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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6047026" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 298: August 2002part 5/10Sinister tools: Drow do love their poisons. With save or die mostly gone in 3e, that means they have to get a little more inventive if they want to stay as scary as they were when we first saw them. So along with new magical items, they give us a fair number of new chemical and mineral concoctions here that have various ways of making your life interesting. Some they take themselves, some they put on weapons and traps, and some they just sprinkle liberally into the environment to ruin it. As chaotic evil creatures, often short-term pleasure and destruction takes precedence despite their potential long lifespans. So the items here are entirely in keeping with their established personalities, with spider stuff, torture stuff, tentacle stuff, and vanity stuff all catered for. Unlike the previous two articles, this is both highly useful for players and DM's, and not silly at all. The harder and more interesting the challenge of killing them and taking their stuff is, the more players will value it once they have it. VS Drow: This column gets a complete repurposing, dropping the usual terse tactical advice for fighting as and against them, and instead providing a specific organisation devoted to killing Drow, along with a bunch of prestige classes, feats, spells, and items that'll hopefully make things a little easier. Feels a bit like cheating really, compared to learning how to use your existing tools to their fullest potential. But I suppose that's the thing. Increasing the size of the pie will make you more popular than telling you you ought to carefully make the most of the slice you have. And like any race that can gain class levels fairly freely, Drow are a pretty difficult challenge to prepare for. You need a combination of being able to survive, navigate and blend into the underdark, which is a pretty big challenge in itself, and then bring the blinding light that'll put them at a disadvantage when you do find them. And since a party is only as stealthy as it's noisiest member, that means everyone in the group needs to have some skills in that area. Fortunately, even the spellcasting prestige class here gets an emphasis on silent spellcasting and blindsight, so that's covered. And spells that not only affect the visibility, but also the earth around you so you can hem them in or create pits in the ground quickly might give you an edge, as Drow wizards don't often become earth elementalists, weirdly enough. So this is another indicator of their changing direction, towards providing lots and lots of new specific crunch every month, rather than giving info and advice that could be applicable to any RPG. It's not that it's not useful, but it's only useful in a far more limited and specific situation, and I guess it's up to you to make sure those situations come up, as they're less likely to do so naturally.</blockquote>

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