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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6236593" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 350: December 2006part 5/6Bazaar of the Bizarre comes to an end with another collection of items to aid wizards in their spell research. Make stuff to help yourself, and you can do more to help others in the future. Or crush them under your high-heeled jackboots better instead, if that's the way your tastes run. Arcane Fences are another way of setting up a guarded perimeter so you can have a good snooze. They can even play you a lullaby if that's what you need. Your adventurer friends may laugh at you, but then they'll have to deal with mr tedddikins coming to life and ripping their throats out. Containment Cloths are instant summoning circles you can then just rub down and use as a tablecloth. Don't let the kids realise this, and don't try and summon Rilmani with them. Business as usual here. Failsafe Rings cast a buff on you as soon as you get hurt. It might be better if they could do it just before, but we're wizards, not miracle workers. That'd take permanent foresight, which would be very expensive indeed. Occulus are goggles with instant identify spells up to 5 times a day. And if you're getting magic items more frequently than that, your DM is probably a serious monty hauler. I think this'll save your wizard many days of tedium and expensive material components. Researchers are little scuttling eyes on legs that act like an internet search engine for your library. Only slower and with a smaller pool of info to draw from. Sigh. Fantasy just doesn't seem very fantastical when it's doing things reality does better I'm afraid. These writers really have got to get that through their heads. A Thaumatoscope is a spyglass with permanent detect magic. Rather more portable and unobtrusive than the old mirror which does the same thing, but still not paradigm shaking either.  A bit of a limp ending after the last few columns really.  Spellcraft also comes to an end quietly as they prepare to do a few lineup reshuffles for the new year. This month's theme is Chronomancy. Given their current degree of drawing on old products, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are updates from the old 2e book of the same name, but I'm currently unable to check that supposition. I'll just have to judge the spells purely on cool & power, rather than comparisons. Aging Touch may age you temporarily, but it wears off. You'll have to wait for the epic version to get that kind of power as a PC these days. Skillful Moment allows you to take 20 without taking 20 times as long. This is about equal to the +10 bonus similar spells of the same level have granted in the past, but more reliable. The choice, as ever, is yours, as one method may be more advantageous than the other, given the situation. Temporal Jolt inflicts fairly minor damage on living things,but really does a number on your items. Muahahahaha! Always love it when they do that. Temporal Repair is the obligatory counterspell. If they kill your granddad while this is up, then you're fine. Ha. The duration isn't that long though, which means any superparanoid wizard'll be making an advanced version a priority, right after preventing teleportation, scrying and extraplanar screwage. Time Shield halves the duration of spells within it. This is really quite brutal, assuming your fights last more than 2-3 rounds anyway, which I know some parties don't usually. I guess so much of that is up to the DM. Can't say I have a problem with this selection at all. Just wish it was longer, like so many of the articles these days. 5 spells in 3 pages still feels both slight and inefficient compared to the old days where they could sometimes put a dozen on a single page.</blockquote>

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