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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6105805" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 312: October 2003part 2/9Zogonia blows their recruit paladin roll. You're better off without her anyway. They then kick the head off a gnome. What is this writer on? Something's not right here. Up on a soapbox: Once again Rob Kuntz gets the lions share of the attention. Not only was he one of the first DM's, he was one of the most dominant players as well. Honestly, I'm surprised he didn't contribute more to the actual books. Also once again, it's the funny stories that have stuck in Gary's mind all these years. Rob getting himself an awesome orc henchman was not some big quest, it was an emergent thing that built up into a story via a bunch of cool co-incidences, piled on opportunistic profit seeking, topped off with a terrible in-joke. The kind of stuff that seems perfectly reasonable at a game table, but got treated with great disdain when it appeared in official supplements like Castle Greyhawk or Gargoyles. Which really makes me wonder if those adventures are actually truer to the spirit of the original Greyhawk game as it was played around the table than any of the newer reboots of the campaign that try to recast Oerth as this serious, gritty, war-torn place. Even if Gary was no longer with the company at that point, the rest of it was still heavily comprised of people like Skip, Jim and Rob who had their formative gaming experiences in these games. Maybe it is time to reassess that period, and ask if a few more goofy plots and pun names might actually improve your campaign, make it last longer, and give the Serious Dramatic bits more impact by contrast. BLACKGUARDS!: So as everyone noticed straight away, they only covered the non-evil paladin types in issue 310. Heeere's the rest of them. As with the previous article, they completely ignore the versions from issue 106, letting us know that those strange names and design quirks are not in style at all, and that we'll be dealing in standardised class structures with a few powers swapped out, maintaining the appearance of balance even if some of them are vastly more useful than others. Sigh. Looks like this is going to be much the same as the last two issues. Anti-Paladins are pretty much the exact inversion of regular ones, detecting and smiting good, causing fear and disease, and getting a fiendish mount. The only real difference is that they trade off curing with a touch for a bonus to attacking creatures weaker than them, incentivising being a petty and cowardly bully. That's a considerably better idea than just inverting that to cause wounds, as they would do with the Paladin of Slaughter in UA. Despots are obviously the lawful evil ones. They too have abilities better suited to their role & goals than the Paladin of Tyranny from UA. When you consider how many of the articles in the last two issues will be recycled and improved upon, I'm very annoyed these ones won't be. What were the UA writers thinking, missing tricks as basic as this? Corrupters fill the neutral evil slot, and have the clear goal of subtly tempting people into depravity, as opposed to dominating or killing them. They could really do with sacrificing the full BAB for more skills and spells in that case. The powers they do get are quite suited to the cause, including a really nifty new spell which does actually subtly tempt people into doing bad things. But they could do with more of them. I guess this way, they'll still be able to give you a really good fight when found out as well. So while not as quirky as the 1e paladin types, this has been a fairly interesting article, with some actual thought put into designing new abilities. They just needed a bit more courage to break out of the existing framework to really make suitably diabolical villains.</blockquote>

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