Sword of Cyric's page

Gorellik looks like an impossibly large hyena with jaws giving the impression they could bite through almost anything.

His eyes show a strange mix of power, cunning, madness and despair and all in all he looks like he has seen better days. His fur is dirty, shaggy and has fallen off in many places. None of this has any impact on his statistics or combat ability as written, but anyone looking at him gets the impression that this mighty entity has been in decline for quite some time.

Gorellik is initially hostile to anyone and attacks on sight to feed. If approached while just on the way to once again drink from the river styx to get short oblivion from his missery he's especially aggressive.

After he had his drink of styx water however he becomes indifferent for some time and can be reasoned with. At this point the PCs have their only real chance to recruit him for their assault on Demogorgon.

If Gorellik agress to partake, he sends and gnoll petitioner to attempt the final strategy meeting. If the PCs are ever present during a time when Orcus and Gorellik meet, the can note the strange desire that creeps into Orcus' face whenever he looks at the divine entity (a DC 35 sense motive check reveals how much Orcus hungers for divinity of his own)

How is it that setting specific content is perceived as any less usefull to people not using this setting than generic content? Fine, people may not play this specific setting, but nobody plays the generic setting either. In both cases people need to change a name here and a reference there to bring it into their own campaigns.

So why do people think it is any more difficult to change the names from the Waterdeep article from issue 336 to fit into their world than to change the names from the Balefire article from issue 322 to fit into their campaign?

Both are cities from outside their own campaigns, and both require exactly the same effort to include into their own campaigns. Both are equally usefull to the general public, but one also has an increased value for the people who actually play FR (without becoming any less valuable for the people who don't)

So this reader is complaining that FR issue was less usefull to him than an issue with only generic stuff.

But I ask myself: If the very same issue with the very same content had been printed with the only difference of renaming anything that might give away the connection to the FR in the Songsabers and Waterdeep articles, would he have noticed at all that these are not generic articles but actually setting specific stuff?

I don't get it. Why is it considered more difficult to have to change the name of Khelben into something that fits my campaign better than to have to change the name Acora-Shin?

PS: Note that this is not intended to go against this particular reader in any way, I want to question the general idea that setting specific stuff is less usefull to the readers as a whole than completly unrelated stuff.

Just a short question about one of it's class abilities:

Silently Enthralling Laugh, you may cast silent versions of you spell-like ability?

Aren't all (Sp) always silent anyway? So why this ability?