Joshua Randall's page

Oh, my. Chris West, you've outdone yourself with Lands of Mystery.

You realize, of course, that I'm going to have to start a new campaign just to use your map? It's simply outstanding.

Seems like most of the time the posts on these boards are complaining about something. I'll buck the trend and say that Dragon issue # 338 / Dec 2005 is great.

I liked how all of the articles were tied into a unifying theme (Expanding the Magic of D&D). I especially liked that the Ecology of the Spellweaver tied into the Bazaar of the Bizarre article about a spellweaver spellbook.

As a side note, the Ecology of the Spellweaver is the second Ecology article in recent memory -- the other one being on the Shadar-Kai -- that has taken a seemingly lame monster and made it cool. Now I want to see an adventure featuring spellweavers and shadar-kai. :-)

Finally, kudos to Paizo on snagging Order of the Stick as one of its comics. Like a lot of other people, I've been reading OotS online for a while. But not everyone does that, so getting OotS in a print magazine is a win-win.

Looking forward to more great Dragon issues!

So I read Cities of the Realms, Ed Greenwood's new column in Dragon. And my initial thought is, "Woah. Do we really need a chart of twenty different penalties for breaking the law?"

My more considered thoughts are as follows:

1. The font used in the footnotes is waaaaaaay too small. Also, there is no good reason this information is footnoted instead of integrated into the article itself.

2. The extreme level of detail is overkill. To paraphrase a really old review from the pages of Dragon, what you want is not completeness, but the illusion of completeness.

3. The extreme level of detail crowds out other, more important, information. For example, we get tons of detail on the various taverns and inns, but little detail on the personalities, motivations, and plans of the city's notable NPCs.

(As DM, which are you more likely to need know when your PCs visit a city: stuff about the NPCs they might interact with, or stuff about exactly what foods and wines are served in the taverns?)

4. The ghostly lady who possesses people to make them search for her long lost lover is a neat idea, but making up a new rule to implement this is not good. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. We have at least two existing rules for possession: the ghost rules from Monster Manual (core), and the demonic possession rules from Book of Vile Darkness (non-core). There is no good reason for this article to invent its own rule.

I'd like to hear others' thoughts on this article.