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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6157967" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 326: December 2004part 4/8Down the drain: Sewers are a perfect source of dungeons, even if they're a bit more grimy and cramped than people in plate mail would prefer, as they're full of life, and the organic way they're built up over time along with the settlements above gives you plenty of room for hidden or collapsed bits that no-one knows the layout of, regardless of what the maps in the town hall say. I'm very surprised indeed that they haven't done an article on them before, with the closest thing being a collection of sewer monsters in issue 238. So this is another one they can afford to be fairly system-light on, going into both historical detail, and how to make sewers fantastical for a D&D campaign. In a world which has plenty of ruins from magical civilisations past, you have plenty of freedom to make them both bigger than the surface town they abut, and very weird to PC's ignorant of engineering principles. (watch out for the one that feeds all the pipes to a sphere of annihilation deep beneath the city. It may seem like a good idea, but it'll ruin the ecosystem in the long-term. ) There's tons of adventuring hooks you can get from this, both the obvious ones while down there, and the less obvious ones where you travel through the sewers as a means to an end. (quite possibly using shrinking magic to come up someone's toilet at the other end) Any adventurer who's afraid of getting a little stinky is definitely missing out on a prime source of XP. Are you going to be that party who falls behind or fails the quest because they weren't willing to hold their nose in the pursuit of good deeds? Get Lost: Labyrinths are a more classical inspiration for D&D dungeons. Unlike sewers, mines, or ruined buildings, they're intentionally created to be challenging to navigate, by tricks like making everything look the same, layouts that naturally tend to draw your movements back to the way out, subtle slopes throwing off attempts to map by actually having multiple levels, and the ancient greek method of making sure people are hopped up on drugs before they can even enter in the first place. Unlike sewers, where adventurers might balk at first, but'll soon find plenty of stuff down there to occupy their attention, they'll probably jump at the the chance to explore a labyrinth, but might well find themselves getting bored once there, particularly if the place is low on landmarks and wandering monsters. As with the Tomb of Horrors, you really do have carte blanche to be as sadistic as you like with the design of these places, as mundane considerations like living spaces and toilets don't apply, and there are some people with ridiculously huge budgets and twisted senses of humour out there, who know how to set things up so trying obvious solutions lands you deeper in trouble. If you want to make the dungeon impossible, you can do so easily. The question is, can you make it seem impossible, yet remain interesting enough that the players will press on and solve it anyway, and will you fudge things if it looks like they're having it too hard or easy, or let the dice fall as they may and watch them slowly starve to death if they can't find the way out again? The ecology of the rakshasa: Hmm. Technically, we haven't had an ecology on this creature before. However, in all but name, we almost have, in Scott Bennie's article in issue 84. Still, this does take a quite different tack to that, leaving their origin mysterious,  and engaging in the usual focus on their psychology, society and combat tactics. Seems like they have rather more societal variants than most creatures, adapting to different worlds and even planes almost as well as humans do. Since they're yet another monster for whom sneakiness is paramount, the tactical advice is once again focussed on outmaneuvering your foe on both sides of the battle, with half the war even figuring out what you're facing. This does throw into relief the fact that since the revamp, the ecologies have been increasingly metronomic in their hitting of particular beats, and very precisely bounded page count, going from one topic to the next, always in the same order. With a creature like this, which could definitely stand a more detailed examination, this is a serious flaw. If all the subsequent ecologies are like this, I'm definitely going to start struggling for new things to say about them.</blockquote>

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