TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

The Raven's Buff Trumpeter 2-9: September 1998



11 pages. The demonic attacks and weird magical storms hold off this month, letting the elections take place uninterrupted. Lord Silverfox won the deputy mayor position, while Lady Anna Kara Des Solara got the Speaker position in the House of Lords. This did not come without some controversy though, as the race was close, and there are accusations that some of the candidates engaged in various shenanigans to buy more votes. This probably won't get the final results overturned, but if they can put in stronger anti-corruption measures for next time, that'd be good.

The two newer plotlines continue to develop though. The big underdark expedition to find something to deal with the heart of bane is now fully underway, a complex undertaking with plenty of attention to supply chain and setting up base camps along the way. Nice to see them doing some old school logistics where you have to really think about encumbrance. Meanwhile The Checkmate makes it clear that if the temples don't follow the cryptic commands he gives them they will rapidly cease to be temples. Just how morally compromising those demands will be and if they'll go through with them remains to be seen.

Plus in an issue this size, there's room for several smaller stories as well. We get a letter from a wizard who really hates disenchanters and the bleeding heart liberals that protect them, and is willing to put his offensive spells where his mouth is to exterminate them wherever possible. The Golden Shield Trading Company is sold from one group of adventurers to another, who hope they can expand it further. The Temple of Lathander once again suffers construction delays due to the perfectionism of the guy in charge. Let's hope they don't run out of budget and leave it half-finished for years. One recent adventure obviously involved mischievous polymorphing, as Lord Darkarrow was temporarily stuck with bright red skin and a horse's tail. High position won't protect you from goofy happenings, particularly not if Elminster has any say in events, as the bigger the ego, the more fun it is to puncture.



Rogue's Gallery is very busy indeed this month, detailing three more high level characters that are worth noting.

Alexander Theodore Vuchovich is a sinister looking figure, hairless, scarred and with vampire fangs from his various misadventures. He spent his early years as a mercenary, before being killed by a black dragon. Fortunately, his adventuring companions had saved up enough to have him resurrected. This rebirth led him to be more spiritual, joining the church of Lathander and the Order of the Phoenix. At 11th level, he's not far from the retirement cap, so he's mostly settled down, raising horses on his lands for the next generation of adventurers, smoking cigars and training his ward, which I'm sure is another interesting story of how they lost their parents and ended up in his care. Playing the 60's batman theme when he turns up at the table seems an entirely appropriate response.

Kalib Goldweaver is a dwarf, as you'd probably guess from the name. However, unlike most dwarves, he's also a highly skilled sailor, having spent many years working as a cabin boy and not being taken seriously before coming to Raven's Bluff. He braids a bead into his beard for every life he takes, which as he's made it to 10th level in two classes is probably a pretty extensive collection by now, giving him a suitably intimidating piratical style. His unusual skillset gives him a useful perspective as advisor to the new dwarven king. Just because you live underground, doesn't mean you don't have to worry about water, there are whole seas down there filled with Aboleth, Kuo-Toa and stranger things, so you might as well overcome your fears and learn how to navigate them.

Lord Alexi Sharpeye was once just an ordinary farm boy who set out to adventure and found himself in Raven's Bluff. He had a particularly harrowing time over the course of the recent war, being aged up to his late 40's by ghosts, which caused him to turn to drink to cope with all the trauma and sudden aches & pains, before clawing his way back to something like his chronological age with a few potions of longevity in subsequent adventures and winning his current title. Let's hope he has a few more epic adventures in him before being forced to retire due to OOC level limits rather than whatever age he happens to be at the time.



There's no systems Q&A this time, but there are a whole bunch of OOC clarifications about recent events. They still want to encourage more interactives, so they spend a couple of pages on the procedures for booking one, with particular emphasis on on ones involving the wizard's guild, how you join, what it costs and what benefits you can gain for doing so. Another area where PC's can take on official positions if they're high enough level and willing to do some volunteer admin work for the RPGA. They also once again have to deal with people losing or misusing item certificates, or having unrealistic ideas of how far you can stretch their powers. If they find them in the hands of characters who haven't legitimately gone through the adventure that item appears in there'll be hell to pay. Goes to show how many magic items in the Living Campaigns do only appear in one adventure, so you can only have them if you were active at quite specific times and places that were running those adventures in the real world. You have to work pretty hard to powergame the best combos of stuff around here.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 70: Sep/Oct 1998



part 1/5



89 pages. Sometimes you’ve got to make a little sacrifice to get what you want. But if you can sacrifice someone else instead, it’s often win-win, particularly if you didn’t like them anyway. But that’s not very heroic thinking. Let’s find out just what kind of ceremony your adventurers will be interrupting this time, and if you can turn that very large and stylish thurible to more virtuous purposes, or it’s powers are inherently harmful and corruptive.



