Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6272229" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 3part 3/6The half-orc point of view: Now, if Gnomes are the 5th wheel, Half-Orcs are the red-headed stepbrother that the family keeps "forgetting" to invite to parties. They've been in and out of the corebooks from one edition to the next, and if they don't show up straight away, they often pop up later. Because you have to learn to be tenacious when you're stuck between two cultures and struggle to fit into either. The funny thing is, despite their intelligence penalty, they often learn to be cunning because it's their big advantage when compared to full-blooded orcs. But then, racial differences are always a matter of degrees and contrasts. Orcs have shorter lifespans than humans, which have shorter lifespans than halflings, then up through dwarves, gnomes and elves, which are dwarfed by treants and dragons, who in turn can't compare to the eons immortal outsiders see. Similarly, differences in intelligence, aggression, size, etc, it's your neighbours that are important. Orcs aren't that different from humans, but those differences are enough and they're common and expansionistic enough as a race that those differences get shoved in your face. And so they're stuck with the role of villains, at least until a bigger threat comes along and forces them to ally with humans against rampaging dragons, even faster-breeding and dumber gibberlings, slime molds that can only be hurt by specific damage types or extraplanar threats to the laws of physics. It's a <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=":)" /> life, as this makes very clear. And that's one thing that certainly hasn't changed over the years and settings. They might not be the eternal underdogs like kobolds, but they get no respect and they're never on top for long. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya. The gods of the orcs: It's notable that while most of the good demihuman races have a token evil deity for when they turn to the dark side, monstrous races don't have a token good god, and the thing that they fear and only propitiate to keep away is even worse than their regular gods. In Orc's case, an unspeaking embodiment of disease that strikes or leaves you alone as it pleases, because they don't have the smarts to figure out hygiene. It's not as if the other gods in the pantheon are particularly united either, with plenty of room to play them off against one-another. In the end, their inability to plan ahead or co-operate for long periods of time will be their undoing, just like their followers. So this brings the chapter to a close in fairly interesting fashion, giving you plenty both to work with and think about for your games, in a far less confrontational way than Gary did. BREATHING LIFE INTO DRAGONS: At this point, they'd formalised the three regular themes that would remain throughout most of their lifespan. April for comedy material, June for Dragon related stuff, and October for horror. Since the comedy stuff proves pretty controversial, I find it unlikely they'll be putting much more of that in their best of's, but collecting the dragon related stuff makes perfect sense, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a horror one sometime in the future, given the quality of submissions they generally got for that. Let's keep their namesake in the limelight, even if they sometimes struggled to get enough good submissions for them. That's not in the Monster Manual: Gem Dragons have certainly more than proved their worth over the years. Someone would probably have introduced a neutral dragon type eventually, since there was an obvious symmetry there, but it might not have been as cool as our enigmatic psionic friends. Since they can be both allies and adversaries, they've done their share in many adventures. Arthur Collins can feel proud of himself for adding them to the canon, and for writing them strongly enough that despite a few mechanical tweaks as the editions progressed, their core tricks and personality traits remain the same. Good to be reminded that they got their start in the magazine. Hatching is only the beginning: Even in the very first D&D books, they made dragons more than just combat encounters, as the rules for subduing illustrate. There were certainly plenty of precedents for them as silver-tongued roleplaying encounters. However, that doesn't add the kind of comedy that trying to raise a baby dragon adds to your game. If you think trying to raise a human baby is tricky, bringing up something that has a decent chance of disemboweling or frying you when less than a year old is fraught with pitfalls and scenes of mayhem, especially with a type naturally aspected towards chaos or evil. This article still seems very applicable to any game with supernatural monsters that breed normally, not just D&D, and full of fun variants. Had enough of killing monsters? Try running a shelter for them. (after all, we wouldn't want them to go extinct and leave the next generation of heroes nothing to do, and it's a good solution for all those paladins who balk at killing babies, no matter how likely they are to be a problem in the future) Every day will be an adventure.</blockquote>

Verification