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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6067674" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 303: January 2003part 4/9Saying the right things: A few more uses for your social skills here, showing an article doesn't have to be all new feats and spells spreading your slots thinner and thinner, or whole new subsystems like the ones Robin tries to add on this topic. If anything, this shows you how to make do without buying up the full compliment, by taking better advantage of the overlap between them. Intimidate gets the common house rule of substituting your strength for your charisma, so all those ugly fighter sorts can be realistically threatening instead of getting laughed at. The only skill that you can't really substitute for is sense motive, which is more of a passive skill than the others, if no less useful. All of these are logical, useful and not overpowered, so this is definitely the kind of article that i'd use in my game. Like the herbalism articles, these kind of mundane details still need filling in in 3e. The Iron Path: Speaking of relatively mundane stuff, here's 15 new martial arts styles for the OA fans amongst you. Since they generally give advantages to fighters and monks in particular, they're very welcome to those who want the game a little more balanced. Each of them is specific to a particular race, with elves and dwarves getting several, and everyone else getting one, including several monster races like goblins, ogres and gnolls. Some are familiar, like elven bladesong and Drow two-weapon fighting, while others are all new. None seem particularly overpowered for their price, with even the formerly twinktastic bladesong style just offering a +4 bonus to concentration checks to avoid spell disruption. As with the previous article, this provides a good number of low key options in an area that isn't oversaturated yet, so it's entirely welcome. The under-groves: The underdark, on the other hand is pretty heavily detailed already. However, this article manages to find some cool new ideas to fill it with anyway. One problem with the underdark is how it manages to have a sustainable food chain and ecology without the sun to provide energy for plants. Well, it turns out there are several options without resorting to generic magical radiation (ie handwaving) as your base. Thanks to water's ability to dissolve all sorts of stuff, it can serve as a transport medium both horizontally and vertically, to keep things moving and let a wide variety of organisms grow where you don't expect them. Which means there's all sorts of theoretical underground terrains that could be formed. And the ones here are pretty imaginative, filled with all sorts of new monsters and smaller environmental dangers like slipping, becoming stuck, or contracting various diseases.  Since oozes, slimes, vermin and fungi are less in fashion this edition, it's very fun seeing a whole bunch of variants on the theme, ands planning to unleash them on players who are too used to adventuring being a glamorous process. As anyone who's actually been spelunking knows, while there are some incredibly pretty crystal caverns out there, you also wind up negotiating your way through a lot of wet mucky cramped spaces too. I really like this one, as it's got both plenty of solidly thought out details, and fantastical bits that couldn't happen in reality. It'll make your imaginary world feel nicely solid and visceral.</blockquote>

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