So what else is in it?
- Psychic Swords Against Elder Evil by Sean Punch. A nice call back to his Swords Against Evil swashbuckler article, this one is for folks who channel psi powers into physical blades to chop up Elder Things. It has a template, power-ups, and five new Elder Things.
- Hidden Knowledge by Christopher Rice. Spellbooks, developing over-powered hidden spells, and learning a hidden magic system, all for your delvers into forbidden lore.
- Living Rooms by David Pulver. Inside the living dungeon - with a nice mention of Snit's Revenge, which might be the first published game-related living dungeon.
- The Magic Touch, by Matt Riggsby. Eleven new magic items for unarmed martial artists, from bottles you break on your firsts to extending grappling sleeves.
- Dire and Terrible Monsters, by Douglas Cole and me. Terrible & Dire Monsters came out of a joke that Doug and I decided to run with in the face of many groans. It's both totally silly (the Terrible Bunny) and straight-up lethal DF monster enhancements (also see the same Terrible Bunny.)
- Random Thought Table: Complications Made Simple, by Steven Marsh. It's a nice little guide to how to spin up complications in your DF game (or other game) based on what you know or left undefined in the margins, without a lot of work.
I've read about a third of this so far, and skimmed the rest, and I'm enjoying it. The DF articles are always pretty fun. And now is your chance to see what I think a rabbit's stats should be in DF.
Your terrible and dire tags make it easy to engineer Tiny and Sweet in reverse.
ReplyDeleteBut that dire terrible wolverine...
Blame Doug for that. We needed extra wordcount, and it pretty much wrote itself after Doug started on the references.
DeleteBut yes, Tiny and Sweet would be fun, too!
Silly or not, yours is the one I'm likely to get the most use out of.
ReplyDeleteYours is the one I'll get the most use out of.
DeleteBut yeah, ours is really silly - but it's silly centered around a core of "this should be useful." Silly just let us be unreasonably deadly without worrying about stuff like "balance" or "appropriateness" or "piles and piles of dead PCs who don't find this at all funny."
You know, guys, if you keep writing such great articles, the rest of us aren't going to get a chance to get one in. (Though Marsh hasn't responded to any of my query letters in the last 18 months, so it's kind of meaningless here.) Glad to see the Dire Nonsense article published at last so I don't have to hide the draft I have from my players.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteOurs sat in the slushpile so long I wasn't sure what Steven was emailing about until I read the whole message, and when I re-read it I couldn't remember who wrote what. Except the bunny. That was mostly me - Pitiable on a lethal monster is my kind of touch. ;)
Well, I'd at least like an acknowledgement that I even sent a query. I do know your article is about a year old. He must still have a helluva slush pile. I suspect his slush pile is very DF-heavy.
DeleteI almost regret running a DF game, since I prefer to write what is relevant to me. Almost, mind you.
I'm not sure if we ever got one, either. I'd have to look. I have an edge, though, over a lot of people - experience writing for Pyramid and name recognition, so my stuff might go into the slushpile but also be more likely to get pulled out.
DeleteI bought this because it had psionics and Elder Things. I was disappointed by the psionic monsters however. They were not alien of Cthuloid or something from another reality, instead they were just regular animals like scorpoins and tigers with psionics. I would have much preferred a pyro-polyp in place of a pyro-tiger. I will have to read the rest however.
ReplyDeleteNot all Elder things are Cthulhoid - Elder Thing is short form for "psi related" as well as "tentacled horror" in DF.
DeleteOur article is blatantly silly, even compared to stuff like the Abominable Snowman that I did before, so I don't think that's what you are looking for either. Plenty of straight, useful material in the issue, though.
That being said, while our implementations are spectacularly ridiculous, there's nothing silly about a Death Ray, +3d cutting teeth, or "Fezzik, tear his arms off."
DeleteWhich, darn it, would have been a great pull-quote, though the last-minute inspiration on the Transformers movie made it a fight.
The terrible ogre, the dire wombat...the terrible dire elder dragon from hell...
ReplyDeleteThe prefixes fit everything and everyone!
DeleteLevels/adventures taking place inside of giant creatures has always been a favorite theme of mine. I hope I can eventually buy this issue (along with numerous other DF-related PDFs).
ReplyDelete