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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6144356" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 322: August 2004part 2/8Zogonia has to deal with a fallen paladin. This splits the party somewhat. Shadow's city: In issue 305, we got a city set on the astral plane, to give us both a good homebase there if you're planning an extended extraplanar campaign, and plenty of opportunity for political adventures as well as physical ones. Here, they try to repeat that trick with the plane of shadow. Of course, while the astral plane is a quiet place where you don't need to eat, and very little happens unless you actively seek it out, the plane of shadow is far more slippery and hostile to nonnative life. This is especially the case here, because instead of trying to blend in, they've chosen to fill the city with light as much as possible, shouting I to a dark uncaring universe, and having to deal with regular hordes of undead pissed off about this disturbance. It takes a fair bit of work to gain citizenship here, but not nearly as much as on the astral plane, as we aren't dealing with strictly limited living space and no breeding. I would wonder how they provide food for themselves, but since a big chunk of the population is underground races like drow and dark ones, I assume the tricks that work in the underdark also provide here. I also wonder just how they keep a stable population with 7% mind flayers, as their appetites would deplete all the other races pretty damn quickly. So the demographics and ecology don't really hold up to sustained examination, but this does look like a very adventurable place, as it's filled with dark alleys, competing organisations, opportunities to get your hands on magical items, and an obvious physical threat to disrupt the whole shebang whenever you run low on ideas. Raymond Chandler would have a field day, and hopefully you can too. Who's afraid of the dark: When your players are stuck in an area of darkness, it's an interesting challenge describing their experiences in terms of their other senses, so they have enough information to make some choices about what to do, but not so much that it's no harder for them than it would be in a well-lit environment. There's a whole load of things that are effortless when you can see what you're doing that suddenly become very tricky indeed. Any change in the environment, like say a moving wall or pit trap can separate the party without them realising it until it's too late. Ranged attacks are pretty much pointless when you're aiming blind, and that includes non AoE spells. This is a fairly straightforward outliner of both the problems and solutions that show up when the lights go out, with plenty of attention paid to the existing 3.5 mechanics. You can dial up the difficulty based on the cleverness of the enemies and pull some very unfair tricks. This is the kind of primer that's drier than I'd prefer but has enough fun sadistic ideas for actual play that I can forgive it. After all, that's what really counts, not all the research and preparation that come before. Ecology of the dark ones: After another pretty lengthy gap, the ecologies return with  another of our interesting paired creatures. The Dark ones, like the Firenewt & Giant Striders, first appeared in the fiend folio, and have got relatively little love in modules since then compared to drow & illithids, with their limelight hogging ways. Still, as the ecology says, that's probably exactly how they like it, because it means pesky adventurers are less likely to come hunting for them specifically, and they'll be more vulnerable to their tricks and traps. Despite being physically fairly close to human, they have a rather alien mindset that leads them to extreme isolationism, and some rather interesting behaviours amongst themselves. While this illuminates some of these details, it raises just as many questions as it answers, giving GM's plenty of leeway to decide what their real origin is. Along with the now usual tactical advice and ideas for pairing them with other creatures (not in that way, although I suspect Dark Stalkers are one iconic character away from becoming a yaoi fangirl favourite. After all, they even explode when killed like anime monsters. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> ) we have Savage Species rules for making them available as PCs. This is probably the one sour note in this ecology, because as usual, they'll wind up rather underpowered, particularly the creepers, which have 5 racial levels, but only a single hit die, which as we know from pixies, results in very fragile characters. Oh well, can't fix the systematic problems. Other than that, it's a nicely atmospheric and usable ecology here.</blockquote>

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