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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6218746" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 344: June 2006part 2/6First watch: Hordes of the Abyss is our generic D&D product. Demon lords, and everything underneath them. Always a popular topic, especially when they try and suppress that knowledge. What power level will they be when you encounter them? Given the way of 3rd ed, it should be a level that's challenging but not insurmountable. The Realms gets Mysteries of the Moonsea. Both sourcebook and adventure series. Well, they've got several previous books doing one or the other for the area in their back catalogue, so they can draw on those. Can you get the gloomy buggers around here to cheer up, and maybe some decent management? Tough order, since they have the power of many novels behind them. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman prequelise again in Dragons of the Dwarven Depths. See the last few scraps of the original heroes lives get picked over for the few remaining vultures to consume. All we need now is baby heroes of the lance saving the world while still in diapers. Maybe it could be a cartoon series. On the gaming side, this line gets a new bestiary for 3rd ed. A few new monsters, a lot of updated old ones. How will they cope with the new sorcerers and mystics, and other tricks the heroes have? On the minis side of the operation, they're warming up for their 10th wave of stuff. War of the dragon sees Tiamat doing the expansionist thing, bringing with her lots of new monster types, including the ridiculous dragonspawn humanoids. Now, draconians make sense, because you get dozens from each egg, and you're taking resources from your enemies too. But these are pretty pointless compared with actual dragons. Oh well, they're interesting opponents, they just need a little refluffing. On the third party side, there's another set of pieces for building your own castle adventures, and Ptolus gives it's villains minis as well.  Not that rat like humanoids or cowled cultists are rare in other settings, so they should be transferrable to, say, WHFRP. Out in D20 land, they pick True Sorcery for True20. Once again Green Ronin try and push the boundaries of what you can do with the D20 engine, and make magic that's balanced, but less limited than standard Adepts.  No objections to this one. Fantasy Flight Games release the Runebound boardgame for Midnight. With the movie planned as well, it looks like they're trying to make this a multimedia IP like the WotC ones. Good luck with that. Also on the game side, there's Wizkids Pirates of Davy Jones' Curse. Guess what film they're trying to capitalize on with this one. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> They also choose to promote some music this month. Nox Arcana are a more classy ambient relative of filk, composing tracks based around classic horror themes. Ok then. :buh: I do wonder how they pick this stuff. Is one of the group mates with the Dragon writers or something?  Even more stuff to come as they promote LARPing here again. Yay for that. True Dungeon: Escape from the spider cult gives you a chance to dress up and spend a weekend pretending to delve dungeons in an entirely more visual and visceral way than usual. Great fun if you can afford it. And finally, they celebrate the 100th anniversary of Robert E Howard's birth, and take a little time to talk about all the things currently being planned involving the Conan property. Some people are making a lot of money off that IP. Let's hope they don't dick the licensees around too much. Planar dragons: Our third and final instalment in this series arrives. We now have planar dragons for all the outer planes apart from Arcadia, which is apparently too civilised and tidy for big stompy primal things to fit into. There's still a fair few of the more obscure para/quasielemental planes missing, but all the transitional ones are taken, so you're never more than one planar jump away from a dragon. As long as they're in the name of the game, this is kinda helpful for the DM, you know. Astral Dragons are quite different once again, making them one of the most drastically retooled monsters every edition. Strange. Once again the degree of quirkiness is reduced substantially, which depresses me even more than their ignoring history. Chole Dragons, on the other hand, really do bring the quirky, with a whole bunch of odd descriptive details that remind us that the abyss is a place of chaos as well as evil, and that chaos is thrown into relief by smaller scale patterns that don't connect to everything else. They're full of plot hooks to solve, or go mad trying too. Elysian Dragons are all about the good times, making everyone around them happy in the most direct and effective way (which may produce more than a few half-dragons in the process <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) Their breath weapon makes everyone caught in it drunk, and their ability to create food at will ensures they don't mess up the environment and steal resources from others in their pursuit of generosity. It's good to not have to compromise. Gloom Dragons are the exact opposite, miserable, cowardly scavenging <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=":)" />ers who condemn you to an eternity inside them (with a tombstone growing on their back) if they eat you. Seems appropriate for the Gray Waste. So these are fairly inventive and appropriate in their descriptions, even if they forgot the distant past to focus on more recent material.</blockquote>

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