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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6075481" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 305: March 2003part 4/9Cities of the Planes: Hmm. That sounds like it might be the start of another regular column. Although to be honest, I can't see it lasting longer than it's counterpart Cities of the Ages did, despite the number of places out there that could do with some filling in. Still, as usual, I live in hope. :Checks ahead: Nothing? Oh well. Still, this is a very interesting and otherworldly place indeed, that takes full advantage of the different physics there. On the astral plane, there is no time, so creatures don't need to eat, sleep, or age. Which means any settlement there is composed of immigrants, and will remain pretty stable for long periods of time without natural births or deaths among the population. On the other hand, you do need to worry about Githyanki invaders, having decidedly limited solid materials to build with, and the gigantic corpse you're living on turning out to not be quite so dead after all. Under these conditions, an earthly economy doesn't really work, as people don't need to work just to survive. And so the main avenue of competition is for citizenship, as there's a very limited number of permanent residencies, and a fair number of temporary workers who do not have much legal protection. There's also the interesting fact that everyone who can get here is at least mid-level, often much higher, which means there'll be no slaughtering your way through the guard this time. It's all both interesting and different, which is exactly what the planes should be. I definitely wish more people were writing stuff like this. Faith and Honor: A religion can not survive on clerics alone. Gods need worshippers if they want to have general influence on the population. Yet a lot of the time, if players aren't playing someone empowered by the gods, they're tremendously cynical about them, even when (or perhaps because ) they definitely exist and are active upon the setting in measurable ways. You know what would fix this? Feats that let even those who aren't clerics enjoy some minor measure of divine power, just like psionicists get wild talents. That's a very 3e way of looking at things. Actually, it's very 4e as well, introducing the idea of picking up minor features from other classes via feats as a general thing, which would also see plenty of use in the incarnum and martial maneuver books. Oh, and lots of roleplaying advice of various ways you can play religious faith. So this is an instance where they're trying to introduce a bit more realism to the game, and having to fight both built up expectations and the system itself to make it accommodate them better. But with interesting results that will have an impact on the game in the future, unlike most articles that try to add more realism. Guess Skip still has a fair bit of influence on the company's design philosophies.</blockquote>

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