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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6228761" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 347: September 2006part 4/6Elemental hazards: One problem that crops up again and again when people talk about why they don't travel to other planes in their games is that of variety. To an outsider, another universe can seem like a one-note place, with the obvious feature it's named after drowning out everything else. This is not the case, as anyone who's ever studied lava flows, rock strata or the weather will tell you. And with the other elements mostly removed, the elemental planes are free to develop their dominant one into even more exotic forms. This article gives us a good dozen for each elemental plane. Some are hazardous, some are cool opportunities, and some are merely flavour encounters that spice up the visuals as you travel through, but they are mostly pretty interesting, and serve to show how other universes can still have an ecology despite the things there being very different. With three monstrous compendia devoted to the planes, I don't think we have trouble finding creatures for any but the most obscure ones, but this is still a handy niche to have filled, especially as they include random encounter tables so you can see how common each of these occurrences is by comparison to each other. Hopefully this'll put the accusations of elemental planes being boring to ground along with that of paladins all being the same, which the magazine has also done a good deal to refute. Paraelemental paragons: Before we get to the regular columns, we round things off with a bit of boring symmetry filling. Stats for paraelemental monoliths, and parelemental templates to represent regular creatures native to those planes. Each is pretty much what you'd expect in terms of boosting stats and adding special abilities, with a scaling CR adjustment based on how many HD they have. Useful, but formulaic, this shows that not all their articles are going to include setting details, even though they have increased that quite a bit. At least the illustrations are good this time round. The ecology of the elemental weird: Hmm. These guys have got a substantial revamp for the better in 3rd edition. Before that, they were just another lurking strangling monster, trapping you and gradually killing you. Now, their name seems appropriate to it's linguistic antecedents, with their new ties to the concepts of fate and prophecy. I really rather approve. Unlike with the inevitable one, despite technically tackling four creatures, they're closely connected enough this time that the ecology doesn't feel too thinly spread, and the new crunch is pretty decent, focussed as much on helping PC's as hindering them. And if you aren't happy with the changes made, they even give you stats for a creature closer to the old version  of weirds. Win-win, really.</blockquote>

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