Editorial: Every editor tells us about their first time gaming at some point, except for the ones that only stick around for a few months and don't really get to make their mark. Chris is no exception. Starting with the Holmes basic set in 1977 playing with his next-door neighbour, he soon graduated to AD&D in a piecemeal fashion, picking up the advanced monsters and using them against his basic characters. Sure it wasn't sticking strictly to the rules as written, but they were so vague back then that that wasn't really possible anyway. Since then, it's been a never-ending voyage of discovery, because the great thing about RPG's is not only the plethora of lore and optional rules, but the freedom to add to them yourself. As long as you have a little creativity left in you, they never get stale. And hey, even if you do run out, just introduce someone else new to the game, get some fresh perspective from them. Which leads neatly into promoting their new fast-play booklet. D&D is currently in a bit of a precarious position, what with the whole company collapsing & being bought out thing, and they need more players, so get out there and make some more first time's. Best story gets a year's free subscription! Well, they can't offer anything too expensive and hopefully the new players'll make it up by becoming buyers as well. Another little example of WotC's increasing promotional aggressiveness. There'll be a lot of that in the next few years.



Letters: First letter is a recent joinee who praises their Ravenloft and non D&D adventures. They might not get the chance to play them, but it’s still good to try and expand people’s horizons.

Second is predictably the exact opposite, an old-timer who remembers the last time they tried non D&D adventures and hated it then as well. Get these wastes of space outta my magazine or I’ll cancel my subscription!

Third pointedly avoids giving their opinion on Alternity, instead praising By Merklan's Magic, Stepping Stones, and the whole Maps of Mystery idea. When it's impossible to use everything, it's more helpful to accentuate the positives.

Fourth wants them to do more stuff in unusual settings, praising the whimsy of Spelljammer and Old Man Katan. There'll always be another dungeon crawl, but if you do something unique, people'll remember it for years to come.

Fifth fittingly praises their Fifth Age material, and hopes they'll do more. Don't expect them too frequently though, as despite a few strong proponents, survey results show that the majority of readers still want to keep things all AD&D in here even if they do play other RPG's as well. Eventually, they'll give into those demands entirely.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 70: Sep/Oct 1998



part 2/5



Homonculous Stew: Another issue, another wizard who's got himself in a bit of a pickle. Milo, the Wizard of the Woods sent his homunculus to grab some ogre hair to make a potion of ogre strength with. Unfortunately for him, the ogre turned out to be smarter than expected and captured the homunculus before sending some goblins to make ransom demands. Milo was in no mood to negotiate and responds with his most explosive alchemical ingredients to hand. This attracts attention as the PC's pass by. Now he'll want your moral support going to the ogre's lair and getting his bonded servant back before the ogre loses patience and has it for dinner, inflicting a load of damage on him in the process. Maybe you'll be a little more willing to negotiate with him fairly instead of just trying to take his hair, which would just grow back anyway. The kind of very 2eish little adventure that's all about encouraging the roleplaying, reminding us that the humans aren't always the nicest and the nonhumans aren't all irredeemable monsters so maybe you should judge them more on their actions and figure out solutions with talking rather than violence. Sure you won't succeed every time, but if you want that Good alignment on your character sheet to have any meaning beyond colours on a cosmic team you ought to try. Perfectly serviceable middle of the road little adventure quality-wise.



The Maze of the Morkoth: They’ve already stepped up the amount of continuity in here. Now WotC up things another notch compared to the TSR years by putting regular co-ordinated tie-ins between Dungeon & Dragon. Issue 250 included PC stats for a whole load of underwater races. Here we have an underwater adventure including pregens using the same rules, although obviously you could use a regular group of PC’s with water breathing abilities too. A powerful psionicist tried to steal a morkoth's magic resistance, as he'd read about them and hoped that would make him even more of an out of context problem to regular spellcasters. This kinda worked, but also drove him insane and pissed off the morkoth. It's now sending it's minions into the undersea world to find out who had the temerity to mess with it's mind. One notable victim of this investigation is the prince of the nearby aquatic elves, which is probably how the PC's will become involved in this. Do you go straight to the Morkoth's lair to kill it & rescue it's victims or do you listen to it's side of the story and investigate the nearby city for the thief. Either way, you'd better have something that helps you resist mind-affecting powers if you want to get through this one alive, because both adversaries are heavy on those on top of the inconvenient magic reflection. As this combines undersea adventuring with psionics, referencing multiple supplements in the process, it's definitely on the more niche end of adventures in here, showing once again that WotC are more willing to aim their adventures at the hardcore readers who really need the novelty to stay interested. Since that includes me, this adventure gets my approval. Hopefully it'll still be a few more years before the desire to tie everything together and cross-promote becomes too obtrusive and corporate-driven, losing it's freshness.

