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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5838843" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 267: January 2000part 3/7By any other name: And I thought they'd run out of steam on these naming convention articles. I guess that's another demonstration of how popular the Drow are. You know the formula by now. Short descriptive blurb, and a whole load of tables to roll on to determine personal and house names. Not really anything I can get excited about, positively or negatively. The city of sunken spires: An upside down city built within and around a massive cavern full of stalactites? Awesome! That's just the kind of thing you should be filling the underdark with. It means you're protected from monsters (and PC's) which can't climb or fly, you have spectacular views and an easy form of waste disposal. (in the short to medium turn, unless there's scavengers down there.) Course, getting around may be a challenge, but if you can train giant spiders like the drow or duergar, that's very solvable. So this is a Forgotten Realms location expansion that thinks quite a bit about how to make itself both interesting and logistically feasible, with plenty of details on population demographics, ecology, interactions with surrounding settlements, potential adventure hooks, NPC's, religion, even equipment available. It's high density, well focussed, offers plenty of challenges, and doesn't forget to keep in a bit of whimsy and humour. Ed hasn't been going it alone for a long time, and this shows again how good some of his assistants have become in their own right, able to fit stuff in that matches his tone perfectly. And so the Realms gets a little further filled in, long past the point I would have expected them to stop. PC Portraits: Drow don't work particularly well in black and white, curiously. You need a particularly clever artist to create highlights on a basic skin colour of jet black and still allow for proper expressiveness. Which is why this one doesn't even try and instead goes for greywashing them like issue 214. Let the cries of fantasy racism continue. Actually,. let the cries of fantasy sexism continue as well, since there's 9 male ones, but only 5 female ones, and a larger variety of ages and outfits in the male ones. Still, at least we get a little shirtlessness for the fangirls, so it's not totally lacking in progressiveness. But you've got to try a bit harder if you want to genuinely walk the walk of an alien culture where many values are inverted from ours. Denizens of the underdark: The frequency of new races in the magazine continues to be way up as we hit the final stretch of the edition. Here's some more creatures to lurk in the darkness, and possibly be persuaded to come into the light and take class levels. Diopsids are intelligent beetle people with a whole bunch of interesting racial quirks, some of which are advantageous (including the usual multi-weapon fighting bonuses also enjoyed by thri-kreen) and some which aren't. (short lifespan, can't use many worn items, widely spaced eyestalks mean they have to walk sideways in narrow tunnels) They aren't evil, but there are some rather good reasons why they will tend to be hostile towards surface dwellers at first, and PC's will be exceptions. They definitely seem like they could be fun in the hands of the right player. Sapromnemes are even stranger, essentially being fungi that consume the memories of the dead creature they grow from. This leads to a whole bunch of interesting plot ideas, as it allows you to bring back characters that died and got left behind in the underdark, and then have them face a whole bunch of challenges adapting to their new bodies. That definitely sounds like a fun chance to stretch your roleplaying muscles to me. They can float, and manipulate objects with their tentacles, but they have a serious lack of general body strength that once again limits their regular equipment. Zygodacts diverge even further from earthly bioforms, with their closest literary relatives probably being Pierson's Puppeters. They have two head/hand combo limbs, with eyes on stalks, and four dextrous little appendages surrounding their mouths, and a shelled body which they can withdraw into. This means they make great wizards, as innate heavy armour + the possibility of casting two verbal only spells in a round is pretty awesome. On the other hand, they can't climb ropes, play video games, or do a lot of other things that require two hands at once. So it won't always be easy having them in your party, but at the same time, it could once again be rather cool. They would definitely be a good contribution if you were to try the weird underdark variant from earlier in the magazine.</blockquote>

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