Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5839674" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 267: January 2000part 4/7Fiction: The knights touch by Nancy Varian Berberick. A chance to see Dalamar actually being smart and knowledgable, instead of Elminster & Mordenkainen's buttmonkey? Sign me up. Set before the Chaos Wars, this nonetheless shows him being not exactly heroic, but definitely on the side of the world as it is, and willing to put some serious work in to protect it. But still, he's only a side character, the real focus is on a mother and her son, their relationship, and the tragedies that have happened to them in the past. The desire of the young to be heroic, vs the fears of their parents, who may well have seen their siblings die for their ambitions. So this is very much designed to tug at the heartstrings, and I think it succeeds, especially the final lines. After all the bad Krynn fiction I've had to deal with, that's incredibly welcome. Nodwick goes to white plume mountain. And all the good toys get him. This one was silly enough anyway. Dragon's bestiary: Greg Detwiler again goes on about creating monsters that form an ecology, and make sense in a dungeon environment. We get it already! Logical extrapolation of capabilities. We can do that in our sleep by now.  Cool down.Tunnelmouth dwellers, like gelatinous cubes, are just the right size to block a typical 10x10 corridor, and advance along it swallowing everything in it. Ommity nom nom. better hope there's a side tunnel or some other way of getting around it, because it's not nearly as dangerous from the rear and has trouble turning round in tight spaces.Stalking catfish are even bigger, and if you touch their whiskers, they will strike. Still, there's weeks of eating on one if you can catch them, so if you're stuck down there in the dark, there are worse choices for surviving on. Lots of light is handy here, for they are slow moving out of water and you could steer well clear that way. Glitterworms can disguise themselves as a lode of precious metal to attract adventurers, then spew acid all over them. As usual, trust nothing down there. These three do seem to be rather in the gygaxian tradition, but with a more IC logical slant to their quirks. I think that counts as a modest success. Marvel super heroes: The Beyonder is our subject this month. As with some previous characters, he's used to illustrate a point: in this case the perils of omnipotent NPC's in your campaign. While a DM theoretically has ultimate power, if no-one wants to play the game, it means nothing. And if they're not only omnipotent, but also prone to doing whimsical crap for whatever reason, players can grow to loathe them very quickly. Using them to tell an Aesop may work in cartoons, but chances are, your players won't draw the desired conclusion, and instead go into paranoia turtling mode trying to prevent further annoyances. So a valuable lesson here, which could in itself be taken in several different ways. Still, I think I'll stick to my policy of avoiding deus ex machinas, and if the players screw up my plans, rolling with it and seeing where it goes.</blockquote>

Verification