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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5791648" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 262: August 1999part 6/7Dragon's bestiary: A second computer game derived bestiary in a row? This is a bit worrying. I know I said quite a few times last year that you needed a change, but if you do too much of this instead it'll soon feel just as tedious and creatively moribund. Variety is important. How many ways do I have to say it? Anyway, this month is another backconversion, even more direct than last time. For whatever reason, Planescape: Torment included quite a few monsters that weren't actually found in D&D. Since my appetite for planar creatures still isn't really sated, even after all these years, far be it from me to to complain about this one. Gronk are big hopping rocky things that smash anything they see. Definitely a monster purely for the fighting and killing, as with so many of these computer game conversions. Grillig have the interesting distinction of being born from 2D, and being immune to edged weapons. They use quite interesting tactics, and have a cool backstory too. These would definitely be allowed citizenship as a canon immigrant if I was in charge. Sohmien are decidedly creepy looking horse variants. Like Bebiliths, they are evil creatures dedicated to hunting other evil creatures, in particular Nightmares. One way or another they'll end the cycle of destructiveness, quite possibly by taking out both sides. Once again, sounds pretty neat to me. The writers on Torment knew what they were doing. Trelon also venture well into the uncanny valley thanks to their modelling. Tony DiTerlizzi would be proud. They attack wizards in large quantities, particularly illusionists, and have quite a few immunities. They're another quite interesting creature that again, I wouldn't mind using. Role models: In some ways, minis are a tremendous boon to mass combat. They allow you to easily tell who is where and think in a tactical fashion. But as has been made very clear before, they're also a substantial expense. You can reduce this by having a single mini represent a whole troop, but that can lead to it's own issues if you want the heroes to split off and do things individually (which they might well be more effective at, given D&D scaling. Once again, this column does three things in two pages. Rules ideas, a mini scenario, and a bit of painting advice. Putting scars on your minis when they came close to death, showing the gradual development of your characters in a solid way is a pretty neat idea too. This column is becoming quite the little smorgasbord of useful tricks. Gotta love it when the writers surprise me like that. Nodwick and co take their shot at another classic module. Many giants are humiliated. From dungeons to drivespace: Alternity gets a conversion of Ilithids and beholders this month. Two of AD&D's most powerful, distinctive, and mechanically tricky creatures, they have an array of powers that takes a reasonable amount of work to represent elsewhere. Indeed, just these two monsters take them a full 11 pages, more than many an ecology. They also have some general talk about converting other AD&D monsters, and some thoughts about how to integrate these two terrors into the Star Drive setting. I don't think it's a co-incidence that both appeared quite a bit in Spelljammer as well, and had interesting social structures that differed  substantially from their earthbound colonies. I think this was a clever choice of creatures, as it presents a challenge, and then solves it, showing you that you can get ambitious with the Alternity system and it'll hold up. That seems like it might get them a few more purchases. So this article gets a fairly positive result.</blockquote>

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