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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6117922" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 314: December 2003part 7/9Fiction: The Leper's hand by Thomas Harlan. As I suspected in the last instalment, it's time to up the stakes and set in motion a multi-part plot that'll give the characters of Crusader Earth some major development before we say farewell to them for good. Funny how that's become a pattern over the last few years. The stealing of a minor sacred relic sets in motion an action packed plot as the impetuous young paladin and the cynical old witch try to discover who took it and why, and the journey involves kings, assassins and the holy grail itself, which has who knows what powers if all the pieces are reunited. They manage to succeed in their initial goal to recover it, but now they're drawn into a bigger conspiracy, and if they don't seek it out, more waves of trouble will likely come to them anyway. Are they ready for the adventure of their lives? Given the nature of the magazine I can't see them not triumphing eventually, but one or the other might die or have to make serious sacrifices in the process. I guess we'll see in a couple of months time, as we have the usual acceleration in pace of instalments as we reach the finale. Let's hope it's a satisfying ride. Silicon sorcery: Once, long ago, (issue 213) we had an article on items with synergistic powers, becoming more than the sum of their parts when you have more than one piece of a set. While exceedingly cool, these take a lot of work to design, both in and out of game, so you don't tend to see that many of them around.   Well, it looks like Heroes of Might and Magic IV has some more of these to get players excited about the thought of an extended treasure hunt to collect them all and gain ULTIMATE POWER!!!!! Even better, this is one of those cases where they've substantially improved on the formatting of previous attempts, making it really easy to figure out how much power you gain with each addition of a new item. There are three sets detailed here, a 3 item set each for sorcerers and bards, and an extra powerful 5 item set for wizards, reinforcing as usual that they're the ones most able and inclined to make elaborate equipment that boosts their power and versatility above it's already high baseline. So while there are the usual balance issues 3e suffers from, this still manages to be an exceedingly cool article, with stuff that can really spice up your game if introduced. You've just got to make sure the other classes have similarly cool synergistic sets of items to seek out should they so desire.</blockquote>

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