TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 135: April 1999



part 5/5



The Rogues Gallery: More stuff from the decathlon, as we see the best three character entries they got, which thankfully are for a wide selection of systems. Good to see their players are still willing to experiment with systems the RPGA doesn't officially support yet.

Ollo is a companion for Ars Magica that really shows off the complexity of their virtues & flaws system. Giant blood makes him a very impressive figure, but is also setting him up for a shortened lifespan in the long term. Like many a giant surrounded by regular size people, he's confident but not very bright, making him pretty easy to trick. His backstory is similarly full of nuance, taking what could be a simple character and giving plenty of more specific little hooks to roleplay him with. Not a character you could build in D&D without lots of fudging and houseruling.

Professor Praxis is basically Doctor Seuss as a Malkavian in Vampire: the Masquerade. He rhymes all the time, would never hurt a child, but if you do, you may well wind up falling beneath his fangs. Given how high his humanity score is, he'll be angsty about it afterwards though. This is all a bit silly, but then again, what do you expect from malkavians.

Coefficient of Friction Man (a bit of a mouthful to declare when arriving on the scene) is a FASERIP character who has the comical but exceedingly flexible power to increase or decrease friction in anything he can see. That has it's limitations in space missions, but on earth that provides many options to defeat villains in humiliating but nonlethal ways. Thankfully, he's immune to harm from his own powers, which also makes him fireproof as an added bonus. He's no stronger or tougher than a regular guy though, so you can still beat him if you get the drop on him or use energy attacks that aren't subject to friction. Probably for the best that he's already joined up to a hero team to cover his weaknesses.



Welcome To Hell: Since WotC took over, they've still been pretty keen on the planes, but backed away a bit from the Planescape framing, with the guides to the ethereal & inner planes noticeably lower on the sigilian cant, and books like Paladin in Hell & Guide to Hell ditching the branding and art style entirely. In fact they're so keen on their H. E. double hockey sticks they're also making it the theme for their booths at Gen Con this year. Good thing they have more than 9 things going on. Which layer of hardcoreness will you wind up trapped upon? The basic standalone tournaments, the big Living ones where you could affect the metaplot next year, the LARPs? Maybe the seminars are more your thing? Will you be able to penetrate all the way to the mysteries of the 9th layer? A fairly basic promotional piece, but at least you're forewarned so you can put together an appropriate piece of cosplay for the weekend. And as a plus, it fits the theme of the issue as well. This is followed by the full preregistration schedule. With 25 AD&D events and 18 for other systems, it does indeed look like they're going to be bigger than ever, with LARP ones in particular way up, and some events 8 hour extravaganzas covering two adjacent slots, which they haven't done before either. You'd better not have neglected your constitution score in real life. Good luck trying to figure out which things you want to play in more if there's a schedule clash, because the bigger they get, the more likely that is to happen.



The reader surveys continue every issue despite the low response rate. Maybe if they add them up over the issues they can get enough data to make meaningfully popular decisions.



A pretty decent ratio of stuff that's actually useful for a game here, even if none of it was particularly controversial or otherwise something they wouldn't have posted in the TSR era despite the buildup. They still haven't quite got the hang of the whole 90's edginess their rivals have turned into a formula yet, even though the decade is almost over. Anyway, it's a Living City special next time, which is one of their core competencies, so hopefully they'll have got at least one good submission to keep it growing and evolving. Let's head down the dungeon once more so we have some spending money when we get there.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 74: May/June 1999



part 1/5



84 pages. I want no greens at all! Red, yellow, purple, black, all fine. Even a hint of green, you're fired! Well, it definitely gets this cover to stand out, making things look bleak but not too dark to make out what's going on. Let's hope the adventures inside strike a similar balance of distinctive but not overwhelming types of peril. Time to see what new challenges remain now we've reached a third of the way through the magazine's run.



Editorial: Like Polyhedron, they want to take playtesting their adventures more seriously these days. So the editorial is encouraging you to sign up to do some of it and going over their process. Send in the SASE with an idea of what kind of adventure you want, (just knowing what kinds of adventures are popular is also a factor in what ones they accept) play the adventure within a month or two of getting it and send the questionnaire back with as many useful notes as you can think of. Do the difficulties of encounters and amount of treasure feel right, did any obvious plot holes come up or the players pick an unwritten path? It may add months onto development time but you'll be thankful you did, and it's not as if some adventures didn't spend over a year in the buffer waiting for the right combination of other adventures to make a good issue even in the TSR era. They don't mention it, but obviously it'll be even more important once they announce the next edition while all the rules for that are still undergoing revisions. It'll be interesting to see how they handle that and what the proportions of adventures written by the staff natively to the new system vs ones obviously converted from old 2e submissions are.



