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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6246173" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 354: April 2007part 4/6Ancient PC's: Another article that has a bit of very dry humour indeed involved. D&D has had ageing rules for a long time, and yet very few campaigns run long enough to make use of them. (and even if they run for years of real time, it can often be less in game. ) This is a shame, because the longer a character has been around, the more room you have to give them an interesting backstory. Of course, you also have to worry about balancing power levels, but given the speed characters advance in 3e, that's less of a problem than you might think, and there's plenty of reasons you can give why they might have been more powerful in the past, and then lost a big chunk of it. Most of this article is devoted to playing characters that have outlived a natural human lifespan, whether through twist of fate, magical transformation, or merely belonging to a longer-lived race than humans, and there are a bunch of feats and backgrounds that reflect this mechanically in various interesting, and slightly more powerful than normal ways. (several cribbed from Dr Who) So while this still struggles to maintain game balance in the face of accurately representing their abilities, it does do a fair amount to make them interesting and accessible from a story point of view. And it's definitely something you're more likely to return to than a joke article who's mechanical bits aren't usable at all. The ecology of the Kopru: Now this is a monster that richly deserves some more attention, as well as being linked strongly to their current adventure path. The Kopru are decidedly strange creatures that dwelled in the central caverns below the isle of dread in the original module. Merely a brief encounter at the end of the original, the hints of a fallen civilization finally get expanded out into an extensive bit of writing on their culture, religion, class and gender divides, and the decidedly unpleasant things they got up too. They'd fit right in during an ancient era when aboleths, illithids, beholders and other aberrations had massive empires and competed for dominance of the world. We finally get some decent illustrations, allowing me to get a better idea of just how different they really look from humans, and the usual advanced NPC to give us an idea of how we could customize them for our own adventures. About the only sour note is their turning the black pearl from a singular treasure to a regular class of item that's an integral part of both their food chain and magical rituals. Really, that's as dumb as some of the extrapolations of throwaway lines from the movies in the star wars expanded universe. Such is the danger of decompressing a short story to an epic series without adding enough new material. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, and may transplant the setting stuff backwards as well. They are supporting their adventure path well this time around.</blockquote>

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