 

[KoolMoDaddy-O]

I registered with ENWorld just to reply to this thread.

I greatly enjoy your reviews of Dungeon and I've been eagerly anticipating your thoughts about my own contributions, which include "The Baron's Eyrie" in issue 58, "The Unkindness of Ravens" in issue 65, and my final -- and favorite -- adventure, "Slave Vats of the Yuan-ti" in issue 69.

This morning I was enjoying your review of "Slave Vats" until I reached this part:

the worldbuilding parts of the adventure are well above average, as is the use of nonstandard monsters with templates and class levels to keep the challenges interesting. Even though Chris is only editing rather than writing it still shows his hallmarks in monster design, much of which will become common practice next edition.

I think you misunderstand how The Mere of Dead Men series was created. Chris Perkins approached a group of regular contributors to the magazine (a questionable title in my regard, as I had only contributed two previous adventures) to create a series of linked adventures. We were given some information about the meta-narrative's overall framing and assigned locales (in my case, Wolfhill House, which was just a name on a map), and because my other two were low-level affairs, I was assigned the first adventure designed for levels 3-5. Beyond that, we writers were given free rein for the plot and content of our individual adventures. The published version of "Slave Vats" was almost verbatim what I submitted, with a standardized introduction to the series bolted on the front (IIRC each adventure in the series had the same standard intro).

So when you mention the nonstandard monsters (megalomen) with different templates (first generation, second generation, etc.) as a hallmark of Perkins' design, I have to tell you that wasn't Perkins -- that was me. The megalomen and other named villains in the adventure were conceived and designed by me. The world building was me. The story of Wolfhill House, its curse, the design of the house -- one-hundred percent me.

It is a point of pride for me that I wrote the first adventure in Dungeon's very first adventure path and I will always be thankful to Chris Perkins for that opportunity. But just understand that I wrote that adventure, not Perkins, and his editorial hand was light. He may have designed the framing narrative and used similar ideas elsewhere but -- good or bad, whether you love it or hate it -- I must insist on proper attribution for my writing and my creations.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 70: Sep/Oct 1998



part 3/5



Side Treks - Boulder Dash: One of those pun titles that encapsulates the adventure perfectly. The PC's are walking along an elevated ravine walkway when a bunch of stone giants decide to use them as target practice. They need to either make a hasty exit from the whole area or figure out how to get down safely to fight the giants, for standing still and exchanging shots will probably get the walkway smashed and you dropped in the water. They've already smashed some parts of it anyway, so you'll get to put your climbing & jumping proficiencies to good use in the ensuing action scene. All very Indiana Jones in feel, which is a good thing in my book. Encouraging battles that are more mobile instead of just hacking until one side runs out of hit points is an idea I approve of, even if the D&D rules aren't the best system to run them under. Hopefully you can figure out how to run it as fast and frantically OOC as it's supposed to be IC.



Maps of Mystery steps out from the dungeon to give us some coastal borderlands between lots of little countries. What adventures are to be had wandering between the Nation of Anok, the goblin bandits of the badlands, the Old Kingdoms, Bret Minor and the Sea Duchy of Lionwalk? Have fun taking the tiny linguistic hints of what each of these countries are supposed to be based on and extrapolating outwards, and also deciding on the scale, as a precise one isn’t given, so you can slot it into your own world.



