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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5713237" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 251: September 1998part 5/8Dragon's Bestiary has lost it's definite article as well? Really, this is getting to be quite the habit. Familiarity breeds contempt and all that. This also seems rather familiar in another way, as Johnathan creates some more hybrids of existing creatures, this time with less comic and more fantastical elements. Whether they're common ancestors of the existing ones or products of magical experimentation in your campaign is for you to choose. In any event, it lets him fill up another article without needing much actual inspiration. Bloodstingers are somewhere between pseudodragons and wyverns. With cute little tyrannosaur paws and save or die poison, you might be tempted to tame them, but it ain't going to work. Stick to the regular ones. Boneslithers seem to be the primitive ancestors of nagas. With no magical abilities, they can't do much with their intelligence. Like the many dumb near dragon things, they seem like an excuse for someone who wants the visuals of a particular encounter type without the hard to manage versatility. Marble pudding could be the common ancestor of mimics, ropers, and some other pudding types. Their disguise abilities might not be as sophisticated, but really, in a natural cavern, all you need to do is look like stone and people won't question odd shaped outcroppings and stuff until it's too late. Shadow panthers look pretty similar to displacer beasts, but also have centaur like properties. Curious business. Just how does a creature go from quadrupedal to bipedal anyway? This set of creatures has definitely given me something to think about, even if they're not that imaginative in themselves. Combining existing elements in odd ways is a useful technique when your inspiration is running dry. D&D fast-play game: Now this is the kind of special feature they should have had last issue. A 16 page adventure designed to get complete newbies playing without a DM. Of course, for experienced players, this is a ridiculously tiny and easy dungeon, that'll take less time to do than most of the 8 page adventures back in the day. So it's really the kind of thing you give to someone else, rather than play yourself, especially if you're a regular reader of the magazine, rather than someone caught by their new marketing push. As such, I am a bit ambivalent towards it, as it involves a level of hand-holding I did fine without when I first learnt to play, and worry that it might slip too far into patronising elementary school territory. I may have to test it out on someone so as to get a fresh perspective, rather than simply judging by how it reads. The ecology of the wererat: Hmm. Lycanthropes have been curiously absent from the ecologies before now. I guess that since they have official books on them going into greater detail, people haven't felt the need to send them in. Still, this does better on the crunch front than I'd expect, giving them several more new tricks. They may be the weakest lycanthropes in head-on combat, but they more than make up for that by numbers, deviousness, the variability of their weakness, spell-like abilities, capacity to replace themselves, ability to spy and live in cities, right under your feet. Compared to that, who's afraid of the big bad wolf? I pity the thieves guild that doesn't maintain a cordial relationship with the local wererats. I seem to have drifted off topic a bit, so this one can't have been that interesting. It follows ecology formula number 4, that of the writings of someone who died facing the creatures being discovered later. And that's all I can think to say about it. Just seems to have slipped through my mind without making much of an impression, good or bad.</blockquote>

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