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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5867666" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 271: May 2000part 3/7Power word Baffle: Well, here's this month's special feature, as advertised on the front. Time for a good 10 pages on cryptograms, crosswords, word searches, quotation puzzles, and general word games. Of course, the frustrating thing about these is that they're pretty strongly tied to the specifics of the language they're written in, and thus may not translate to a fantasy campaign, where it may be assumed that the characters aren't actually speaking english. Still, it worked in the Hobbit, so you can probably incorporate them into your game a few times. Personally, I'd prefer more practical and mathematical based puzzles that do translate universally, but that's just because I'm better at solving them. I suppose we do already have several articles on deviously sadistic traps that require pretty convoluted actions to avoid. So this is fairly well done, but as it's a subject I'm not very keen on, it leaves me feeling that this is a topic they ought to have covered for completenesses sake, but doesn't really encourage me to use it. Hopefully it'll be more use to you. Riddles of the rhyming sphinx: Our second theme article is much shorter, presenting us with a bunch of sample riddles for creatures like sphinxes to challenge the players with. Most of them are new ones, so players won't be able to answer them purely from memory. Quite a few of them are based around D&D specific creatures and ideas. Many are word plays, with the obvious answer being wrong, and so not translating well into other languages. They get increasingly tricky as they go on, with the final one in particular requiring players to be very careful if they want to avoid being set up to fail unpleasantly. So this could cause your players more than a little amusing frustration, and will eventually drive them to just try and kill the riddlers rather than fighting them. This stuff never works for long when confronted by brutal realists, does it. Someone always pushes things too far and makes it no longer a game, spoiling it for everyone else. So much for that game. The totem deck: How long is it since we got expanded versions of the deck of many things? Issues 26, 77 and 148? Yup, seems about the right time for a revisiting, given their current policies rounding off the edition. And this doesn't directly repeat any of them either. Instead, it selects 54 creatures mundane and supernatural, and then maps them to a basic deck of cards. If you want, you could instead cut out the supplied cards (although you'd have to photocopy them or print out the scans to really make this work, since they're on regular pages rather than blank on the back.) for something with a bit more flavour. As with any of these decks, it's an amusingly mixed bag. 28 of the effects are positive, 16 negative, and 10 could be either, depending on your point of view and cleverness. They generally aren't as extreme as the original deck of many things though, and many of them are merely temporary or one use, rather than transforming your character forever. Which if your players know this, may mean they're a little more likely to make the gamble of trying a draw. The fact that this isn't a centrepiece special feature just shows how much they're packing into these last few issues. But even if the presentation isn't as good as it could be, it's still a great article. If it appeared 15 years ago, people would still be citing it as a classic. Lock, stock & Barrel: We had an article on magical locks fairly recently. (issue 239. ) Now here's one on mundane ones. Another fairly old school feeling article, this is all real world technical info of the sort that gives you a primer on the subject, but you would be better served by going to the library and finding a full book on the topic. As has often been the case recently, the visual aspect is a real treat, well formatted, and making a real difference to the atmosphere and ease of learning. But it doesn't stop the content from being a bit boring. If you have a rogue heavy game, you may well want to to use it to keep them feeling challenged, but I doubt you'll want to make locks and traps the focus of your entire campaign. Well, at least it fills another little niche the magazine hasn't done before. Fiction: By the job by Paul Kidd. We've seen quite a bit on the conflict between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil over the years, but pretty few concrete examples of disputes between Lawful Good and Chaotic Good. Well, we have one here, although the goodness of the Paladin involved is questionable, falling more into the lawful dick category. There's a very interesting combination of humour and straight characters in this, and it doesn't shy away from showing violence, and asking tricky moral questions before interjecting some whimsy again. It turns out at the end that this is another prequel to a full novel that's coming out soon, but this one works as a standalone story, so it doesn't feel like it was thrown in purely as a promotional tool. I could definitely stand to see some more stories with these characters. Colossus: Ooh, shiny! A minigame! We haven't had one of those in SO long, and for the last couple they forgot to scan in the board anyway. Once again, they're making cool and thoroughly unexpected callbacks to the old days without actually repeating themselves. It doesn't require you to cut out any pieces that you're then likely to lose anyway either. It's a pretty short and simple game where you build a monster, and then use it to fight the monsters of the other players. It has both elements of skill and luck, but given the large number of tactical choices available each turn, you'll definitely improve with repeated plays. As with many of the old games, it also introduces some optional rules to keep your game interesting and increase the complexity a bit once you've got the basics down pat. I can definitely say I'm happy to see this kind of material in the magazine again. Why did they stop doing it in the first place anyway? This is the kind of stuff people really remember.</blockquote>

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