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The Good:

-Reminding players to think outside the box is a good thing. I like the concept of this article.

-Some of these are quite creative and interesting approaches, allowing for interesting story development.

The Bad:

Ok, let's start with the core problems with the article itself - too open-ended, not enough guidance.

-Number one, you absolutely need to have a much bigger "AT DM DISCRETION" tag on this article. As others have noted, otherwise we'll have people trying this stuff out in LFR and elsewhere with the absolute expectation that they can do any or all of this, cause its "in the rules".

-Number two, I dislike how little guidance is given on what characters some of these punishments are appropriate for. You don't need to put in absolute requirements... but maybe just have some of these tagged as 'Paragon' or 'Epic' punishments, so every 1st level wizard doesn't think they can permanently polymorph defeated foes into their pet mice? Sure, a DM can let that happen if they want to - but again, these article is positively irresponsible in how it sets up player's expectations to be shattered. Add some tier suggestions, maybe tag some of them as appropriate for arcane/primal casters, etc - some of that is covered in the flavor text, but not enough.

-Number three, some of these results are way too rigid in the text. The author here is doing too much of sharing his own stories, and not giving enough room for players and DMs to invent their own. Somewhat ironic in such an imagination-driven article. Again, you're setting up players for disappointment - let's take the blindness condition. That's a powerful and potent fate to place upon someone. And when the DM sees a good opportunity for the blind villain to still work at schemes behind the scenes, the player will be pissed, pointing to this article and how it claims "He lives out the rest of his days sightlessly, begging at street corners and eating filth to survive."

Give suggestions, not absolutes. Suggest possible outcomes of such fates and story paths for the DM to take with it. Putting in these absolutes, especially ones so extreme, is going to leave many players frustrated with the disconnect between how this article portrays things, and how their DM actually handles things.

The Ugly

-Hey, look, another article without any mechanical player content. There seems some confusion over whether this is Dungeon or Dragon, so I'll give it a bit of a pass... but it also seems aimed mroe at players than DMs, so it seems to have been designed as a Dragon article, and that's rather frustrating. Look, having a couple articles each month focused at pure fluff or gaming advice is all well and good. Having an entire month of such articles is really not cool. And, honestly, if this was actually written as a DM article instead of a player article, I think that would have helped avoid most of the basic problems above.

-Torture. Some of these are truly disturbing fates. I don't get easily discomforted, but reading this articles was a genuinely unpleasant experience at times. Now, that's fair, and there is room for games that allow these sorts of things - but, again, give some guidance! Some of these should be noted as evil acts, or at least some hint given to players that arranging the eternal torture of someone is not a good act. And the description and themes behind some of these, such as Blindness, Crippled, Isolated, Malicious Polymorph... I can see these stirring up all the wrong sorts of ideas in some player's minds. It can be ok in some campaigns, but tossing this out willy-nilly is, again, completely irresponsible of the author and Dragon magazine.

What is this complete crap? What happened to Totems of the Far Realm - which was supposed to be delayed until midday and is now completely gone from the calendar. This article was not interesting, worthwhile or offered something that should be in Dragon whatsoever. It's also yet another completely devoid of content/crunch article.

This is a new low, even by Dragon's standards.