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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6235841" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 350: December 2006part 3/6Magical Pollution: We've talked several times about the things high level adventurers do that essentially create dungeons for the next generation of adventurers. Some of them are intentional, like building castles full of traps to protect their wealth. Some are not, like your dumped waste products producing defiled lands and mutants that come back to make your life a misery. Of course, the thing about pollution is that you can rarely predict what long-term effects it will have, save by trial and lots of error, as it involves small amounts of lots of different waste products being thrown together and interacting. So this article is another grab-bag of stuff built around a theme. Three different templates that represent the mutations this might cause: Arcane-blooded, poisonous and stonebones. Two prefab adventure locations for you to put down anywhere, with social and research challenges as well as physical ones to deal with. And three more smaller hazards that are more obvious challenges to be avoided or suffer in the process. So this is for the people annoyed by everything having implied setting stuff, who just want their crunchy material so they can make better campaigns on their own. They're hardly going to neglect them, despite what some letter writers might think. Creatures of corruption: Continuing directly on from the last article, even though we don't have quite enough material to make Pollution a full theme in the issue. Now there's an idea. We've had war and death themed issues. I'm sure there's more than enough article ideas to make poison, disease and famine themed issues in the future. Hell, on that note, a biblically themed one would be cool if they could get over their fear of causing controversy. But anyway, back to the monsters formed by our own despoiling of nature. Will they be suitably ironic in the deaths they inflict upon players. Alchemical Undead are your basic shambling monstrosities in eternal torment, only with extra toxic breath and damaging explosion when killed. Pretty familiar really. I'm sure you can visualise this from any number of media properties. Corrupted is a template that YOU could well wind up with if you fall in the wrong mutagenic slime. You might look ugly, but you also get superhuman strength and toughness, natural weapons, regeneration and poisonous bite. I'm sure you could get an adventuring party to accept you anyway, and if not, there's plenty of precedents for a heroic party composed entirely out of mutants, fighting to get a cruel world to accept them. Toxic Oozes are as hard to kill as most of their relatives, eating away at any weapons or armor (or your flesh) that touches them. In addition, they emit toxic fumes that'll do slow con damage even if you don't touch them. You probably want to kill them with cold rather than fire if possible, as it'll be more pleasant smelling afterwards. So these monsters are once again going with the obvious and archetypical, rather than unique spins on an idea. Well, they were dealing with newbies again in the letters.</blockquote>

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