Sea Trade from Dragon #6

This is the sea trade system from Dragon #6 Ωmega mentioned in my previous post.  I've read it before, but, looking back, I have to say I'm impressed. The whole thing fit on one page, was clean, and easy to understand. Kudos to Ronald C. Spencer, Jr.  It feels very DIY OSR to me.  

I've reformatted the data here for scholarly purposes. I changed "Ports Skipped" to "Port Distance" (it just makes more sense to me, unless there's some kind of race for time related to profiting).  I've also tabulated the returns and odds in a second chart. As you can see the sting of failure is ameliorated by including the brutal chance of ship loss with just getting poor returns on your cargo.  The biggest risk giving a 35% for the former, 25% for the latter. But if you take that risk, you have a 5% chance of getting one of those dreamed of 500% returns on your investment.

I don't think I would use this as is.  The minimalist in me wants to at least cut it down to short, medium, and long hauls.  But it's cool to see what they thought the probabilities should be.  If you can get a hold of a copy, the system also includes simple rules for pilot fees, time spent, and import taxes.  Cool stuff.

Blueprint for a Lich

Recently James at the Underdark Gazette posted about Ed Greenwood's great articles on adventuring in Hell.  I love that illustration that begins that first article, but I never read them.  Because of that picture and the Paladin in Hell illustration in the PHB I had a craving for some adventure down below, so I had an arrangement with my DM not to read about Hell and learn all its secrets.

But it was just something James mentioned that sparked this post.  Speculating on why these great articles weren't included in the Best of the Dragon compilations:

"I can only suppose that the TSR policy of appeasing the Satanic Panic crowd, kept them from including the articles in one of their Best of compilations."

It's a good theory considering the times, but my mind immediately jumped to my favorite magazine Dragon ever put out: Best of Dragon Vol. II.  That was chock full of awesome possibilities as well as lots for evangelists to abhor.  There was the Antipaladin for one, the section on poisons, and actually an article on the politics of Hell by Alexander von Thorn.

But what I want to focus on was related to another thing I always wanted to achieve in D&D, and like venturing into Hell, never managed to do-- becoming a lich.

To cut to the chase, there was a little comic that ran under several articles depicting a mage in the process of becoming a lich.  It was drawn by Timothy Truman.  And the beauty of the design was the layout that had it running under relevant articles.  Two pages into an article about vampires, the strip starts with a mage entering the lair of a vampire (pg 57).  Then two pages later, under a different article about vampires we see the mage defeating the vampire.  Two pages later, under a page about lycanthropy, we see our hero killing two werewolves.  And finally, two pages later we're at the article on becoming a lich called Blueprint for a lich and our hero nestles into a coffin of his own.

I thought about presenting the comics here for you, but the beauty of it was how they went so perfectly with the reprinted articles.  Putting them in sequence won't recreate what I experienced first seeing them.  All I can recommend is that if you see it, snap it up.

I don't know who made the design decision to run the strip under the articles the way they did, but I'm thankful to whoever it was.  The credits at the front of the magazine list:

Edited by Kim Mohan

Design by Bryce Knorr

Production by Marilyn Mays & Gali Sanchez

It seems a shame, after all, to talk about this without you seeing any of it so here is the first section as a teaser: