'd expect, hunting in packs to keep warm. Thankfully, they don't have instadeath poison, so it'll just be a fairly standard fight as long as you can keep from falling down on the ice. Crystal skeletons are another skeleton variant with a low malevolent intelligence. Like Dust skeletons from last year, they're even more dangerous if you kill them. The undead equivalent of suicide bombers, they should be most annoying to fight, especially if there are civilians around.  Tundra lizards are pretty self explanatory. They're not too scary in combat, but may drain the heat from you while you're sleeping. I bet the players'll suspect vampires. <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" /> Growlers look like icebergs and use that disguise to let their prey get close. Another cool idea I'm surprised they haven't got round to before. A quite decent end to a fairly average entry in this series. Dungeon mastery: Oooh, a back conversion of an idea from Oriental Adventures. It's been ages since they tried something like that, partly because they simply ran out of enthusiasm for Oriental stuff in general after 1991. This time, it's the random events table for regions. So whether you're doing the domain play thing, or just passing through a town and need a little help figuring out what happened recently, roll on this and see what it throws up. It's not innovative, but it's useful, and that counts for quite a bit. Plus, y'know, nostalgia callback, which adds an extra frisson of excitement. If you're going to be unoriginal, it helps if you steal from good sources, which OA definitely was. So this is the kind of article I hope I'll remember when the right time comes in actual play. The ecology of the shambling mound: The monster hunters association are all nicely raised after their debacle with the nymph, and this time, they're after a creature which will simply kill them by bashing them to bits, rather than narrative fiat. But since shambling mounds can grow infinitely if you cast the wrong spells at them, this can be a risky business for the dumb. And this ecology ends rather comically, with the association in disarray again. How will they stave off bankruptcy with a showing like this? It is marred a little by having a bit too much pure pontification, with the personalities of the people talking not quite managing to keep me interested the whole way through. Still, it is pretty solid, and gives the creature a few new tricks to surprise adventurers who think they can beat it by sticking to a formula. A perfectly decent way to finish off the year in this department.</blockquote>

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