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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5893903" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 275: September 2000part 3/7Miscellaneous mishaps: We've delved into the intricacies of the new rules enough for one issue. Now it's time to cater to the people who want general articles suitable for any edition, or even other games. And if you guessed from the title that this is another random encounter table then you are absolutely right. This one is a fairly mundane one, giving you two tables, one for travelling along roads, and the other for rivers, and all the encounters are people of various classes or natural animals and phenomena. Probably the most interesting part is the bits to determine what's in a random barrel or crate, which can stump a DM who's otherwise well prepared for an adventure on occasion. This seems like a good one for a DM who wants a few more mundane encounters to break up the monsters, and make a place seem less deadly. After all, you can't have a sustainable civilisation when the chance of meeting man-eating monsters on the road is more than 25% per day of travel. Everyone would stick to grotty walled cities which tried to be as self sufficient as possible. Which doesn't sound like my idea of fun. Instant heraldry: Time for another returning topic. Issues 53, 154, and 199 had articles on heraldry of various kinds. Now it's this decade's turn to shine the spotlight on a small but significant part of medieval knighthood. Hell, everyone apart from rogues enjoys having a good logo, and even they can have gang symbols they spray on a joint when they aren't being all secretive. Since it's been 7 years, we're starting off with one of those articles aimed at absolute beginners, getting them involved as quickly and easily as possible. How to accomplish this? Pregens! Yup, it's 48 basic backdrops for you to select from, and some random tables to determine what creatures and objects go on top. That'll get you in the game in just a couple of minutes, especially if the players just inherited their coat of arms from their parents, rather than getting to pick an appropriate one for themselves. Plus it'll give them extra motivation to get out and make a name for themselves. Can't go letting the family down, can we? So this is another article that'll be instantly useful for any edition of D&D, and quite a few other games (especially Pendragon or WHFRP) as well. They're definitely getting the balancing act right so far. Historical Heraldry: Having done the quick-play article, we have a second, rather longer and more involved heraldry article. This is definitely an instance where their greater degree of colour and printing precision helps them do better than the previous articles decades ago, letting them not only explain all the various patterns, shapes and adornments, but clearly illustrate them all in full colour and quite a bit of detail. It shows how coats of arms will be altered based on your deeds, and your position in the family. I definitely found this more interesting than the previous attempts at covering this topic, quite a bit of which can be attributed to the artist, but also to the comprehensiveness of the research. Despite being a fairly long article, it still feels very densely packed indeed, trying to tell us as much as possible. (after all, they're probably trying to condense several books worth of information. ) Between the two articles, I definitely think we have a more solid grounding in the topic than we used to. And now back to the fantastical stuff. Hooked: Robin Laws encourages you to blur the roles between player and DM a bit more. Why should the DM decide what the adventures are? Create characters who have a mission, who's desires are more specific than kill things and take their stuff, and simply by pursuing those goals, they'll make things easy for the DM because all they have to do is set suitable obstacles in the way. The main problem then comes if characters have desires which conflict with one another, or one player winds up getting most of the spotlight because their character is simply more interesting and proactive than the rest. I think this illustrates pretty well why some types of games work better with small groups, and others with large parties, possibly with players playing multiple characters. And once again, what he's saying here will be influential, with indie games (and exalted) where your character's motivations are actual stats on your character sheet and you have mechanical effects for following, fulfilling or going against them. So for several issues in a row, he's been hitting it out the park now and this continues that run of thought provoking influential articles. It's great to see how this stuff got introduced into the mainstream. (or as mainstream as roleplaying gets, anyway) The definitive D&D soundtrack: An article combining music and roleplaying? Aww hell yeeeeah. This is relevant to my interests. I really am very surprised that for all the many mentions of music in the past, they never did one one on just using it as a background to your game. And it is no surprise at all that Led Zeppelin are right on top of the recommendation list. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> While there is a definite emphasis on music of the 70's and 80's here, which I think shows the age of the author, they do talk about both older classical music, and modern electronic music as well. With a two page colour coded list of all the artists recommended, and where their music would be most appropriate, this does feel like quite a bit of though and effort was put into it's design. The fact that they have a column just for hellish music, along with the general lighthearted tone of the article makes it entertaining as well. So this is another rather cool article that's suitable for either edition, and isn't rehashed at all. I'm starting to think they were intentionally overdoing that in the last few 2e issues so it would come as more of a relief when they stopped.</blockquote>

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