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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5946932" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 281: March 2001part 3/7By any other name: A bumper pack of monster races get their naming conventions explored this month. Derro, Duergar, Svirfneblin, Kuo-Toa, and particularly bizarrely, illithds as well. Since these guys are pretty different, despite living in similar conditions, their name structures are quite different as well. This particularly applies to illithids, where people are trying to vocally approximate the horrible combination of mental transmissions and writhing tentacles that is their communication. There's less to draw upon for these races, but it still seems like the author has done their research, keeping the names produced consistent with ones from previous modules and sourcebooks. Having exhausted the core races, these are rather more interesting, and I wonder if they'll consider it worth their while to do any more. I'd like to think so, but you never can tell. 101 Wondrous whereabouts: Our system-free article this month raids the mythology books to remind you to make your adventure locations cool, memorable and epic. Dungeons where all the rooms look the same and treasure is primarily measured by it's GP value are so 80's. Far better to have one big reward at the end that'll be a real game-changer like a wish or immortality. Some of these have been slightly altered to make them more gamable, or simply genericised, but most are presented straight. This does mean they might not quite fit into the D&D planar cosmology, but hey, that's not too hard for a DM to deal with, especially if you change the names for your own campaign.  And really, you should be using this for inspiration rather than wholesale thievery. A lot of the time, the difference between being considered original or a copyist is how good you are at hiding your sources. As with most of the 101 articles, this is pretty handy. Logjam busters: Robin Laws continues to deliver multiple articles of play advice this month, showing you how to get stalled sessions going again by psychoanalysing the players and DM. You've got to figure out what everybody wants, and how much they're prepared to compromise on their personal desires for the good of the group.( And if you can't come to an agreement, who needs to be kicked out to get the group into some form of harmony. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> )This will of course be very contentious for people who distrust psychiatry and being analysed. (But would you want to game with scientologists anyway? ) But does seem more likely to productively resolve a troublesome session than the Tracey Hickman method, in any case. This is a good example of how you can steal ideas from something seemingly unrelated to gaming, and apply it to good effect, and also his general love of taking the responsibility of power from the DM alone, instead sharing narrative control with the players. Just don't become a total pushover who gives them exactly what they want without working for it, or the game won't last that long anyway. Fiction: The hounds of ash by J Gregory Keyes. Well, that's Fool Wolf's story over. He's saved the world, discovered what's really going on with that imprisoned goddess of his, accepted that he'll need to put up with her for the rest of his life, and got himself a similarly immortal and untrustworthy (but also smokin' hot) girlfriend. There's room left for further adventures here, but I guess after this climax, writing more didn't seem worth it, so it's as good a place as any to draw the curtain. He didn't manage quite as many adventures as Niall, but he did manage to get laid as often, and solved more problems using his own brains, plus the enemies he faced were smarter and less caricatured as well, so I'm going to have to give the edge to Mr Keyes for better quality writing. This is one bit of continuity in the magazine that I'm definitely going to miss. Dragonmirth is in theme as ever, ie, just barely. VS Psions & Psychic warriors: This is a bit of a tricky one, really, as psionic characters are almost as versatile as wizards in some ways, and considerably more in others. Grappling them or stealing their stuff will be pretty much a waste of time, for example. To prepare decent countermeasures for psionic characters, you need to know their specific powerset, since they generally have a smaller selection than spellcasters. This will also tell you what their strong ability scores are likely to be, and a decent amount about their personality. The only bit of advice that remains universally applicable is that you should always buff your will score if possible, since so many of their powers target it. Fortunately, there are quite a few spells and items that do just that. If they've read your mind, then any clever tactics you've come up with will be mostly useless anyway. Basically, this is the problem when facing anything with lots of discretionary powers to select. General advice doesn't do much. Better get your divination spells out before the adventure then, and hope they don't have anything to block those.</blockquote>

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