Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6281745" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Compendiumpart 8/10CLASSICS: While the last two chapters were all from the last few years of the magazine, this one is nearly all 1e stuff designed to tickle our nostalgia bones. Many of them are ones I've just gone over a second time in the last batch of best of's, so I may struggle to find something to say about them. Let's see how much effort they've put into improving the mechanics and visuals of these old faithful's. Arcane Alterations: Our only recent article in this chapter is also the only OGL article in the book. Very surprised that they liked this one enough to reuse it considering that. Still, the Arcana Evolved influenced ceremonial feats and spell templates are pretty nifty, so I'm glad that they did decide to include it. Monte Cook did have some pretty cool ideas, and it's good to see them using the OGL the way it should be used, to pass them around, twist them into new shapes and build upon them. Glyphs of Cerilon: We've certainly seen a lot of the Forgotten Realms since the early days, much of it reprinted repeatedly in multiple forms. However, it's easy to forget that once there was another freelancer sneaking bits of their personal setting into our magazine - prolific cartoon writer Larry DiTillio. Erik bringing this one back is a very good example of just how much he researches, and how much he cares. Unsurprisingly, while the conversion is fairly faithful in most ways, with all the cool flavour retained, they seriously nerf anything that would inflict permanent harm upon your character, like the ones that drain levels or wither limbs.  So this serves as another reminder just how much more forgiving D&D has become over the years, with nearly all status effects temporary or easily healed with the right spell. None shall pass, even the legacy effects! The answer is … the Riddle!: Sigh: They had to have at least one bit of irritating cheese in here, didn't they, and revisiting the riddle themed issue certainly fits the bill. They include a nice bit of new artwork here, and tweak the formatting so there's more headers,  but there's no mechanics to convert, so the text is pretty much unchanged. If you do want to use riddles and make your players groan, it's not as if anyone is going to stop you, even in games which encourage rolling mental stats to solve these problems in game. Moving swiftly on. Runes: You again. Once again, the fact that runes are a big part of several mythologies gets them brought back for another generation. And once again, the fact that this was completely mechanics free means there's no changes in the text, apart from a bizarrely small one at the start, where they swap out the thief in the original for a wizard, to reflect their changed powers and roles in the new edition. Amazed that they bothered really, since it is such a tiny thing. I suppose that kind of attention to detail is to be commended, because otherwise I'd have even less to say about this one. Runestones: For a second time, this article follows on directly from the last one in a best of. Unlike the previous two, this one is a little abbreviated, with the example bits of writing cut out, leaving just the text and the key to the runes. And the text is still great fun too, reminding us that even Ed eventually scaled back on breaking the 4th wall in his writings and got caught up in giving us little bits of crunch and setting detail on a regular basis rather than big ideas. He might have had more longevity than any of their other staff, but even he can't completely ignore the hands of time or the dictates of fashion. Tesseracts: Now this is an awesome one that definitely deserves re-introducing to every new generation, since it's based off a mathematical construct that remains universally applicable regardless of time, place or culture. 4-dimensional mapping is now easier to do than it was in the 80's, thanks to home computers that are more powerful than the entirety of a big company's processing power. Games like Portal have exposed people to the fun you can have distorting space and given us systems for managing the convoluted maps that can result. So if you're struggling, google away. You don't have to hurt your head figuring this one out on your own. Another look at Tesseracts: If maps that don't conform to the normal three dimensions take extra effort to make, ones that you can wind up in the same areas, but different orientations are even more complex. This is somewhat harder to find help with, as we still have less of an idea what gravity is and how to manipulate it than we do advanced theoretical mathematics. Electromagnetism and the Strong & Weak nuclear forces, we have a idea how they work and the cool things you can do with electricity and chemistry. Gravity, it's just kinda there, and a real pain in the ass a lot of the time. If we could negate, invert or set gravity at right-angles to the dominant plane the way they describe in this article, the world would be a very different place, and getting into space would be a lot easier. So there's still room for quite a few more expansions on this idea, and the magazine shouldn't have stopped at the two. Maybe that would have slowed down the descent into incredibly specific bite sized chunks of info. Toxins of Cerilon: A second updating of Larry DiTillio's old works, this is another collection of toys for the DM, and possibly players to put into their games. Unlike most of the articles here, the list of poisons is completely reorganised, removing the categorisations from the original, and putting everything into alphabetical order. The effects are also completely rewritten, with far fewer of them doing hit point damage, instead substituting all sorts of ability score damage and status effects. So while there is a little bit of nerfing going on here where they would do permanent damage before, they've also worked to make them more interesting in other ways in the process of updating. That pleases me, and makes these articles very worthwhile even if you already have the original.</blockquote>

Verification