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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5833959" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine annual 1999 part 6/7Dragon's bestiary: Hmm. This is an interesting and different one. Troy Denning provides the statistical conversions for a whole bunch of unique creations from his own latest book. Similar to the Darklords of Ravenloft, Ghazneths are unique creatures formed when someone spectacularly betrays the country of Cormyr. Course, like Darklords, they're pretty much cursed with awesome, being essentially indestructible and immune to magic, plus having several cool abilities of their own. They seem perfectly designed to serve as recurring antagonists for an extended series, until someone finally finds a macguffin that can put them down for good. Even Elminster can't solve this little problem, which is rather pleasing. This skirts at the edge of fiaty cheese, but just about manages to stay in control, producing exceptional results. These may not be too easy to incorporate into your game, but as an example of how to construct flavourful NPC's with lots of survivability, and as writing, they are very good indeed. Suzara the scold is the wife of the founder of Cormyr, who left him with the baby because she didn't like living out in the wilderness. In return, she got to spend the past 1,300 years locked in a tomb, and has the power to blight crops, age people and wither items. And she fully in tends to take advantage of that to ruin the Cormyr of today. Boldovar the mad is a mental ex-monarch. Not too surprisingly, his powers cause paranoia, confusion and insanity in those around him as well. Even without them, he's pretty disconcerting and unpleasant company, but at least he doesn't have any big plans beyond his own amusement. Merendil the Bloody tried to assassinate king Azoun I. Now she's a wasp-thing which can turn people against each other and a crowd into a riot. She'd rather like to succeed on the current king where she failed with his ancestor. Melineth the grasping sold Suzail for 500 sacks of gold. Curiously, being locked away with them for 900 years has not diminished his greed. His powers are disease based, for no apparent reason. Luthax the firey was a court wizard who wanted to overthrow the king and form a magocracy. Now he's a gargoyle thing which can cause volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. He still has all his wizardly powers too, making him a lot scarier than his relative HD would indicate. Xanthon the baneful is a brand new ghazneth who hasn't had time to do any atrocities against the country, but not for lack of trying. His powers are also disease based, in his case getting insects and rodents to swarm and do his bidding. He may need more practice with them though. Dungeon Mastery goes Marvel, as Stephen Kenson gives advice on running your game like a comic book. Apart from the visual element, this means pacing is quite different to a purely written book. More things happen simultaneously rather than consecutively, as you can have lots of elements in a panel, not all immediately obvious. They also have a greater tendency to snarling continuity, retcons, alternate universe stories, flashbacks, and other such complications, much of which arises because they don't have one consistent author, and the more popular characters have multiple comics running simultaneously. Perfect excuse to switch GM'ing duties regularly, and run with the emergent weirdness that comes from this. You can even encourage players to give feedback in the form of a letter to the editor (extra XP for commitment) So this seems to encourage switching things up quite a bit in an attempt to do genre emulation, which will hopefully keep players interested. It is indeed fairly interesting. After all, when they were doing the old Marvel-Phile, they were curiously light on general GMing advice, sticking mainly to specific characters. And rulesets have diversified quite a bit since then. So this is another attempt to make your game fun and different that's a reasonable success. Variety is crucial to sustaining interest, as I've said far too many times already, and this adds a decent bit of variety to the issue. The ecology of the grey Ooze: Back to another set of characters we've seen before in here. The last time we saw Shandrilla and Javorik, they were running from the dread black pudding. This time, it's another amorphous slime that's largely impervious to conventional weaponry. Man, they just can't catch a break. This follows pretty much the same formula as their last instalment, with the creatures actions described in the relentless utilitarian fashion that befits their nature, and the adventurers bickering and panicking their way through the adventure, barely managing to survive. Still, at least this time they kill it, so hopefully they'll manage to level up sometime. In comparison with his last few, this one feels rather conservatively written, deliberately harking back to the previous instalment. Well, it's a special issue. Gotta go with the reliable crowd pleasers. Yawn. Afraid that kind of conservatism won't keep my interest.</blockquote>

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