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: 5841896" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 267: January 2000part 6/7Dungeon Mastery comes to an end, it's scattershot advice having been eclipsed by Dungeoncraft's sustained continuity heavy planning over the past year. We finish up with some advice on different kinds of rewards you can give your players beyond yet more gold and magical items. A topic I'm pretty sure we've had before. Yup, not that long ago in issue 217. And looking at them, this one comes off substantially inferior, as it's shorter, has fewer ideas for various kinds of rewards, and doesn't have the nanofiction and random tables adding flavour and increasing it's ease of use like the previous one. Even the illustrations are inferior, although there's more of them. So this definitely falls into the category of redundant rehash, which is never a good note to end a column on. I suppose that's a good reason for the cancellation though. After all, if you end on a high note, people will complain and want it back. And then you'll have to think of some more ideas to fill things up. So this is very unsatisfying. Oh well, they've already started a couple of new columns this issue, I guess someone had to end up on the chopping block. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />Eye in the sky: Spy Satellites are controlling your mind! Get the tinfoil hats out now! You know, that doesn't actually seem too dated. Of course we know now that the government doesn't need spy satellites to access all your data. They just lean on the mobile phone companies to give them backdoor access to their servers and record all your texts and calls with no trouble save the tedious legal challenges when they forget about the paperwork. Who needs conspiracy theories when we have pretty well confirmed conspiracy facts like that. Your only real defence is that while the amount of electronic data flowing through the air has increased by orders of magnitude, the number of people to sift through and interpret it hasn't. But anyway, this is a fun little Alternity article letting you know just what they can and can't do at this point in time, and what they could do if you were running a modern day conspiracy campaign. It's pretty much system free, so it could be applied to other games such as Conspiracy X or the World of Darkness without too much trouble, and has some nicely quirky adventure hooks. It's a string to your bow that's quite useful, especially as it's not easy to get the resources to affect the satellites directly, which gives the players something to work towards.  Dungeoncraft: More advice on how to create interesting challenges for the players here, presented in an easy to digest format. And here, he once again gives advice that i strongly approve of. Make challenges that have multiple solutions. Reward them for their success. Pace your challenges, with a mix of big and little ones. Tailor your challenges to the magic they have, and don't cockblock them when they use it creatively. In fact, you should place challenges for which their spells are essential. This of course involves knowing what your PC's stats are, but what DM would be dumb enough to not keep track of that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Work with the system, not against it. Absolutely no complaints here, either with the format or the message. Carry on then.</blockquote>

Verification