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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5718404" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 252: October 1998part 3/8Grim Callings: We kick things off with a horror themed collection of kits. We've had a couple of those before, but not a complete collection covering all classes and giving them multiple niches, so there's still room here. Of course, too much choice of powers gives you room to twink out and reduce the horror aspect, so you might not want that many kits as a DM. So let's see if it's desirable to add this collection to your game. Keepers of the Veil are paladins that specialise in kicking undead ass. This means they sacrifice their normal healing abilities for a suite of more specialised ones that'll be good in a few situations, but not nearly as in demand as restoring HP always is. So this kit'll only be beneficial in an undead heavy game. Dirgists are Bards who specialise in goth music, comforting the miserable living, and entrancing the dead. This is not as effective as clerical turning as it only makes them stay still, not run away. They're good for an adventure but suck at the afterparty. Sounds like my kind of adventurer. I'd much rather just get onto the next bit of business. Lethean are priests concerned with saving souls, literally. They lead an ascetic lifestyle, and their turning powers are subtly altered to reflect the fact that they liberate the souls of the dead rather than repel them. This is mainly flavour, and their hindrances are mostly flavour behavioural restrictions as well. Meh. Moribunds are necromancers with a particular obsession with feeding off negative energy to sustain themselves. This means they are undead hunters, but for completely different reasons to everyone else. It also means normal magical healing is useless on them, which is a pretty nasty hindrance. Overall, I think their penalties outweigh their benefits, but in an interesting way, that might make them still desirable if gamed right. So I think this collection is perfectly suited to their milieu, with class variants that are interesting, but won't break your game in the slightest. Now you just need to persuade people to pick them over the more powerful options. Legacy of decay: The Realms tries to prove it can do horror as well, giving us a whole selection of nasty magical items and spells recovered and sealed away by the Harpers in their pursuit of evil. And since the Realms has far more high level characters than Ravenloft and less natural justice, that means more opportunities for villains to make a genuine impact with their diabolical creations. Well, that's the theory anyway. It's a generic setting. Who knows what we'll get. The Black Satchel is one of those items that really isn't worth the price. It may let you heal, and even raise people from the dead, but the number of people you have to kill to power it far outweighs the number you'll save. Of course, if you're an adventurer slaughtering your way through enemy territory, that might not be an issue, but you'll still face the requisite alignment change. Caveat emptor, etc etc. The Intellect Syringe allows you to drain the brain of others and temporarily boost your own, making it another one that'll eventually be your downfall, either due to creeping insanity or the murders you commit to power it catching up with you. The Needle of Fate lets you create tattoos that murder people, and then transfer their remaining good luck to you. Of course, if they resist the attack, it'll turn on you, so this again seems fiddly and not worth it in the long run. Who designs these evil artifacts anyway? They really ought to pay more attention to what they're doing. We now move onto new spells. Decay ages inanimate objects in a fairly impressive way. Obviously the effect of this will vary quite a bit, but even metal and ceramics don't deal perfectly with the passage of time. This seems like the kind of spell that rewards imaginative usage. Undead Ward is slightly disingenuously named, as it only protects you against strength draining attacks. Very much the kind of specialist spell that only gets prepared when you know that's what you'll be facing today. Contact the Dead is essentially the clerical speak with dead, only crap and evil, inflicting pain upon the spirit contacted and harmful backlash upon the caster. Torture doesn't work in the long run, and this is the kind of spell no-one would take if they knew about the alternative, which in the Realms should be all but the most uneducated spellcaster. Lesion causes the victim to bleed profusely. In certain circumstances it could wind up doing more damage than fireball or lightning bolt, but most of the time in real adventuring situations it won't. Still, at least it's less likely to destroy their stuff in the process of killing them. Spirit Attack, on the other hand, is much more powerful than the similar higher level spell Nightmare, as it has a decent chance of permanently draining the victim's Wisdom. It looks like we're going to have quite a few balance issues in both directions with this collection. Candle-Life allows a sick person to act normally for a few days, before dying for good. This can be used compassionately, if they want to do some important final task, or by scammers selling a cure and then moving on before the consequences arrive. Gee, which do you think is more common in this context? Drain Vitality is another nasty one that permanently drains someone else to give you a temporary ability score bonus. Eat the rich. How glamorous. The greatest possible long-term benefit is if you then use the drained points in creating magic items. Just tell yourself they were going to die anyway. It'll all be dust apart from what you create. Suspended animation is your basic sleeping beauty effect, if not quite as long lasting. Not as good as the version in issue 221. Age affects living creatures, although not as well as the much lower spell affects objects. Such is the joy of actually having decent resistances to magic. Of course, one ghost touch'll do as much as half a dozen castings of this, so it's not really that impressive. Some things just come so much easier to the real monsters, try as a wizard might. Preserve Youth is yet another spell that permanently drains another to temporarily keep you going. They're building up quite the selection of those, aren't they. Hope they have somewhere suitably capacious to hide the bodies. Summon Ghost is pretty self-explanatory. Watch out, because if they get loose, you know how much even a single hit'll hurt you. Maybe you should stick to elementals, as they don't tend to hold grudges as much. Transplant is another permanent spell, letting you nick body parts from someone else to replace your own. As in reality, rejection is a bitch. So this isn't quite as evil as the others, but it'll still wind up killing you if overused. Revenant lets you trap someone's heart, making them temporarily undead, nearly indestructible, but vulnerable to whoever owns it. Similar to the Al-Qadim heart removal spell on steroids with a more gruesome slant, and another case where I'm not sure how well it balances with the previous version. Summon Night Hag is another one that'll turn on you if you let your guard down for a second. Honestly, given how greedy and vindictive they are, this seems like a losing game even if you don't mess up and pay their price. Two sacrifices before you even get down to business? I'll hold out for a pit fiend who you know'll stick to the letter of their bargain. Final Struggle takes the stealing theme of this article to it's logical conclusion, with a contingency effect that lets them take over the body of someone else permanently when they die. Well, they've certainly had a strong agenda and stuck to it, even if many of the spells aren't something sensible PC's would want even if they were evil. Overall, I think I'll give a positive result to this article, even if I have misgivings about many of the individual entries.</blockquote>

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