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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6036672" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 296: June 2002part 6/10Elminster's guide to the realms: Sometimes, Elminster reveals all the secrets behind these strange little locations the Realms is packed with. Sometimes not, and you just get what's needed to play, and some options for what could be behind the scenes. Here's another one of those. A dryad, a mysterious floating shield, and a pool of water which may or may not be enchanted. As usual for these, it's designed to exist in a world where adventuring parties are common, so there are pretty substantial safeguards in place to make sure a single party can't just kill everything and take all the stuff, leaving a stripmined wasteland. I guess once more it's a pretty flavour encounter that reminds us how many powerful creatures there are here, and how hard it is to make an impact. If you want to be a real hero or villain, it's going to be a lot of hard work and clever contingency building so you can survive when you get the attention of the big players. I think once again I'm feeling the oversaturation, because I can't get enthusiastic about this at all this month. The bestiary gets it's The back. Well, it's something, anyway. This birthday has yet another variant on dragons, as you would expect. Wurms? Well, Wyrms is already used, and worms just sounds mundane. Warms is already a word, and werms and wirms would look even closer to not just scraping the barrel, but taking it apart and using the planks for firewood. Still, they're not going for the brainless rampaging monster archetype this time, but the more connected to nature one. And rather than having individual stats for every variant, they use a cross-matrix of ages and types, with Wurmlings, adults, Greater Wurms and Elder Wurms, and Forest Wurms, while the environments they favour are Tundra Wurms, Sand Wurms, Swamp Wurms, Sea Wurms, River Wurms, Grassland Wurms, Hill Wurms, Lava Wurms, Storm Wurms, Cave Wurms and Mountain Wurms. Thats a relatively elegant bit of design, which isn't too overused, so I don't mind this one after all. It can't be easy finding decent non-rehashed dragon articles every birthday for 25 years, but somehow they keep on doing it. All credit for the many writers who make that possible. Hackmaster presents The Spellslingers guide to wurld domination. Because that's what every wizard wants, isn't it?Living Greyhawk Gazetteer Index: This section doesn't have the usual pair of articles, instead devoting a full 12 pages to an index of Greyhawk material. Want to know who's what, where, and how high level quickly? Here's a high density alphabetical listing of page references. I strongly suspect that this is why the scanner went to the extra effort to make this issue searchable when the rest of the post-archive ones aren't. And kudos to them, as that makes this index even quicker and easier to use. This article is a good example of fan power in general, showing that the official writers are willing to take and use things that the fans do for free at the moment, which is of course a big change from the 90's and part of the same idea that produced the OGL. Let's hope it lasts a few years longer before WotC start trying to claw back control and do everything in house again.</blockquote>

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