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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5895458" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 275: September 2000part 5/7Bazaar of the Bizarre: Earlier this year, we had armour made by abyssal lords, intended for the foulest of mortal villains to wear. To redress the balance, here's some suits intended for the use of Paladins. They aren't as interesting unfortunately, but at least they don't have maddening or lethal side effects.Drachensgaard is for those paladins who would also like to be dragonslayers. Bonus to saves vs breath weapon, climb bonuses, and the ability to speak Draconic. (which won't quite compensate the heavy armour penalty. ) All seems pretty logically themed.  Hellshield helps you resist both the temptations of fiends, and the privations of their home planes. Once again, the benefits of the new skill system are very apparent. Course, if the character hasn't put points into it, they still don't have much chance of resisting a specialist monster. Humillianthir is a paired set of armour for you and your horse. It lets you teleport straight into the saddle. Ready for action! Brupapa pa pa dum diddydum diddydum. Praesidum Luminata sheds magical light that buffs your buds and reveals invisible and shapeshifted creatures. As I have said many times, that's an invaluable power. Spellcease absorbs enemy spells, although it has a fairly easy to exhaust limit. Still, you only need a few rounds, really unless they've artificially boosted their AC and hp. It'll be a lot more effective against wizards than sorcerers. Truedeath is of course designed to kick the butts of undead. That's still one of their core competencies, so they'd be remiss if they neglected it. Still, no great surprises here. They aren't helping paladins break out of their mold much. The adventures of Vo7o also gets 1337153d. It's all very lame. Ed gives us another quirky adventure seed for you to flesh out this month. It's pretty close to waterdeep, too, giving it yet another reason to be adventurer central, and a big city despite being miles from other civilised places. The crumbling stair is yet another abandoned place with a few monsters to kill and mysteries to plumb. The fact that many of the ghostly inhabitants are whimsical, sometimes just watching from a distance, sometimes leading you into trouble, and only occasionally attacking allows you to scale this one easily, and make revisiting it be a different experience each time. And the fact that many of the treasures encountered here are faulty or incomplete means that players may well leave behind much of what they find, keeping it a vibrant dungeon ecology. In an adventurer heavy world, the dungeons that survive and become really renowned are the ones that don't give it all away to the first schmucks who come along. Draw romance analogies as you will. Once again, despite the format change, there's no real difference in writing or usability. This could have been done any time in the past decade really. Class acts: Our second instalment in this series drops the preamble and gets straight into the crunch, with the Duelist. Swashbuckler is always a popular archetype, and none of the base classes do it brilliantly. This is a fairly easy one to get into, with multi-classed fighter/rogue being the quickest option, but you could go  single classed if you're willing to drop a load of cross-class skills to getting in, or wait a few levels longer. While not brilliant, it makes being a fast-witted mobility fighter or more combat focussed rogue a pretty viable option. It would seem a bit redundant in a campaign which included the swashbuckler or unfettered core class, but it's certainly way better than the mystic. Remember, you've got to control which classes you allow into your game to influence the tone and style of it. The ecology of the darkmantle: Our first proper 3e ecology is a very fitting one. A creature that's new to 3rd ed, but harks back to the very first ecology in the nature of it's biology. A creature that steals liberally from many real world things. A creature that would really annoy hundreds of starting characters with their seemingly endless ambushes in region A of the Worlds Largest Dungeon. The bloody darkmantle. They fly! They stalk! They envelop! They're a hell of a lot scarier than the piercer ever was. But they're still dumb enough to make suitable foils for Javorik and Shandrilla. Johnathan takes considerable care in tying this ecology to the old stuff, showing that not everyone is throwing out all the old stuff for the new and shiny. And once again, the heroes and the monster spend quite a bit of time being described separately, only meeting up near the end. Seems like his formulas are still working in the new era. And they've improved the artwork a bit as well. Quite pleasant reading. Vs Go6lins: This, on the other hand, is pure powergaming tactical advice completely specific to 3e. Not that goblins are that hard to fight in any edition unless the DM is playing them really smart, but they are tougher now than they used to be. This is only a single page long, and is blunt, no-nonsense stuff that's primarily aimed at fighty sorts, since they're the ones that need extra help getting used to being able to customise your character. And since even with whirlwind attack and great cleave, they won't be able to wipe them out as fast as a good fireball, I'm still a bit meh about this. Your optimum build choices will also rapidly once we have a few supplements up as well, so it's reusability is dubious. It's a sign of their shift in priorities that I'm not to keen on.</blockquote>

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