Letters: First letter praises Kingdom of the Ghouls and wants more big nonlinear adventures like that where the players have lots of freedom in where they go and what they do. That's where the fun in RPG's over other types of game lies, the freedom to make choices not strictly covered by the rules and have it still work thanks to the intelligent responses of the GM.

Second is a lengthy one on the filtering process in a magazine that gets an even more lengthy response, reminding us just how many submissions they get for each one that's accepted. Even the people who do get published regularly have more than half of their submissions knocked back, they just don't get discouraged. Don't think it's some kind of nepotistic conspiracy, grow a thicker skin and send in some more ideas.

Third praises them for putting more ideas for continuing the adventures in recent issues. It's a good way to ease novice GM's into writing more of their own campaign instead of just using prefab adventures.

Fourth is generally positive about their recent developments, but would like more themed issues. That'd be more useful if you want a bunch of connected adventures than waiting months for the next instalment in a series.

Fifth would also prefer their next big set of linked adventures be delivered in one big load instead of spread out. In the meantime, keep up the good quality maps and Nodwick hilarity.

Sixth also wants any adventure series delivered over a shorter timescale and kept as generic as possible so lots of different campaigns can use it.

Seventh is mildly annoyed that the mere of dead men is all the way up in the northwest away from the well detailed forgotten realms locations. If you want a shorter trek to & from the Dales & Cormyr you could put it in the swamps of the Vast instead without too much trouble.

Finally, another reminder that just because an adventure is for one system, doesn't mean you can't convert it to different one. Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu, even Star Trek, all have had adventures from here used in his campaigns. Maybe they could get native ones that people could convert to D&D instead sometime.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 74: May/June 1999



part 2/5



The Scourge of Scalabar: If I had a dollar for every time a gnome built a submarine in here I'd have 2 dollars, which doesn't seem like much, but when you add it to the steamboats, spaceships and giant semi-aquatic lobster robots you get a picture of a race that's much more nautically inclined than the casual stereotyping would suggest. They've built one that looks like a giant shark, which is now being used to attack the shipping around the city of Scalabar. This naturally attracts adventurers keen to solve the mystery and maybe make some profit in the process. Will you head out to sea and just search around for trouble (tricky unless you own your own vessel as everyone is afraid to set sail until the danger is over) or do a little more investigating in town to find out what you're up against? This second route is the better supported one, as it turns out one merchant is using the sub to attack their rivals and there are several different ways you could stumble across clues to their involvement. Following those will let you find out where it docks when not in use, which'll let you get to the big climactic encounter with the pirates in their cave lair. A fairly short adventure for it's pagecount, but with plenty of detail in each of the sections which helps you react to however the players try to solve it. A solid but unexceptional starter that provides a decent mix of social and combat challenges and is far less whimsical than most gnome based adventures. This can definitely go on the might use at some point pile.



Nodwick is surprisingly unattractive as shark bait, given the number of other ways he's died over the years.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 74: May/June 1999



part 3/5



First People: Time for one of those reminders that PC's shouldn't just kill whatever they encounter on an expedition and take their stuff, as that's culturally insensitive. The PC's are searching for a pass through northern mountains when they come across a tribe that are very specifically based on canadian indigenous people. Unless the PC's are instantly violent or otherwise extremely unpleasant they'll be naively friendly and invite them to meet the rest of the tribe. They will be hostile to the idea of you continuing through the other side of the mountains though, as that's sacred ground. This impasse is soon broken when perytons attack, which their weapons are useless against, leaving the PC's free to save the day. Their arrival at this time was obviously fate, and if they can find the source of the perytons and stop them for good they must be worthy to cross. Turns out they're minions of a nymph who was cursed for the hubris of saying she was more beautiful than the gods and now warps nature into dark & twisted forms wherever she goes. She'll pretend to be the prisoner of her minions and then get nekkid if it looks like the PC's are actually a serious threat. If enough of you get through all the save or dies from that fight you then have to deal with being blackmailed on the way back by the witch doctor, who killed his predecessor and hid the body near where the monsters laired, and is paranoid the PCs'll find something incriminating. Depending on how you handle that you might wind up exposing him and being the big heroes of the day, or your name becoming mud and having to make a hasty exit from the whole region. An interesting read, but also above average in both linearity and potential problematicness, between all the barely serial numbers removed real world tribal stuff and the whole party having to make save or dies at once as a gotcha. One to be handled sensitively as a DM if at all.



