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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6188808" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 336: October 2005part 3/7Not for the living: We've had plenty of templates for monsters over the past 5 years, with undead definitely getting more than their fair share. After a couple of articles turning various types of undead into templates for ever greater flexibility in monster design, I have to wonder what new spin they can add on that this year. Well, it looks like they're extending their love of templates to inanimate objects. (man, they really do breed anything with anything in 3e <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ) mechanically codifying various types of haunting so you can design even this type of encounter quickly and easily. Which is all to the good if it leads to DM's putting more noncombat challenges in the game that you solve by roleplaying and cleverness. Bad Place is the kind of incredibly generic name that only Steven King characters can pull off without seeming silly. And indeed, the mechanics show a definite Shining influence in the way anyone who lives there gradually goes mad, and then homicidal, and also in the steps needed to clear the place out.  All work and no play does indeed make Jack a dull boy, which I can quite empathise with at this point in my writings. Dreamscapes draw on the also popular Nightmare on Elm Street stylings, giving anyone who sleeps there nightmares that you don't wake up from if you die in the dream. Again, you need to play it smart to sort out the force behind the nightmares, and don't get complacent, for they may come back again, and again, and again. Eidolon let you use the basic principles of the Ring series in a world without videotape. Hallucinations, odd compulsions, and the ghost coming out of the bonded objects to mete out a horrible death if you don't do what they desire. Muahahahaha! Entitys are haunted places directly bonded to a particular powerful ghost. If you can  take out the ghost, the rest is relatively simple. But anyone who's ever played a Ravenloft adventure will know that what sounds simple in theory is very much not in practice as their power levels and degree of angst mounts up. Planar Cankers are a more self-explanatory name. Intrusions from other universes are a fairly common thing in D&D, (after all, we had another set of rules for them just this april) and there's plenty of fun you can have depending on what other universe a bridge is forming between. We definitely have such sights to show you this time around. Primeval Scars are the most powerful and hard to fix of these, causing animals and plants to be overgrown and hostile and anything unnatural to simply vanish mysteriously after a few days. if you stray into one, things will turn into survival horror of the scariest type. Good luck, you'll definitely need it. Once again James Jacobs has pulled off a winner of an idea in style. Birth of the dead: Many undead are capable of reproducing by turning creatures they kill into minions, which then gain independence when their master dies. But that doesn't answer the question of where they came from in the first place. Just saying a god or wizard did it every time gets very tiresome indeed, especially when you don't have the specifics of what spells they used and how much it will cost as a PC to do it. So here's 26 bits of nanofiction and explanation to differentiate the many many different ways you could come back after dying in D&D land. (not one for each letter of the alphabet though, unfortunately) Some simply require you die in a particular way, some require deliberate and often very complex effort, and some are restricted to certain nonhuman races anyway, so you only have to worry about being killed BY them. The whole thing shows a combination of extensive research and making up new details to fill in the gaps that's pretty pleasing to me. If you want to build upon a setting, you have to be aware of and respect the things that came before so it makes a consistent continuity. While this might not have quite the depth on a single creature an Ecology can manage, it does make a good reference for whenever too many monsters start to blur into one and you need reminding why we have them all.</blockquote>

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