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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5855250" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 269: March 2000part 5/7The new adventures of Volo: Two months ago, we looked at the various elven kingdoms of the Realms. This month, halflings and gnomes get lumped together, as they have too many times. We get a seriously broken bit of aesopping here, as he simultaneously says they're not to be underestimated, and yet makes most of the settlements here need guardianship by some powerful wizard, dragon, or similar crap to survive in the harsh world of the Realms. That's about on the same level as romance novels who say the heroine is a strong independent woman at the beginning, but she winds up bouncing from one man to another throughout the plot, defining herself by them and worrying endlessly what they think, and then ends the story happily married. Gnomes come out of this better than halflings, but really, this is a nasty case of theory and practice failing to line up. Sorry Ed, but this one is going to get a firm thumbs down. Giants in the earth: We finally do something that would have appeared in this column's original run, AD&D stats for historical figures. In this case, from ancient egypt. Now, since they did have a habit of deifying their pharaohs, that might mean we've already seen them in Legends and Lore. Will this be rehashed? References at the ready. Imhotep didn't appear in L&L in either his mortal or divine forms, curiously enough. Course, he played a pretty critical part in Masque of the red death, but that's not really historically accurate. In addition to being a great doctor, he's also exceedingly good at motivating a workforce. Given the difficulties involved in surgery, I'm not sure why dexterity is his lowest stat then. Well, if you've got magic to do all the heavy work, you don't need super nimble fingers. Ramses II was pharaoh for a stonking 66 years, a pretty good run by the standards of any monarchy. He was supposedly the guy in charge in moses' time, although he obviously didn't die in a flood, and might well have set the Jews free without quite so many plagues as the bible version suggests. You obviously don't stay in charge that long without being a fairly astute politician. Ramses III wasn't in charge as long, and was a more hands on warrior, always off pacifying the neighbours. This means troublemakers may encounter him directly. Perfect opportunity for adventurers to do a takeover. <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" /> Wenamon is a priest of Amon who was saved from raiders by an opportunely timed storm, which of course he thanked his god for. A good example of how what is a legendary event for a real person would be just tuesday for a D&D adventurer, with provable supernatural powers and easy access spellcasting. This is one case where reality doesn't seem stranger or more spectacular than fiction. Urban Legends: Last month was all about putting magical item equivalents in Alternity. This one involves the monsters. The big difference here is that you probably won't be facing more than one or two types of monster per adventure, and hunting them down will be as much or more of a challenge than the actual battle. So let's get our x-files on, and go to investigate sewer alligators, hook-handed muderers, animating mexican statues, bog monsters and family murdering changelings. Unlike last month, this means they aren't all drawn from D&D, instead casting a slightly wider net of folklorish fun. Each gets a good page of writing, plus stats and illustration. The way they're framed does seem conducive to avoiding hack-and-slash play, and making the whole episode revolve around one. You could steal this format for your monster writing, and see if that would rub off on the way you run the monsters in response. Control the format, and you control the content. Wizards Live: The online schedule once again looks pretty busy, with 14 scheduled  live chats this month. Skip is once again doing Sage Advice live, which sounds like fun, Elaine Cunningham is getting a good Q&Aing about her life, and the RPGA gets two chats devoted to it. Are the logs of these saved anywhere. It seems another thing that would help us get a clearer picture of the mood in the WotC camp as 3e drew near. Dungeoncraft: Before actually drawing the map for his first adventure, Ray pauses again, asking us to think about exactly what rooms we need in our layout, and how they should connect. After all, if you just get a blank sheet of graph paper and start drawing until you fill it, you'll wind up with a sprawling monstrosity which makes no sense, is confusing to navigate, and doesn't have nearly enough toilets for it's inhabitants to live comfortably. So he encourages you to figure out what essentials you need, and only then add the extra embellishments that make your adventure quirky and unique. Which does seem pretty sensible. As is often the case, this probably isn't how most of the classic old adventures were designed, but it'll do the job. He's once again giving us a clear step-by-step approach that'll only fail for you if you're completely devoid of creativity. It makes me rather interested in seeing what the final result will be, so it's with some irritation that I see that it'll be appearing in Dungeon rather than Dragon, presumably in an attempt to encourage more crossover between their readerships. (gotta collect 'em all! ) Ok, so it's not as if issues of Dungeon are that hard to find online (unlike Polyhedron) but it still means I won't get to properly review the final product. Sigh.</blockquote>

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