Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6071333" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 304: February 2003part 3/9Mercenaries for hire: Our first feature this month is basically an expanded Guild Secrets detailing a fantasy Foreign Legion equivalent. That's a bit of interesting real world lore they haven't done in the magazine before. And since the idea of giving up your old name and memories to escape your dark past, and being put in a group of other random malcontents of all classes and races and sent on missions by mysterious masters is a perfect way to set up a campaign, I think this is definitely an idea that works well with the D&D ruleset. You can play a group still in the legions, or one that's recently finished their 5 year tour of duty and been released to build a new life on an unfamiliar world, and you have a good reason for the locals to tolerate creatures of different races, even if they aren't common in the area you've been posted or normally considered monsters that should be killed on sight. So like the gladiator one last issue, this shows you an effective way of organising your campaign, concentrating on the setting details, but not forgetting to include a few interesting bits of crunch at the end. Only it's not generic at all, having a clear author vision while still retaining a fair amount of flexibility in how you apply it. So this is a very strong start to the issue indeed. Well done, Mr Mearls, well done. Monstrous magic: 46 new spells in 9 pages? I think that's a little too much for me to describe each of them for a change. That'd virtually double the length of this issue's review. The title is pretty self-explanatory. It's a whole bunch of spells that are most useful if you're a monster, or have monsters in your retinue with appropriate powers to enhance. They do things like boost your DR, SR or natural armour (which only works if you already have some) or let you do tricks with your gaze attacks, swallow power, diseases, energy draining, etc etc. Basically, this is just a more general version of those dragon specific spells we often get on birthday issues. As such, it's mostly for the DM, but some of them'll also be useful for players too, particularly if you're experimenting with the many monsters that can gain class levels. Since they're enhancing existing abilities rather than granting new ones, they also tend to be slightly more powerful than regular spells, which means this is rich grounds for the optimisers amongst you. Will you be able to make up for those ECL modifiers by deploying these spells cleverly?</blockquote>

Verification