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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5826333" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 266: December 1999part 6/7Bazaar of the Bizarre: A very different bazaar this month, with only 3 items, but cool and detailed ones. Wands of wonder and bags of beans are well known, but here's some potion based random items. Drink them and experience semirandom but generally useful transformations. Much hilarity may indeed ensue.Groundshift gives you rocky transformations.  From fists of stone to turning into earthworms, they all have their positive uses, but may also be a problem. Make sure you have someone on hand to dispel a bad turn. Herbturn has plant related transformations. You could become spiky, a tree, a dryad, or a floating blossom. This is probably less useful than the last one. Plus, people eating your fruits sounds kinda kinky. Waveschange provides water based benefits of course. Gills, scales, tentacles, or just becoming merfolk. It'll generally help, but still isn't really reliable. And if it gets contaminated, it'll be even less so. Are you going to play this mugs game? Dragon's bestiary: Last christmas, they combined giants with undead. This year, they combine them with lycanthropes. Will wonders never cease? [/sarcasm] They are starting to use the templating idea though, with most of this article devoted to what can and can't be infected with what. Someone may have been sneaking peeks at the developers ideas for the next edition. They also introduce a couple of types of true lycanthrope, just for the hell of it, along with a decent amount of roleplaying advice, albeit stuff that feels very familiar if you've read Van Richten's guide to werebeasts. Keep cranking those formulae :sigh: Polarweres are frost giant werebears, unsurprisingly. They're grumpy solitary things, and seem likely to die out eventually if they don't pass on their infection. It's a good thing there are regular werebears around then, isn't it. Shadkyn are voadkyn weremobats. They're also one of those lycanthropes that has serious problems fitting into regular society, since regular voadkyn are vegetarians and they have serious bloodthirst. Guess they'll have to flap around being angsty and alienated then. Maybe they could hook up with some exiled drow. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> The ecology of the Xixchil: Oooh. It's the body mod obsessed spacefaring mantises.   Another bug race that can also become PCs. Well, they're a good deal better at fitting into humanoid society than Aspis, but that doesn't mean they'll ever think quite like us. They move wrong. They think in a highly pragmatic manner. And their sex life.... let's not go there. Amazingly, Johnathan does go there, counting on the fact that it's so different from human sex to get past the censors. He also provides a new system for body modifications, for those of you who want to get some cyberpunk in your D&D. Once again, he really seems to be pushing the limits of what you can do with the format, combining gross-outs with humour, and psychological study. A combination you wouldn't think would work, but just about does. What will he try next? Role Models: Using a different scale for outside and inside adventures? Well, if it's good enough for the Expert set, then far be it for me to complain. Of course, you'll have to adapt your rules based on the fact that your characters aren't actually occupying the whole space their minis are on the map, and the terrain features are abstracted rather than solid to scale objects. Although I'm not too keen on drawing out the entire overland walk with multiple erasings and redrawings as you go. Save it for when there's anything actually happening. Or maybe this is the kind of thing that virtual mapaking software would really help with, so you can create the large scale map with huge mountains and forests, and zoom in and out to add individual houses and dungeons. Definitely be quicker and more consistent than regular redrawings of a big board. So this is an interesting article, but one where I can instantly see more efficient ways to handle things, especially with technology advancing as it is. Once I build my world, I'd rather it stayed built, rather than having to take it down and put it together again each session.</blockquote>

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