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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6206466" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 340: February 2006part 5/6Spellcraft: No surprise that this department is in theme too. Astrology and magic have huge real world links. Hell, just being able to track the time of year accurately, a la stonehenge, WAS magic. Humans can be surprisingly easy to impress. Course another strong connection here is werecreatures and the moon. That's one we have had a themed collection on before. So lets hope this collection of astrological magics venture a little farther into space. Guiding Star helps you get places, twee weather witch style. Follow the shiny light. Watch a will-o-wisp doesn't take it's place and lead you too your doom. Lunacy drives you nuts every full moon. Dr Dominiani would be fascinated by this one. Hmm. You have too much cerebral fluid. We must drain it at once! :nom: Moonbridge create a means of transport only good creatures can use. Perfect for getting over a river or ravine and escaping. Make them permanent and create a city out of little floating islands and you have the perfect security measure that keeps out nasty sorts unobtrusively. I quite like this idea. Motes of Moonlight is just another low level light creating spell. Like Dancing Lights or Faerie Fire, this has it's distinct uses, but is hardly a worldchanger. Sever ties of the Moon helps mess up lycanthropes, making remaining human the optimal thing for them to do. Handy for dealing with inflected ones, in particular. Just make sure you have the chains ready, for like many 3.5 spells, it doesn't last nearly long enough. Shooting Star is a more firey variant on call lightning. It doesn't do as much damage, but can obviously be used whenever there's open sky, instead of needing storms to activate. No objection to that idea. Novel Approach returns one last time, albeit without it's A, to give us a look at The Black Cauldron. Lloyd Alexander's series is one of those that continues to sell decently to this day, even if the movie didn't do too well. And completely unsurprisingly, said cauldron is the primary focus of this article, along with the horrible hordes of undead that you can create with it. You still can't create unlimited armies like you could in previous editions, but increasing the amount to (level+5)^2 skeletons at a time is certainly enough for a good skirmish game (if they were still running those <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> ) And knowing that the only way to stop the cauldron for good is for someone to climb in it and sacrifice their life for the greater good definitely remains a good source of dramatic tension amongst an adventuring party. So even if this is somewhat nerfed from full mythological artifact status and you can't use it to take over a country, adding more undead to the horde with every village you conquer, it's still more than capable of creating a big challenge for a group of PC's. And I guess that's what the designers want these days. Combat challenges, but not world-changing abilities. :Sigh: And to think they usually avoided that conservatism in previous novel and computer game columns. Time to reduce the variety of stuff we're getting a little further again. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

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