Ssscaly Thingsss: Part two of the adventure path continues to use the swamp environment and reptilian adversaries, but puts even more moral complexity into the situation. The PC's are sent to deal with a particularly aggressive tribe of lizard men that have been attacking people on the High Road. They do have good reason though. Another recent band of adventurers stole some of their eggs in an attempt to blackmail them. This just made them angrier and now they're besieged in one of the little forts found on the solid bits of ground around here. Which side of the story you get first will depend heavily on your actions. If you try to fight your way through all the lizard men at once, there'll be too many of them, you'll be captured, then given an opportunity to escape with new information that'll hopefully change your course of action. If you sneak or run, you'll probably wind up heading for the only obvious landmark and being trapped in the fort with the adventurers, who turn out to be not very nice people in spoileriffic ways. So there is a "best" solution to this that'll earn you the most story XP - siding with the lizard men against the adventurers and then using the goodwill you gain from that to negotiate a peace with them afterwards, but the adventure is intentionally designed so you could side with either side and complete your assigned mission while finding out a varying number of the secrets involved without it affecting the other parts of the adventure path. (although one specific magic item is noted as making a later adventure in the series much easier if they do well and find it here.) Once again they're carefully threading the path between giving an adventure an interesting default story, but also enough leeway that the adventure path as a whole doesn't break if the players pick a different option and making it functional standalone but also adding up to something greater with the other parts. Once again this is a cut about the average adventure in the care and attention to detail put into the mechanical design as well. This experiment continues to be a success and I hope it can continue to build through further instalments and stick the landing.

 

[(un)reason]

I registered with ENWorld just to reply to this thread.

I greatly enjoy your reviews of Dungeon and I've been eagerly anticipating your thoughts about my own contributions, which include "The Baron's Eyrie" in issue 58, "The Unkindness of Ravens" in issue 65, and my final -- and favorite -- adventure, "Slave Vats of the Yuan-ti" in issue 69.

This morning I was enjoying your review of "Slave Vats" until I reached this part:



I think you misunderstand how The Mere of Dead Men series was created. Chris Perkins approached a group of regular contributors to the magazine (a questionable title in my regard, as I had only contributed two previous adventures) to create a series of linked adventures. We were given some information about the meta-narrative's overall framing and assigned locales (in my case, Wolfhill House, which was just a name on a map), and because my other two were low-level affairs, I was assigned the first adventure designed for levels 3-5. Beyond that, we writers were given free rein for the plot and content of our individual adventures. The published version of "Slave Vats" was almost verbatim what I submitted, with a standardized introduction to the series bolted on the front (IIRC each adventure in the series had the same standard intro).

So when you mention the nonstandard monsters (megalomen) with different templates (first generation, second generation, etc.) as a hallmark of Perkins' design, I have to tell you that wasn't Perkins -- that was me. The megalomen and other named villains in the adventure were conceived and designed by me. The world building was me. The story of Wolfhill House, its curse, the design of the house -- one-hundred percent me.

It is a point of pride for me that I wrote the first adventure in Dungeon's very first adventure path and I will always be thankful to Chris Perkins for that opportunity. But just understand that I wrote that adventure, not Perkins, and his editorial hand was light. He may have designed the framing narrative and used similar ideas elsewhere but -- good or bad, whether you love it or hate it -- I must insist on proper attribution for my writing and my creations.

Fair enough. There were plenty of things that became standard the following edition precisely because they were logical changes that lots of people came up with independently and used for years as house rules beforehand.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 70: Sep/Oct 1998



part 4/5



Kingdom of the Ghouls: Another particularly significant adventure in quick succession, as Wolfgang Baur releases his magnum opus, backed up by a tie-in ecology in Dragon and which he’ll return to again in 5e. It’s time to go full Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith, where ghouls aren't just feral scavengers only concerned with their next meal, but an ancient and complex underground society that inducts living people into their immortal ranks selectively. (still got to have plenty of corpses to eat, after all) Unfortunately, this isn't the World of Darkness, so they aren't maintaining an equilibrium on their overall numbers and staying a secret with the help of still-mortal puppets who control the media, but an aggressively expanding underdark empire that's spreading across the oerth destroying the settlements of other underdark races along the way. The PC's find out about this via a passing through a village full of refugee deep gnomes who fled to the surface, which will hopefully motivate them to head down there and do something heroic. If they do, they'd better pay close attention to logistics and look after their healers, because it's a long mazy journey to reach the capital city of the ghouls, teleportation is blocked by the magical radiation of the underdark and you're facing a lot of enemies with paralyzation & disease effects. If things go badly you could well face a lengthy difficult retreat to the surface with a crippled party or be captured by the ghouls & stripped of your gear to be a future meal. So this is a long brutal trek designed to take months to play through both IC and OOC, as the characters delve increasingly deeply into the underdark, fight the ghouls and hopefully save & make alliances with other underdark denizens against them. If they play their cards right, they could find themselves at the head of an army when they arrive at the capital, which lets you resolve this in an epic mass combat scene of a kind we've seen maybe 2 or 3 times in the history of the magazine. If not, they'll have to find a sneakier way to explore the place, take out the leaders and destroy or steal their powerful macguffins, because there's no way you'll be able to fight through literally thousands of extra-powerful ghouls on your own.

