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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6017737" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 292: February 2002part 10/10Silicon sorcery: A double bill of conversions this month, making up for the more fluffy advice last month. Monsters from Kohan Immortal Sovereigns, and feats from Evil Islands. Once again they're trying to do the genre emulation thing, and convert video game tropes to D&D, only in a more balanced fashion than some of the previous attempts. Outright save games may be more than a little silly, but the ability to carry more than your strength score would otherwise indicate, or roll to avoid the worst of a critical hit are pretty reasonable uses of a feat slot. Similarly, the new monster is a reasonable enough mid-level demon, that has some magical abilities, but not as many as a D&D demon of similar toughness. You can incorporate both into your games without any problem I can see. So this column is still a good supply of interesting and slightly leftfield ideas to add. DM's toolbox: Creating a newszine for your campaign world? There's an idea we've seen before, sometimes taken way too seriously. It's all too easy to get into worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding, creating things that'll have no use in actual play, or that'll eat up so much time that they actually impede your ability to prepare and run good games. Fortunately, this column is back to being both snappily written, and very specific and practical indeed in it's advice. Short, consistent amounts of information delivered on a regular basis, with decent formatting that you can reuse between issues, which makes things look more professional and take less effort at the same time. Deciding whether the info is IC or OOC and sticking to that writing style appropriately is a good idea, and allows you to present fallible or incomplete information to your players as appropriate. And of course coming up with a decent brand name really helps to give your campaign a strong identity. I approve of all this advice. Dungeoncraft: While the toolbox keeps things short and snappy, Ray is really building up the the finale of his lost world campaign setting. We finally get to see some characters that PC's couldn't beat at starting level, and big secrets that could last them the length of the campaign. Not too many though, for as Ray reminds us, you shouldn't make more work for yourself than you have to, and statting up a 17th level ghost wizard intelligently would definitely qualify here. Save the hours long optimisation fests for shortly before the fight, because if you do them a year in advance at the start of the campaign you may forget the details, or find the players are the wrong level when they do meet them, and that matters a lot more in the new edition. It's important to work smart as well as hard if you want to get many things done. Now let's finish this for good. What's new sheds their inhibitions. Not a good place to do so. Things will eat you. One of those issues with a decidedly lackluster themed section, but a decent set of regular articles. There's also more rehash than there has been for a while, with two of the articles devoted to providing stats to things from previous editions. After last year's clean slate, that's vaguely tiresome, but I guess there is a lot of material from back then that people do want to see. Still, hopefully they'll keep adding new ideas, and not just drown in nostalgia for a while longer. Let's see what next month has to offer.</blockquote>

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