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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5778141" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 261: July 1999 part 3/7Darkstone plays up the differences between roleplaying personas and the people playing them with withering sarcasm in it's advert. There are no girls on the internet, etc etc. I do not feel tempted to play your game as a result of this. PC Portraits: It's dwarf time! Which means the inevitable female dwarven beard debate resurfaces. This keeps things ambiguous, as while we do have some dwarves with obvious breasts, they're all beardless, or at the most have a bit of stubble. But there are also a few male dwarves who keep their facial hair short rather than going for the full-flowing, possibly braided mane that denotes age and seniority. I blame all those adventurers being a bad influence, introducing the idea of fashion and corrupting our hardworking lads! Next thing you know they'll be using boomerangs instead of the good old-fashioned axes of their ancestors. Let the flame wars continue! Once again this little column provides me a surprisingly large amount to think about. Wizards of dusk & gloom: The position of first feature seems a little devalued, given the number of regular columns that came before it this month. Slightly surprising really, given how popular shadow based stuff is. The article on the demiplane was quite possibly my favourite one of 1995, and there's a ton of spells and monsters based around the theme. And now it's time for three more wizard kits and related sets of new spells. After all, the list of things you can do in the shadows is too big for one archetype to fill them all. Shadow Callers are all about the semi-real creatures and objects, mixed with monsters from the demiplane to keep you guessing so disbelieving the whole shebang won't be effective. Of course, if they do step outside their niche, they have great difficulty controlling normal creatures, and the not uncommon social penalties for messing with dark magic. They seem reasonably balanced. Shadow Seekers have an obsession with becoming a Shade, which they seem to think ought to take them out of play. Oh come now, it's not as if the powers you get are at all game breaking at that level, and it's one of the easier transformations to make if you have 9th level spells. I suppose that's the big catch, isn't it. Spend less time researching, more time going out killing things and taking their stuff and your magical advancement will take care of itself; you'll soon outpace the geeks. Shadow Hunters are another variant on wizards with minor rogue skills who use both to steal stuff very effectively indeed. They also get rogue weapons and proficiencies, but have the rather odd hindrance of not being able to use rods, staves & wands. This makes them even more unpopular with other wizards than the other two kits. UR not doin it rite! Ninjas never have this problem. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> But then, they have PR departments. Shadow wizards are too busy being brooding loners. The 16 new spells are divided up neatly between the three kits, each with their own book of shadows (and a bit of ironic snark about how overused that name is. Blessed be, bitches. ) As with the kits, they are't terrible, but tend to err on the underpowered side, and some of them are of restricted availability despite this. I don't think they merit the secrecy surrounding them. But then that's the problem with secret organisations. When you don't have large numbers of people to do R&D, you don't get economies of scale and the benefits or extensive troubleshooting. So you're unlikely to come up with something as generally useful and efficient as magic missile. I don't think your wizards will mind in the long run if they don't get the option to join up with these guys. RPG.net advertises in Dragon!! My head, I think it may explode from sheer amusement at the recursiveness. Plus they cross advertise the sailor moon RPG. I find this hilarious. Dwarven names: Oh, this one again. Stock up on your phlegm and throat sweets, because you'll need them. Like the 101 lists, they seem to have decided to make a pattern out of this, give their writers something to aim for. Although I very much doubt they'll ever get to the poor norkers or grippli, the kind of races that actually need this kind of expansion, and you can't find in various fantasy novels anyway. But then the writers might actually have to come up with their own ideas. So this is another column following one of their latest formulas closely, not really distinguishing itself in any way. I think the skip button would be appropriate.</blockquote>

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