(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 97/156: Mar/Apr 2003
part 10/10
Campaigns: After the rules stuff has been laser-focussed on creating a specific mood, the campaign advice is surprisingly broad and shallow, giving us lots of different ideas in relatively little detail. There’s the basic grunt campaign, where you follow orders and life is cheap, but many players may chafe at that kind of treatment. There’s the special ops game, which the players may graduate to naturally anyway if they survive a while and gain levels. If you want a little more freedom, albeit at the cost of fewer resources you can play a resistance fighter behind enemy lines, hiding up in the hills as guerrilla partisans or engaging in subtle sabotage and smuggling while keeping up the day job in occupied territory. If you want things to be even more desperate than normal, you can play a penal battalion, taken out from your sentence, given crap equipment and sent on suicide missions. If you can survive a few of these you might get a bit more freedom and respect, but don’t count on it. An even further step is playing in a Kampfgruppe, the increasingly ad hoc battalions put together by Germany as they ran out of resources and lost territory near the end of the war. Will you engage to the kind of atrocities they did in real life, knowing that it’s all meaningless and imaginary in the end so why not go wild? Whatever kind of campaign structure you choose, you’ll still probably find yourself doing the same basic classes of missions. Patrols, assaults, rescues, sieges, establishing bridgeholds. Whichever side you’re on, you’ll also probably find it best to create multiple characters and rotate them out when they get injured so they can heal in a realistic timeframe, rather than getting attached to one and pressing on with them until they die. All in all, it’s pretty solid advice, giving you plenty of options and making it clear how you carry them out. I can definitely return a positive verdict overall on this particular minigame.
Having spent much of the issue in WWII, Godlike goes back a little further to talk about the first publicly known superhuman. Der Flieger unsurprisingly had the power of flight, and made a spectacular introduction to the world by lighting the 1936 olympic torch. What he later did in the war is not disclosed here, but as a symbol, he will forever be important in their alternate history.
They may have dropped some big announcements in here, but the adventures themselves are mostly just business as usual, with even the start of the adventure path not feeling that different from any old regular adventure so far. All quite usable, but nothing particularly surprising. Time to see if the increased amount of content once they go monthly will let them release more quirky and experimental things and cater to an even wider audience, or merely more of the same, but with a lower average level of quality.
part 10/10
Campaigns: After the rules stuff has been laser-focussed on creating a specific mood, the campaign advice is surprisingly broad and shallow, giving us lots of different ideas in relatively little detail. There’s the basic grunt campaign, where you follow orders and life is cheap, but many players may chafe at that kind of treatment. There’s the special ops game, which the players may graduate to naturally anyway if they survive a while and gain levels. If you want a little more freedom, albeit at the cost of fewer resources you can play a resistance fighter behind enemy lines, hiding up in the hills as guerrilla partisans or engaging in subtle sabotage and smuggling while keeping up the day job in occupied territory. If you want things to be even more desperate than normal, you can play a penal battalion, taken out from your sentence, given crap equipment and sent on suicide missions. If you can survive a few of these you might get a bit more freedom and respect, but don’t count on it. An even further step is playing in a Kampfgruppe, the increasingly ad hoc battalions put together by Germany as they ran out of resources and lost territory near the end of the war. Will you engage to the kind of atrocities they did in real life, knowing that it’s all meaningless and imaginary in the end so why not go wild? Whatever kind of campaign structure you choose, you’ll still probably find yourself doing the same basic classes of missions. Patrols, assaults, rescues, sieges, establishing bridgeholds. Whichever side you’re on, you’ll also probably find it best to create multiple characters and rotate them out when they get injured so they can heal in a realistic timeframe, rather than getting attached to one and pressing on with them until they die. All in all, it’s pretty solid advice, giving you plenty of options and making it clear how you carry them out. I can definitely return a positive verdict overall on this particular minigame.
Having spent much of the issue in WWII, Godlike goes back a little further to talk about the first publicly known superhuman. Der Flieger unsurprisingly had the power of flight, and made a spectacular introduction to the world by lighting the 1936 olympic torch. What he later did in the war is not disclosed here, but as a symbol, he will forever be important in their alternate history.
They may have dropped some big announcements in here, but the adventures themselves are mostly just business as usual, with even the start of the adventure path not feeling that different from any old regular adventure so far. All quite usable, but nothing particularly surprising. Time to see if the increased amount of content once they go monthly will let them release more quirky and experimental things and cater to an even wider audience, or merely more of the same, but with a lower average level of quality.
