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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5870979" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 271: May 2000part 7/7PC Portraits: Investigators are this month's theme, to fit with the puzzles of earlier. This means that you can see their hands a lot more than usual, as they examine some object, or merely rest their chin on it in contemplative fashion. There's more miscellaneous objects as well. Less variety of expressions though. Don't want emotions getting in the way of our logical deductions, do we? Role models: The old question about illusion adjudication combined with minis? I fail to see how these two topics intersect. Well, it turns out they do have a few ideas here, but they're ones that'll only work a few times before players get savvy to them, like having the real ones painted, but the fake ones left bare. I suppose that's accurate. Anyone exposed to illusions regularly is rapidly going to become savvy to the obvious cues, especially when the illusions all come from the same source, so they have the same flaws in terms of composition and missing sensory elements. And to be honest, you don't want to use illusions too frequently, or they lose their edge. Use for one scenario, then shelve for at least a couple of years. Silicon Sorcery: Nox is this month's game. Since this has a lot of emphasis on it's spooky atmosphere ad clever traps, it makes sense that this is what they want to help you emulate in your games. And remember, just because you're using traps doesn't mean you have to give the monsters a rest. Combine monsters with traps, and you can make both more deadly, but also open up opportunities to play one off against the other, making otherwise unsolvable challenges resolved via the hubris of the enemies. After all, that's how it works in virtually every Mario game, and an absolute ton of other ones. And along with the examples, they give us an exceedingly versatile new spell that'll let you chain together several other ones in a trap, like contingency, only on an area rather than you. The screenshots don't work particularly well in this case, but everything else is pretty fun. They chose good source material to work with this month. Nodwick fights the slave lords series. But he's still working like a slave himself. Oh the irony.Coming attractions: The Forgotten Realms enjoy more than half of this month's releases, with an adventure and 2 novels. Dungeon of Death sees old skool dungeoncrawling return to the realms as well, finally mapping out a place mentioned ages ago. So much for maintaining the differentiation between Toril and Oerth. R. A. Salvadore's Cleric quintet gets it's third book reprinted, so they can make some more easy money. And Mel Odom finishes off their recent trilogy involving horrors from the sea. Now, how will they handle this edition change IC? Dragonlance gets Downfall, part one of The Dhamon Saga by Jean Rabe. He ended his last trilogy a hero. Now he's just a schmuck again. It doesn't get any easier, second time around. If only the writer were actually using D&D rules. And we also get an idea we've seen a few times fully fleshed out. Reverse Dungeon. Muahahahaha! Ahh, turning the tables and playing the monsters. That's usually pretty fun. They are still coming out with a few cool things this late in the product cycle. What's new covers riddles as well. And provides the answer to every one of them.  Once again, there's the definite feel that they're using up all their old material in preparation for the edition change, and this results in rather a lot of interestingly old school material, some of which they actually haven't done before. After a couple of years in which I've often felt the update couldn't come soon enough, I now find myself wanting them to hang on a few months longer. If only they could have stayed this good the whole time, then we would never have had these company problems in the first place. So 2 more months to go. Let's hope they continue to have plenty of quality articles as well as quantity.</blockquote>

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