(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon/Polyhedron 94/153: Sep/Oct 2002
part 1/10
135 (160) pages. Not often that you see a Mind Flayer get buff and shirtless, as they’re normally the sort to make others do all the physical labor. But it’s often more fun to subvert stereotypes than stick to them rigidly and with the number of adventures they have to publish every year, it’s important to mix things up for their own sakes as much as ours. Time to see how good and varied another harvest of autumnal adventures will be.
Editorial: They thought they could increase their size without raising their price and still keep production costs down. They were wrong! So the editorial is apologising for and justifying the sudden leap from $5.99 to $7.99. Even with the increase, you’re still getting more pages per dollar than a couple of years ago, and at higher production values as well. And compared to the cost of standalone d20 adventures they come out way ahead. Some people may still be annoyed after this, but good luck finding a better deal. (apart from on the high seas, of course, which doesn’t count) A mildly irritating start, particularly knowing that they’ll go monthly in less than a year and I very much doubt the price will go down again when the page count does. Years may come and go, but capitalism never ceases to irritate.
Letters: First letter is a lengthy one in praise of monster tokens, with further ideas on how they could be improved. They do seem like they could run for a while longer before hitting diminishing returns and they have to hunt for the next gimmick.
Second letter is generally complimentary about issue 93, with some caveats. But even if not all the adventures are useful to him now, maybe they will be in the future.
Third criticises The Storm Lord’s Keep for giving the giants treasure way in excess of the recommended guidelines for character level. How did they afford that?! At epic level, those rules increasingly become more rule-of thumb. And besides, it’ll be pretty tricky for the players to use or sell giant-sized magic weapons & armor so it’s not going to be breaking the economy in their homelands.
Fourth criticizes The Storm Lord’s Keep for being much easier to solve if you think to use magical divination on the fugitive adventurer. That’s a feature, not a bug. At that level, the PC’s should have the resources to get the good ending, but it’s surprising how many won’t think to use them in the right time & way.
Fifth is a joke letter anticipating the predictable criticisms of the Polyhedron minigames, particularly ones converted from older editions. Just cut and paste, fill in the blanks to your taste. Thankfully they haven’t actually been getting that many of them. Still, Gamma World definitely has fans with particular and sometimes contradicting ideas about how the game should be, so it’s quite possible there will be next time.
part 1/10
135 (160) pages. Not often that you see a Mind Flayer get buff and shirtless, as they’re normally the sort to make others do all the physical labor. But it’s often more fun to subvert stereotypes than stick to them rigidly and with the number of adventures they have to publish every year, it’s important to mix things up for their own sakes as much as ours. Time to see how good and varied another harvest of autumnal adventures will be.
Editorial: They thought they could increase their size without raising their price and still keep production costs down. They were wrong! So the editorial is apologising for and justifying the sudden leap from $5.99 to $7.99. Even with the increase, you’re still getting more pages per dollar than a couple of years ago, and at higher production values as well. And compared to the cost of standalone d20 adventures they come out way ahead. Some people may still be annoyed after this, but good luck finding a better deal. (apart from on the high seas, of course, which doesn’t count) A mildly irritating start, particularly knowing that they’ll go monthly in less than a year and I very much doubt the price will go down again when the page count does. Years may come and go, but capitalism never ceases to irritate.
Letters: First letter is a lengthy one in praise of monster tokens, with further ideas on how they could be improved. They do seem like they could run for a while longer before hitting diminishing returns and they have to hunt for the next gimmick.
Second letter is generally complimentary about issue 93, with some caveats. But even if not all the adventures are useful to him now, maybe they will be in the future.
Third criticises The Storm Lord’s Keep for giving the giants treasure way in excess of the recommended guidelines for character level. How did they afford that?! At epic level, those rules increasingly become more rule-of thumb. And besides, it’ll be pretty tricky for the players to use or sell giant-sized magic weapons & armor so it’s not going to be breaking the economy in their homelands.
Fourth criticizes The Storm Lord’s Keep for being much easier to solve if you think to use magical divination on the fugitive adventurer. That’s a feature, not a bug. At that level, the PC’s should have the resources to get the good ending, but it’s surprising how many won’t think to use them in the right time & way.
Fifth is a joke letter anticipating the predictable criticisms of the Polyhedron minigames, particularly ones converted from older editions. Just cut and paste, fill in the blanks to your taste. Thankfully they haven’t actually been getting that many of them. Still, Gamma World definitely has fans with particular and sometimes contradicting ideas about how the game should be, so it’s quite possible there will be next time.