"Go to the sign of Marvel's Axe, a dubious inn on the edge of the Thieves Quarter, in the City of Greyhawk, and look to your own wrist. If you perceive a bracelet and dangling dice, watch for the next throw in the war between Law and Chaos and be prepared to follow the compelling geas." -Signal

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Atlas of the DragonLance World, Cassandra's Mystical Spy

Love it or hate it if you are a gamer there is a real good chance that you have something DragonLance related in your collection. It has to be the most marketed campaign setting in the history of role playing. I for one am not ill disposed to the setting or the game material but it was sort of the Joshua Tree of D&D....a good product that took something mainstream and it was never the same afterward.

The Atlas of the DragonLance world was released in 1987 making it the first of the Atlas products connected with gaming. The Pern and Middle Earth books beat this but they were not directly tied to a gaming world at the time they were published. Actually I am not sure if there is a Pern role playing game out there. I can't imagine GURPS has not done it.

As I said previously with the Forgotten Realms Atlas the maps in this book are nothing short of amazing.Decipher released some maps of Middle Earth that are more display friendly but the maps in this book could still be hung if someone was into maps. In addition tot he maps there is wealth of material for the DragonLance fan to read on notable location on Krynn. Below is just a partial list of the locations contained in the book.

- Inn of the Last Home
- Towers of High Sorcery
- Tika's house
- Thorbardin
- Ice Wall
- Silvanost
- Istar
- Mount Nevermind
- Sanction
- Neraka
- The Abyss
- Dragon Mountain
- Foghaven Vale
- Solace
- Pax Tharkas
- Tarsis

The Atlas can be picked up cheap either on eBay or on Amazon (where I stole the list above from) so price should not be an issue. Again it comes down to some people just not liking DragonLance either on principle or the setting itself. If you feel you need something DragonLance in the collection you could do much worse than this.


Spell:

Cassandra's Mystical Spy


Level: Fifth
Range: None
Duration: Special
Ares Effect: One Location
Components: V,S,M
Casting Time: 2 Segments
Saving Throw: None

This spell allows the caster to have an invisible spy deployed at a single location waiting to be activated. The spy will be undetectable except for those that can see creatures that exist in the Astral Plane. If visible the spy will appear as a shifting blob of energy with no consistent form.

The spell must be cast in the location that the spy is intended to monitor. The spy will be located exactly where the spell is cast. Once cast the spy will remain vigilant for a number of days equal to the caster level. They will remain at the location until a specified time or event occurs.

When the trigger event occurs the spy will begin "recording" all that goes on at the location they are posted. They will be able to see and hear all that a person in the location could. The area of effect that they can cover is one single room up to 100' x 100' in size. The spy will record all that goes on in the room for a period of time equal to two rounds per level of the caster.

One the duration of the spell expires the events that the spy recorded will be planted in the mind of the caster. They will be able to see and hear the events recorded just as if they were there. The will not know anything more than what could have been seen or heard though. The spy's position will have been stationary so seeing written words and such will be dependent on where the spell was cast.

The material component of this spell will be a gem whose value is equal to 50gp per day the spy had to remain resident at the location. The gem must be present on the caster when the spell is cast but need not be so when the spell expires.

Disclaimer: The spells that you will see, for how ever long the write ups last, were all written up or conceived of back in the 80's so the terminology may not appropriate for anything other than 1e and depending on how well I did back then it may be slightly off for that as well. If there is any duplication of spells that exist now it is most likely I wrote mine first :) Please feel free to comment on them but try not to be too hard on me. If anyone wishes to use these in anything they print please let me know in advance and all I ask is proper credit.

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