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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5923904" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Annual 2000part 4/7Dork tower is taken over by Phil Foglio, who does a really good job of imitating John Kovalic's art style. At least, until the last frame. Muahahahahaha! Gorgoldand's Gauntlet: This year's adventure continues the fresh start theme, with a 1st level adventure. A fairly clever, rather whimsical one designed to set the PC's up for future manipulation by a powerful NPC with their own agenda. The challenges are mostly based around puzzles, with jermalaine the most frequent adversaries, and some rather annoying wordplay in the same vein as B9. Plus a minesweeper rip-off, which reminds me how ubiquitous that was on windows computers as a free game. This actually seems quite fun, which shows how well Johnathan Richards can sell elements that would be deeply annoying in lesser hands. It's quite flexible as well, with ideas for scaling, and making it a little more action focussed. I was suspicious at first, but I do actually like this, and can see it making a fun little romp in actual play. All over the map: We had questions about this quite a whole a go. And even now, most maps that the official D&D campaigns and adventures use start off hand drawn. They may be scanned into the computer, overlaid and digitally manipulated in all sorts of ways later, including having copies printed off so more hand-drawn revisions can be made. But if you don't have actual artistic skills, you'll never really be able to replicate what they can do. If you want to be a true pro in this field, you need both hand drawing skills and computer manipulation ones, or a partnership where individual people can really concentrate on being good at these individual parts. Of course, in the internet age, where people are increasingly expected to be all-in-one creative units, and costs are cut wherever possible, it can be pretty tricky to make a living in a highly specialised job like this. I don't think any RPG company apart from WotC has a full time graphics guy anymore. Sometimes, you do miss the old studio system. And I certainly miss having lots of companies big enough to maintain a supplement mill for their gamelines and do big pretty boxed sets with maps and stuff. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> Dragonmirth is interestingly obscure this month:After the Dragon: Vangerdhast is a bit of a dick, really. Making the king's corpse smile during the funereal procession? This is why wizards should be kept in support roles, not making decisions on public policy, despite their intelligence. Anyway, this spells out the changes in cormyran politics in recent novels. The old king is dead, long live the king! You can look forward to politics being pretty complicated, as he's just a baby, and there's a regent in charge for the next 17 years. (more than long enough to be corrupted by power and not want to give it up) Ed once again shows that his knack for details is what you really need if you want to create an interesting political game, as he details tons of NPC's and their basic personalities and motivations, ready for you to set the intrigues in motion. If that isn't your thing, there's also a prestige class for the higher ranking purple dragons, which gives them natural armor bonuses and resistances to poison and magic as they level up, making them rather harder to take down than a standard fighter. Being one'll tie you into a hierarchy, but since their job is often hunting down monsters and sniffing out dissension, that won't put a crimp in your adventuring lifestyle. So this is another finger licking good bit of information from Ed, keeping the world alive and growing, while also hinting at how subtly deranged his high level wizard NPC's are. Maintaining continuity is important if they want to keep the old players on board.</blockquote>

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