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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5735130" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine annual 1998 part 2/8Denizens of dread: Ravenloft was a relatively late jumper on the kit bandwagon, only starting with the third core set in 1996. While the place certainly has plenty of need for heroes, the generally low population and insular nature of the natives means it's a struggle to get enough for a formalised skillset to form. Still, here's a few. Whether they'll give your character an edge against the darkness, or just tie you down and make it harder to leave still remains to be seen, of course. Danseur are roguish sorts that specialise in dancing, obviously enough. They get some fairly substantial benefits, but can't wear armor, and need to spend at least 3 hours a day practicing, which'll slow down any adventuring party, and make wandering monsters interrupting their rest very amused. Well, I suppose spellcasters can take even longer than that to fully recharge at higher levels. Still could get frustrating if the DM tracks it strictly. Dilettante have already appeared in issue 214. Of course, this is a rather more general application of the idea than the generalist hyperspecialist half-elf fighter/mage/rogues from that. They again get some fairly substantial benefits and penalties, and won't keep up in terms of advancement speed to the rest of the party.   Let's hope their extra skills will prove to be the ace in the hole a party needs to grease their sticky wicket. Investigators are another one that gain fairly decent benefits at the cost of having a big chunk of their daily time and encumbrance allotment ring-fenced to maintain these skills. Whether this will balance out will be completely dependent on if your DM remembers to enforce that. Of course, if the whole party picks kits like this, that time reduction becomes a little less likely to cause conflict anyway. Psychologues are devoted to curing mental illness, which is of course particularly prevalent in Ravenloft. Their chance of doing this isn't bad at all, but it's compensated for with a flat -1 penalty to attacks. Since they're usually spellcastery sorts, this puts them firmly in the support character section of the party, hanging back so they can treat the frontline guys after the battle. This might not be glamorous enough for some players. Stalkers are your basic brooding evildoer hunters, able to follow things anywhere, but mistrusted, and unable to settle down. Seen that before several times, don't doubt I'll see it again. Not really a hindrance, methinks. Warders are professional bodyguards, getting substantial benefits at saving the life of others, but suffering from terrible depression if they fail despite that, and their charges get kidnapped or killed. Whether this will work in an adventuring party, I'm not sure, depending on how strict the DM is about what counts as willingly letting your charge be endangered, particularly if they're another PC. But once again they have fairly substantial benefits and penalties that'll hopefully balance out in actual play. So this collection is mostly pretty good, as long as the DM keeps track of the character's powers and needs and remember to make their benefits useful and hindrances annoying. Planar Pestilence: Or tiny obnoxious things throughout the multiverse. Disease and the planes is a somewhat odd topic. Ok, in some places it seems very appropriate. The first layer of the grey waste has pestilience as one of it's main themes, and the everything eats everything no fairness horror of the abyss is a place where even the smallest things are against you. But in others, such as Mechanus or the seven heavens, where there is a very precise natural order, these things would be more likely to form beneficial symbioses than be harmful to their hosts. And by focussing on things like that, there is the risk of making the planes seem banal, especially if the effects of the disease is merely a bigger, badder version of existing real world ones. And unfortunately, that is the case for most of the examples here. Abyssal gangrene, limbo lockjaw, planar rabies, hive plague, these are all just quicker, deadlier, and resistant to the usual curative magic. Slightly more interesting are zombie leprosy, which is the kind of thing that causes a nice cascading apocalypse, and fading breath, which is created by dead gods, and is more likely to affect creatures of opposing alignments. On the other hand, Astral Mold seems to miss the point since metabolism doesn't function while there, so you don't eat on the plane anyway. So I think this article has a greater proportion of boring ideas than interesting ones, especially if you're already familiar with biology and the study of diseases in general. It could have been so much better.</blockquote>

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