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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5882263" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 273: July 2000part 4/7Abandon Ship!: Another minigame in quick succession? This is an unexpected treat. Course, the big question is if they'll continue doing these in the 3e days, or this is the end for them, just as with reviews and articles on other RPG's. Anyway, this is an amusing little piracy themed card game, where you fight the other players to get as much treasure onto a lifeboat before your ship sinks. With an intended playtime of about an hour, it seems pretty easy to pick up, but has a decent amount of tactics for you to think about and the possibility of ganging up on players and other politicing. John Kovalic is responsible for the artwork, which gives it a somewhat cutesey old school feel like the work of Tom Wham. I'm a little annoyed that the board was missed out in the scan, but I still like this quite a bit. It's another amusing diversion from the huge morass of sometimes contradictory options AD&D has become filled up with. More standalone minigames would definitely help keep the casual gamer market interested in the magazine. Rogues Gallery jumps the gun a little as well, giving this collection of characters 3e stats. Curiously, they manage to make the statblocks smaller than the old ones, despite the greater amount of crunch in them, via more efficient formatting. Which also means they can fit in slightly more character detail as well. I think that definitely counts as a win-win situation.  Thamlon Uskevren is the patriarch of a Sembian merchant house. He's fairly honest, for a merchant, and this seems to be working for him, as he now has a large and prosperous family, and tons of high class homemade wine. Seems like a pretty sweet position. I bet there's people in the family who want to take it.Shamur Uskevern is his wife, and has an incredibly interesting history. Sent forward in time, she adopted the identity of her own relative, and since then, has been pretending to be much more boring than she actually is. Well, she can't really go back now, with all the kids she has in the modern day. But then again, who knows what tricks fate might pull in the future. It's not as if backwards time travel is unknown in the Realms, even if it isn't as common as Krynn. Thamalon Uskevern II is the typical hedonistic wastrel son. A fighter with a 6 strength, he's pretty much useless for everything, and it's going to be a challenge for him to ever measure up to his dad. Maybe he should give the role of heir to someone else. Such as Thazienne Uskevern. 4 years younger than her brother, she's already an accomplished rogue, and is starting to develop the business aptitude to go with it. Dad probably wouldn't completely approve if he found out how she was making  money on the side, but hey, at least she's competent. The family wouldn't end up losing all it's merchant cred with her in charge. Talbot Uskevern is the black sheep youngest brother. He's not really that bad, but he broods about the things he does wrong more, feeling he can never really live up to his parent's expectations. He actually has the makings of a pretty decent hero, if he can just get over himself and realise his potential. And hang out with the right people, instead of spending too much time in bars listening to music. Get yourself a good adventuring party. Erevis Cale is our first non family member, and the first character to take advantage of 3e's less restrictive multiclassing as well. He of course becomes the breakout guy of this book, transforming quite radically over the next decade. But at the moment, he's a fairly straight angsty brooding fighter/rogue, ruthless, but regretting it. Someone wants fangirls. Well, why mess with a winning formula? Larajin is a young half-elf serving girl with a Tressym pet. Her honesty means she'll probably never work her way up and become one of the more important merchants.  Good thing she has the opportunity to become an adventurer instead then. Hopefully she'll get the chance to level up soon, for even in 3e, the world isn't that forgiving on 1st level characters. Good thing they haven't forgotten the ky00t factor, even if she isn't completely by the book. The new adventures of Volo: More Realms tidbits from that most fallible of reporters, designed specifically to get you into trouble here. The House of Stone may not be as famous an adventuring location as Undermountain, but it certainly seems to chew through adventurers quite handily, with it's rearrangeable walls, and readily replenishing traps and monsters. Course, adventurers being what they are, that kind of reputation only encourages them, and so it continues to lure them in at a rate of approximately 2 parties a week. So that's a death toll of around 4-6 hundred a year. Man, they must breed fast in the nearby villages. Everyone thinks they're the ones who'll succeed where everyone else has failed. Maybe your PC's are even correct. In any case, it's rather (un?)intentionally comical, showing what happens to a world when adventurers become routine. Elminster's snark when dealing with Volo's "facts" is as strong as ever, and this looks like another fun place to drop rumours of into your campaign, see if the players bite. It's pretty much system free too, so it'll still be useful next month. This is still both entertaining, thought-provoking and useful then.</blockquote>

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