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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6169668" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 330: April 2005part 3/7Enter the far Realm: Bruce Cordell has already given us one classic epic article that has the potential to really change the course of your game, in issue 258's attack of the machines. Now he repeats the trick with a 17 page spectacular on the Far Realm, the non-euclidean universe outside the commonly traveled planar cosmology where pretty much everything is alive. Since this is a Lovecraftian realm which is inherently bad for the sanity of normal creatures exposed to it, visiting and coming back unchanged is as tricky as the most hostile elemental planes, and you really don't want it to leak back into the prime material plane. Like that, there's plenty of material for both people who want to combat the threat to the status quo, and those who align themselves with it for the cool powers that are to be had. Unlike the Sheens, however, the creatures from the far realm are presented as pretty unambiguously bad, which means this isn't quite as flexible as his previous offering. However, the new spells, monsters and magical items are better designed to offer a set of challenges suitable for adventurers of every level, while the Sheens stuff was mid-scooped and needed patching the next year to fully support a full campaign. Still, despite the tradeoff of less originality/more polish, it's a very cool article indeed, and one that again offers the potential of many expansions in the future. Let's hope they can make them good too, and not dilute the theme or grind it into the ground with repetitiveness. The Umbragen: Since Eberron tries to fit in everything that's in D&D, there was no way they could leave out the Drow. However, that just gives Keith Baker all the more incentive to recontextualise them, make sure they're different from their Realms and Greyhawk relatives in interesting ways. They're nomadic hunters rather than having huge underground cities, which means they might be more individually dangerous, but lack the high-end infrastructure and luxury a place like Menzoberranzan provides. They also favor nonstandard classes, with Warlock and Soulknife being their most common PC classes, which makes them quite distinctive to fight. And like Eberron's new races, they get a nice big chunk of racial feats that allow you to customise them in thematic ways, making them even more connected to shadow and darkness than regular drow. While it does feel like they're including stuff from other supplements to encourage Gotta Collect 'Em All!, this is a case where it feels natural rather than shoehorned in, as they're only picking a few appropriate things. Once again, the care used in designing the world and integrating it with the system is paying off for them. Fiction: Coming home by Matt Forbeck. Their new Eberron novels get a double whammy of promotion, following on from last month, with a little story using the same characters and set immediately before them. It's not particularly substantial as a story in itself, being about half character banter, and half action scene, charting the course of a single encounter as our heroes try to clear out an area of Living Fireballs. But it does serve to establish their personalities pretty decently, and hint at what might be coming in the future for them. I think that once again, their desire for self-promotion is coming ahead of their desire to tell stories that are really good in and of themselves, which is disappointing. The magazine may be improving again in some ways, but this department is still a pale shadow of what it used to be.</blockquote>

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