After reading, this is indeed one of the most ambitious adventures they've ever done in here. It doesn't displace Tortles of the Purple Sage from the very top spot in either size or nonlinearity of the different ways you could explore it, but it's still a densely written sandbox covering a vast area, not just a single dungeon or city, which gives you plenty of freedom in how you approach it and room to add on further areas as a DM. It might be slightly smaller in page count than Umbra, but it'll last much longer in actual play. It's not the very biggest or best thing they've ever done in here, but it's comfortably in the top 5 by several different metrics, which I think is more than good enough to deserve it's classic reputation. It is nice to see them be more ambitious and produce adventures that could make up a whole campaign in themselves rather than just little standalone stories designed to fill a few sessions.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 70: Sep/Oct 1998



part 5/5



Nodwick’s party have no trouble finding people willing to help them fight the ghouls, but forget to scale up the number of henchmen accordingly, leaving him even more weighed down than usual.



D&D Fast-Play Game: Dragon also contains this little booklet this month, obviously they want to push it hard, hopefully introducing more people to the concept of roleplaying. Which means I also get to review it once again, 12 years apart. When put in a magazine with a bunch of proper adventures to contrast it against, the short, linear and ultra-basic nature of this one sticks out even more, as it handholds you through every step of the way, explicitly spelling out your options and the numbers needed to succeed on them with each of the pregens, taking up far more page count for the amount of content than usual. It’s still handy for it’s original purpose, but putting it in an ongoing campaign with experienced players, it’ll probably wind up boring them. I’m definitely not the target audience anymore, if I ever was.



Another very interesting issue in quick succession, if for slightly less positive reasons than the previous ones, as we see the start of putting lots of co-ordinated tie-ins with Dragon and whatever books they happen to be releasing that month. While a refreshing change at first, that could well result in more adventures written on demand by staff writers rather than freelancers, or chosen primarily because they fit a theme rather than quality like Bill Slavicsek's terrible council of wyrms & dark sun ones. Still, for the moment they're doing pretty well, mixing an increased focus on solid rules with plenty of interesting roleplaying challenges, putting you up against multiple morally ambiguous antagonists and forcing you to choose which to side with in 4 out of the 6 adventures here. I'm still eager to see if that's all the big changes they've got planned for now, or even more will be forthcoming in another couple of months.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 132: October 1998



part 1/5



48 pages: Fee Fi Foe Fum. Give me my ring back you tiny bum! The trouble with stealing from giants is the amount of loot they have usually massively exceeds your encumbrance capacity, resulting in hard choices, particularly if they're still alive and could catch you at any time. Best to go for the choicest bits of potentially magical gear and hope they don't have a tracker on it.



Spotlight on Robert Burns: Shouldn't you have saved this for the december issue? Of course, it's not actually the writer of auld lang syne, who's a little too dead to join the RPGA, but the regional co-ordinator for the the military who just happens to share the same name. This gives him some unique challenges, as he gets messages from all over the world from soldiers trying to get some gaming in. He's still actively enlisted himself, which means he fully understands the situation and could find himself posted to another country at short notice too. This is why it's best to email him rather than sending letters to his PO box and hoping they wind up in the right place several weeks later. Despite all that, there are some definite benefits to gaming with the military crowd, as they're already trained to work well in a team and stay focussed on accomplishing the mission. Another instance of someone doing valuable work for free while juggling a day job as well. Let's hope he doesn't disappear suddenly due to that, or if he does they another gaming soldier lined up to replace him.



Notes From HQ: The idea of awarding certificates that serve as metagame currency rather than physical treasure has proved surprisingly controversial, particularly since the Living Jungle & Death have been doing hero points for years. They have to spend the whole editorial clarifying what you can and can't do with them like it's a whole new thing, which shows just how many of their players only play Living City and never even properly read the rules for the other settings. They add 1 point to a roll, not 1 point per die, they can be used after the fact, but can't turn a natural 1 into a success. It's not rocket science. Introducing new rules or revising existing ones, even with the best of intentions, has a lot of inertia in a big organisation. Just another example of that.



your 1nitiative: First letter is from someone who's confused by all the built-up lore around the Living City. If only there was a convenient book where it was all collected for newcomers. Well you're in luck! Buy City of Raven's Bluff by Ed Greenwood himself. :teeth ting: More detail packed in than you can shake a stick at or your money back.

