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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6056013" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 299: September 2002part 9/10Playing pieces: Two more characters for your Greyhawk adventures, one mid-level and the other high. Both are mysterious and hard to pin down, albeit for different reasons. But then, they live in Onnwal, which is one of the more politically unstable areas on Oerth, and are doing their best to kick out the Scarlett Brotherhood and liberate it. That means they could be killed at any time if the PC's don't get involved. So by their position, they're more likely to end up working with the players than against them, but they're both morally neutral, so the boot could end up on the other foot after Onnwal is liberated and they have a little time to be corrupted by the perks of power. Mechanically, they're not that interesting, both being straight one-class builds with a few powerful magical items, and we don't find out too much about their personalities, but plenty of effort is put into their histories. So if you're in the area, they'll be pretty easy to use. Another decent enough bit of filler for those who want to see Oerth catch up with Faerun. All oerth's artifacts: Index time again? Funny that they went over a decade without them, and then the LGJ gives us two in quick succession. I guess that reflects just how dedicated Erik Mona is to the Greyhawk setting, unearthing and cataloguing every little bit of obscure information he can find for our benefit.  Still, it only takes three pages, as Oerth isn't that huge, and many of the things here were originally presented as generic material, and then co-opted, mainly because it was stuff originally written by Gary and used in his home games. Quite a few of the others are personal possessions of various gods, and so are unlikely to show up in a treasure horde unless they have a very specific plan for you. So I think this is more aimed at obsessive collectors rather than players, letting people know how much more stuff there is in the archives to hunt down. And even if they're not directly profiting from out of print material, it's probably beneficial to keep demand up for it. It looks like this is a case where trying to examine the motivations behind the article is more interesting than the article itself. That's probably not a good sign. Silicon sorcery: Warcraft! Time for another stop in at this series, before it goes on to become the Michael Jackson of video games: already commercially successful for a good decade, to the biggest thing in it's field by an order of magnitude with the release of Warcraft Online. Warcraft 3 continues the plot quite nicely, allowing units to level up if they survive and win battles for a while. (which means you have more incentive to look after individuals and try to keep them alive) This makes converting units to D&D prestige classes particularly easy, although they're only 5 level ones, which I presume reflects the in game ranking system. Dwarven Thanes become Thorlike stompers, able to summon lightning and cause earthquakes with their physical badassery. Orc Blademasters are also fighty sorts that cross the boundary to superhuman, able to become invisible and generate mirror images on top of being able to attack frequently, and with an expanded crit range. One of these popping up in the middle of enemy troops will cause quite the mess. With strong visual images for both of these, they definitely seem appealing to me. And with advice for tweaking them to better suit other classes and races as well, this article is pretty cool. If anything is suited to conversion between the generic fantasy of tabletop roleplaying, it's the generic fantasy of computer wargames. Nodwick tries to introduce another member to the party. It works out about as well as the last time.</blockquote>

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