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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6088472" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 308: June 2003part 6/9Arcane weather: Magical weather is probably one area that's underrepresented in D&D compared to real world superstition. Part of that is because like shapeshifting, you have a few high level spells that basically let you do everything, which gives spellcasters either no power over it at all, or ridiculous flexibility and huge amounts of tactical and strategic control over an area. There really should be more intermediate steps between alter the temperature a few degrees and snap your fingers for instant village destroying hurricane. Still, it seems Mike Mearls isn't in a flexibility cutting mood today, just an adding new whimsical stuff one, and applying the lessons we learned out in the planes to the prime material. In an area of high magic, all sorts of weird and wonderful weather can happen, from raining frogs, to mixing raw alignment energy with the weather. And while some may be beneficial to the PC's, it's more likely that they'll be a challenge to overcome, and figure out how to make them hurt any enemies more than you. Most of this is for DM's to play around with, but as with the dragon articles, there's feats and a prestige class that lets players counteract and play around with magical weather, which will be suitably game-changing at high level. As both an unfamiliar topic, and quite a fun implementation, this is a pretty cool article. A bit of overt fantastically like this reminds players that magic is an integral part of a fantasy world, not something slapped on top of real world physics. Dork tower substitutes science for magic. Once again, nothing changes. Arthur C Clarke would be proud. Fiction: Theadora's ladder by Thomas Harlan. Our third trip back to the time of the crusades, and we up the magic level quite substantially, introducing vampires, and an old woman who has enough blatant magical power to stand up to them in a direct battle. (complete with a bit of wire-fu) So this isn't so much power creep as a sudden leap in stakes ( in both senses <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ) and change in tone. It also ceases to be standalone, leaving a huge plot hook open for a follow-up story. It looks like this series is going to do what Fool Wolf and Orion have done and build up to something. Presuming it gets those future instalments anyway, which is always a gamble in this magazine. So I have very mixed feelings about this. It's nice to see stories with continuity again, but the sudden change in tone is a bit annoying, and the power escalation definitely so, since gritty low-magic stuff has been getting increasingly scarce around here. I hope he isn't going to wind up on the chopping block or finish with yet another save the world story which leaves nowhere to go but down afterwards.</blockquote>

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