My son's middle name is Elric

FormCritic wrote:"Whore" is a deliberate corruption of "Houri'...dates back to the crusades.

Does anyone else remember the Houri character class from the pages of White Dwarf magazine?

My ex-DM had a near-fetish for this class and allowed them to be played as player characters (he did this for a lot of the odder NPC classes which appeared in Dragon over the years) which lead to some odd multi-class combinations, like houri/healer, houri/druid, houri/assassin, and in one REALLY creepy case, houri/necromancer...  

Cheers,
JohnH
aka Wandering Monster

IttyBitty had written:

IttyBitty wrote:Yes, but I never knew anyone who ran the class in their campaign.

Well, my former DM did...

In fact, for some time (a long time ago, mind) he ran a D&D campaign out of the library where his mother worked.  He had to do some adjustments when one of the kids, when asked by his mother how the game went, told her, "Well, my character got seduced..."  

Cheers,
JohnH
aka Wandering Monster

Wandering Monster wrote:(he did this for a lot of the odder NPC classes which appeared in Dragon over the years)

Our group allowed this, too. The ones I specifically remember were the Witch and the Bounty Hunter, both from early Dragon issues. We ran them as PCs and never gave it a second thought.

Hi Xaxaxe,

Xaxaxe wrote:Our group allowed this, too. The ones I specifically remember were the Witch and the Bounty Hunter, both from early Dragon issues. We ran them as PCs and never gave it a second thought.

Funnily enough, this same DM allowed the use of the Witch as a player character class quite extensively. (The fact that he was/is a pagan himself probably helped.)  We quite happily used the witch from issue #43 of DRAGON magazine until the revised 2nd Ed version appeared in issue #114.

He was also heavily into psionics, and used the Deryni as a character race (his justification was that some of them had used probability travel to escape persecution in Gweynedd and settled in the World of Greyhawk) and psionicist character class from DRAGON #78 as well.

In fact, I remember playing Charissa (from the first published Deryni book) in his adaptation of "The Garden of Nefaron," which could only be played by evil or neutral characters; he revised her stats from DRAGON #78 so that she was an assassin/psionicist/witch.

Another NPC classes he allowed use of as player characters was the Healer, but with a much-expanded spell list; the incantatrix from DRAGON #90, and the Duelist, but that one was hardly ever used.

Cheers,
JohnH
aka Wandering Monster

We allowed the Archer from Dragon.  

What a disaster that turned out to be.

Form had written:

FormCritic wrote:We allowed the Archer from Dragon.  

What a disaster that turned out to be.

Oh yes?  Do tell...  

Out of curiosity, does anyone else think that these "specialist subclasses" of the "archetype" classes eventually led to the zillions of "kits" available to characters in the various 2nd Ed "Complete [fill in the blank]'s Handbooks"?

Cheers,
JohnH
aka Wandering Monster

The archer had all the abilities of the ranger, plus the ability to feather any creature to death with arrows.  The bonuses added up fast and got quite silly.  Pretty much, if an archer could see you at range you were most likely dead.  God help flying monsters....

We used most of the "unofficial" items in Dragon, including the "NPC" classes published there.

The plethora of house rules and "unofficial" official rules led to the creation of Unearthed Arcana and two of the least logical character classes of all time...the cavalier and the barbarian.

The "kits" in second edition were mostly unuseable except as story hooks.  The quality of second edition publications...with their blue pick-up art and slick-but-dull drawings...was very low.  Most of the splat books for the character classes and special topics (such as castles) left me feeling like I was holding a publication that should be describing Barbie's Magical Dream Date rather than grim, fantasy war.

The Duelist was popular in my campaigns.  We had a number of anti-paladins over the years, but there was no need for a publication about an NPC class in order to create them.

One of the Dragon issues presented rules for paladins for each type of alighnment...but the chaotic neutral paladin was so superior to all of the rest as to make the others pointless.

I would guess that Dragon has to have been the most photocopied magazine of all time.  Although...White Dwarf published enough rules expansions for Warhammer and Warhammer 40K that maybe it rivals Dragon.

Mark  

FormCritic wrote:The archer had all the abilities of the ranger, plus the ability to feather any creature to death with arrows.  The bonuses added up fast and got quite silly.  Pretty much, if an archer could see you at range you were most likely dead.  God help flying monsters....

I guess that's true..but I was pretty strict on bow use in dungeons...ie, they were unusable (that's what crossbows were for).  Maybe this balanced them out? I can't even remmber it's been so long.

We used most of the "unofficial" items in Dragon, including the "NPC" classes published there.

Yep, we did too.

The plethora of house rules and "unofficial" official rules led to the creation of Unearthed Arcana and two of the least logical character classes of all time...the cavalier and the barbarian.

Never used a Cavalier, but had a couple of barbarians here and there.

The "kits" in second edition were mostly unuseable except as story hooks.  The quality of second edition publications...with their blue pick-up art and slick-but-dull drawings...was very low.  Most of the splat books for the character classes and special topics (such as castles) left me feeling like I was holding a publication that should be describing Barbie's Magical Dream Date rather than grim, fantasy war.

Not Gemmel/Cook type fantasy, for sure. I typically took maybe a kit or two from each book and rewrote them to my specifications.  Some books probably got more used than others...Monster Mythology for one, Of Ships and Sea for another.

The Duelist was popular in my campaigns.  We had a number of anti-paladins over the years, but there was no need for a publication about an NPC class in order to create them.

One of the Dragon issues presented rules for paladins for each type of alighnment...but the chaotic neutral paladin was so superior to all of the rest as to make the others pointless.

Never used any paladins, or the duelist. Most of the guys I gamed with loved to just roll up your garden variety dwarf fighter most of the time.

I would guess that Dragon has to have been the most photocopied magazine of all time.  Although...White Dwarf published enough rules expansions for Warhammer and Warhammer 40K that maybe it rivals Dragon.

I remember walking into the local copy place sometime in the early 80's with my stack of Dragon mags....with all the cool articles/monsters/magic items/adventures bookmarked. I think I ran about $40 worth of copies, and it was on that really crap mimeographed type paper at that.  But certainly Dragon magazine was one incredible gaming resource back in the day....

Mike B.