Second is generally pleased at the work they do, but wonders why they haven't got a Living Dark Sun campaign. Because no-one's volunteered to run it, silly. Send in a good pitch and convince us you have what it takes, we'll happily give you the responsibility.

Finally, some humorously hyperbolic praise from regular adventure writer Kevin Kulp, which leads to an equally humorous in-joke response from the editors about Flumph-apalooza. They're never going to release a sourcebook and trilogy of adventures devoted to lawful good jellyfish, so give it up. Well I guess they are OGL, so anyone could write that sourcebook now as long as it uses 3e rules.



Summer Convention Love: After barely making Gen Con last year, they were worried that people would judge them for it, maybe not trust WotC as the new owners of D&D. They needn't have worried. It was a resounding success, bigger than ever by multiple measurements, with more tabletop tournaments run, more people dressed up and LARPing, more raised for charity, and over a thousand new people recruited into the RPGA. This took a lot of effort, so over a page is spent just giving proper credit to the 100+ people who made this happen, plus of course the winners of various awards, cutting into the space they have to actually describe specific events. I guess you could spend a full issue just telling stories from Gen Con and only scratch the surface of the small dramas and behind the scenes heroism that kept it all running. But those would make more interesting stories than just showing off the sheer size of your statistics.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 132: October 1998



part 2/5



Table Talk: Gen Con may have raised the most for charity, but other conventions are still doing good in their own way. Mega-Con helped give kids with leukemia computers, because surfing the net is one thing you can do no matter how terminally ill you are. (although it gets even easier in the future as laptops and smartphones get smaller and generally more ergonomic, so you can do so from bed) Speaking of the internet, the RPGA is getting into the new trend of webrings, so if any clubs have their own pages, email us and we can all get hooked up and improve our SEO situation. Now there's a part of the old internet I definitely miss, as it's a much more organic way to discover cool related things than search engines that now point almost exclusively to the big sites. But these bits of general news are small fry compared to their ongoing attempt to rank the best of the best in campaign players, classic players & judges and invite them to participate in the most exclusive of tournaments next year. Even if you're not on the list now, there's still time. All you need to do is participate in at least 7 tournaments in a year and get decent scores to be in with a chance. Think you're hardcore enough? There's always got to be another smaller tier at the top of the pyramid as an organisation gets bigger and older. Let the games continue.



Virtual Seattle Screamsheet: Shadowrun is releasing it's 3rd edition. That means Virtual Seattle players have to update their characters to all the niggly little changes. Metahuman allergies and astral projecting don't work in the same way in the new edition, but existing characters can have them grandfathered in. Quite a few edges & flaws are banned for various reasons, particularly the more crippling flaws that make a character tricky to run in a standardised tournament. Initiation is now common knowledge, so you no longer have limits on it, but the more powerful you get, the more likely the megacorps are to notice you and make an offer you can't refuse. If you regularly play with the same group of people, you can register as a team and collectively keep items that would normally be over the nuyen limit and have to be sold after a run. Unlike Living City, where they pretty much always use the most conservative possible interpretation of the rules, they do give you some more leeway to design the character you like and keep them even when new stuff comes out. Let's hope they can keep that up through 4th edition and beyond.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed continues his progress through the alphabet, reaching the city of Luthbaern. One obviously written before the recent rescue of Waukeen, as the priests there are still struggling to make themselves useful without spells. It's one of those rich walled cities filled with merchants, with a bunch of magical protections on the walls that divides property values sharply between insiders and the muddy ring of stables and ad hoc shanty buildings surrounding it. Inside, you never have to worry about fires, rain or shapeshifted creatures sneaking around causing trouble. (except the mysterious Belted Mage who's responsible for them, who obviously leaves an exception for himself and can be found in many guises wandering around subtly keeping the place stable & working to his liking) This, along with a strong system of worker rights and welfare leaves people free to get good at various crafts and invest profits in business ventures without worrying about losing everything in a disaster or all the money flowing to a few people and the economy stagnating because they've formed a monopoly. A reminder that capitalism needs a certain degree of regulation to remain a free market, as otherwise it'll wind up free for those at the top in charge of essentials and everyone else trapped underneath them. So this place isn't perfect, particularly for visitors without any money to spend, but it's another place that's fairly decent to live as long as you can accept that it's ultimately a benevolent dictatorship and trying to take it over without similar magical ability would make it much worse even if you succeeded. Another good example of how the wizards are the ones that are really in charge in the Realms, and how they accomplish that.