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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6170384" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 330: April 2005part 5/7Spellcraft goes up to 4 pages, but remains just as light on actual content, with lots of extra space taken up by reiterative sidebars and illustrations. Our theme is new though. Snaky spells, courtesy of the Yuan-ti. That's an idea that has plenty of flavour and prospects for variants. So it's certainly not bad content, just inefficiently formatted and padded out.Crushing Coils teleports a snake around the poor victim, to die unpleasantly. The victim, not the snake hopefully, although you can never be sure with adventurers.Fang Blade is one we had a variant of ages ago in Elminster's Notebook. Still, a snake in the hand is more intimidating than a dagger, and poisonous too. That's an idea that deserves updating, even if poison ain't what it used to be.Mershaulk's Kiss buffs your snakes. Morale bonuses, for some reason. Don't see those too often round here, so they should stack with most other buffs too.Serpent Storm is the obligatory AoE damage spell, doing ongoing damage, plus poison and terrain obstruction. I'd like to see the monster that's specifically immune to this one. Snake Shield is similar to the last one, only tightly focussed around you, and only affecting those who attack you. Again, you won't be immune to this one, but poison immunity (which certainly isn't rare) will help quite a bitSpitting Cobra is a nasty one who's effects should be obvious. It can not be stated enough. Get poison immunity if you're planning on fighting Yuan-ti. Keeping your distance won't help when they have spells like this.Venomous Volley is a good one to lead with, which makes it's position at the end of the article ironic. It does minor damage, and seriously penalizes further fort saves. That'll have nasty synergy with these other spells. One that's full of flavour, but definitely better for lurking monsters than adventurers, due to the inconvenience of moving the "material components". After all, you can't just shove a portable hole full of snakes and expect them to be ready to go when needed. Unless you use one of those ones that has automatic temporal stasis when closed, which are very expensive and rare indeed. What are the odds of that before you're 17th level and able to custom craft this stuff yourself.Gaining prestige: Yes folks, the Jester is back. For whatever reason, they were one of the first new classes thought up for the magazine, and easily the most followed-up, getting material in issues 3, 60, 120 and 134. They pretty much skipped 2e, but here we go again. Only this time, they're actually welcome, because the world around them has grown darker and we could use a few more laughs in our lives. They can still be fairly scary though, as they gain a bonus to perform checks equal to their class level, and can substitute perform for several other skills, which means no matter how suspicious you are, you'll still wind up falling for their jokes on a regular basis unless considerably higher level. They even gain the ability to make you laugh to death as per the old version at 10th level, which is very pleasing to see. They aren't actually that great on the acrobatics front though, and have saves no better than a regular character, so if you can resist their mind<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ery and get into combat with them, they'll be easier to kill than an average character of their level. I think that helps take the sting out of them for other players who still aren't so keen on seeing them in their campaign. The writeup includes a sample character a la their later splatbooks, which is an interesting development, and further makes this column stand out from previous instalments. All in all, I think this is pretty cool. Let's hope that isn't just the mind-control talking.</blockquote>

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