Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5915601" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 278: December 2000 part 4/7The old words are the best words: Robin Laws joins in on the theme this month, with some very specific character building advice. Can you judge a culture by it's proverbs? Hell yeah. They not only show you what a people considers valuable and commonsensical, but have hidden meanings that serve as lessons, and help the old pass on their values to the young. Since dwarves live a long time and tend to be quite culturally conservative, it makes perfect sense they'd have a whole boatload of sayings for common situations. And he does go to quite a bit of length to establish the depth behind these sayings, highlighting the various aspects of the dwarven personality in a show, not tell manner. I think that once again he's going to steal the show here, because this is not only cool, but suitable for any game or media where dwarves resemble their stereotypes at all. Class combos: Now, I knew that technically the annuals came in between the november and december issues, but this is the first time there's been real consequences for doing them slightly out of order. Apparently that's where they started doing this series on making the most of your multiclass options, providing full 20 level progressions with skill and feat suggestions. As Dwarves have fighter as their favoured class, three of the four options presented here are fighter hybrids, with the final one a cleric/rogue one focussed on mobility underground and harnessing the power of the earth. I can see the use of this, especially if you're generating lots of NPC's, but don't find it very interesting, and can understand why later writers skewed back towards providing lots of new classes to fill different intermediate niches. You can only do so much with multiclassing, especially with XP penalties enforced. Fiction: Keoland blues by Paul Kidd. The Justicar is back, and he's picked up a whole adventuring party of comedic oddballs to be the straight man too. What a life to live. Unlike the last one which had some social message mixed in with it's humour, this is pure dugeoncrawling goofiness, where they stumble into trouble, fight and puzzle their way out of it, and end up no better off than when they started, due to loadbearing boss keeping them from grabbing most of the treasure. Dont'cha just hate it when that happens. So it's entertaining in a fluffy way, but doesn't develop their characters at all, which means you can skip it without affecting what happens in the actual books at all. Tools of the Deep: As we saw last issue, dwarves are one of the races likely to profit if technology advances. So a collection of new nonmagical, but technically sophisticated equipment is right up their alley. Torches attached to helmets and climbing aids are of tremendous benefit to a miner. And adapting the bellows used in forges to launch projectile weapons at high speed is a fairly logical bit of steampunk technology. So this is quite neat, and would have been just as suitable for the previous issue as well. Reminding the readers that not all their cool stuff has to be magical, and resourcefulness is as important as the resources you have is still an important lesson in these days of expected wealth per level, if not more so, because when you have a fixed allotment, using it efficiently becomes ever more important if you want to win against your peers. Nodwick's team meets their monstrous doubles, and go on a big crossover adventure. Much profit is had. The adventures of Volo: A tale of treachery and greed this month, as Ed spins another system free ancient legend about a family, and the magical items passed down amongst them. We saw at the end of last year what happens to people who betray the country of Cormyr too seriously, and it looks like there's plenty of other jackasses who ruin it's good name. Even the relatively pacified england analogue has more than it's fair share of interesting history. Ed seems to be growing tired of maintaining the dramatic conventions though, with not a single snarky comment by Elminster. He might have no shortage of unused ideas, but how many more of them will be able to be squeezed into this format? VS Duergar: Now this is more like it. With a fairly unique set of powers and resistances, Duergar require quite specific tactics if you don't want your ass kicked in the twisting tunnels of the underdark. Basically, the really important thing is to be able to counter their invisibility, and have some bright lights to make them suffer and turn the tables. General dispelling, anti-poison effects, and movement enhancers will also come in handy. You can have the same basic stats, and have the encounter go very differently depending on the environment, and if you have the right equipment and spells prepared. They do actually have some stuff I hadn't thought of this time around. Let's hope they can get progressively more oddball in their choice of monsters.</blockquote>

Verification