Nodwick's party have obviously been buffing their saving throws and have no trouble surviving a little nymph ogling.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 74: May/June 1999



part 4/5



Night of the Bloodbirds: Stirges. Y'know, we haven't actually seen that many of those around lately. They were a staple in the days of big ol' dungeoncrawls with regular rolling for random encounters, but faded away with the rise of more plot-centric adventures. Some people obviously still like them though, as we got a recent second ecology on them in Dragon and now this. A farm is having trouble with large quantities of them attacking their cows and asks for help. Should be simple enough right? Nah, this is still the 2e era so they've got to complicate it up with some plot. The boom in the stirge population isn't just part of natural breeding cycles in response to good food supply and favourable environmental conditions, but being actively bred and trained by a tribe of hobgoblins led by an ogre mage, then set upon their rivals. To stop the problem from coming back, you'll have to follow the surviving stirges back home when they retreat, or engage in an active search of the nearby wilderness instead of just waiting around at the farm for trouble. As usual for an adventure like this, there are several other things out there you could encounter depending on which way you wander, of various degrees of helpfulness if you're smart enough to talk to them instead of just attacking. Another adventure that's quite short for it's size that's in the midground between sandbox and linear plot-driven adventure. Quite usable but not exceptional along any axis.



Preemptive Strike: Paul Culotta is back again for the longest adventure this issue and also one of the highest level ones they've ever done. It's time to drag the PC's away from their domain management for a kingdom level threat. The red dragons and fire giants of the smoking mountains have teamed up, which means you need to get out your griffons, pegasi, flying carpets or whatever else you've accumulated over the years and dust off those arial combat rules for some epic dogfights. If you don't already have something to do the job, you'll be given a griffon and a crash course in controlling them, with plenty of potential for comedic mishaps over the several days of frantic training. You can also get a carpet of flying from the lair of a bunch of perytons that attack along the way, (good month for them for some reason) and/or persuade a local copper dragon to join the fight if you approach him diplomatically enough. Once you've assembled your crack team of mismatched flyers, you've got to head to the castle on top of mount bellows, where you have a massive fight with multiple fire giants riding red dragons, then dismount and head into the castle & dungeons beneath it to deal with the remaining fire giants and their firenewt minions. A serious threat on a kind of epic scale they rarely do in here and using rules they use even more rarely, while not forgetting to put some moments of whimsy along the way, this is great fun to read and looks like it'd be pretty awesome to play as well, although the high bar for entry means not that many groups will be able to play it as part of a proper campaign starting from 1st level. If you have managed to work your way up and accumulate a good selection of magical items and followers, this looks like a good capstone to get you to actually use them all to full effect instead of just hoarding all those one-use items forever, against enemies who also do cool things in battle rather than just having big numbers. If you're in a position to use it I can thoroughly recommend you do so.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 74: May/June 1999



part 5/5



Side Trek - The Vale of Weeping Widows: We reach the end of another issue, and we have another side trek that feels like it was chosen because it was exactly the right size to fit with the page count and amount of adverts. They must have had slightly more space than usual, because this is three pages of atmospheric buildup and only one short combat encounter at the end. While trekking through arid mountains, the PC's come across an abandoned valley with signs that there was once a civilisation there. Spooky statues, odd sounds in the distance, out of body experiences when they go to sleep there, there's lots of forebodingness but nothing actually happens and there's no treasure or magic no matter how hard they investigate. Eventually a storm will sweep through and they'll be attacked by a pack of leucrotta, using their mimicry powers to imitate the voices heard earlier to be all the more unsettling. But the core mystery will remain unsolved, unless you make up a solution for your own campaign. So this is a shaggy dog story, a boy who cried wolf setup, an extended break between things actually happening to build tension with an anticlimactic finish. I guess you should throw in a few things like that between the actual adventures so the PC's don't come to take it for granted that there's a treasure chest behind every waterfall, undead in every graveyard, and more statues that come to life than stay still but this still leaves me a bit nonplussed.



Apart from the high level spectacular, this issue was pretty mid really, feeling like a definite comedown after all the interesting serial and tie-in stuff of the past year. I guess they're taking a break between trying to really push the envelope again so it doesn't lose impact when they do, but it means this one won't be going on any best or worst of lists and felt like it passed by pretty quickly. Another little bit of landscape along the long road to the present. Time to break the next issue down into bite sized chunks and see how smoothly it slides down.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 136: June 1999



part 1/5



32 pages. Nice callback to issue 69 on the cover there. Good to see they've got an artist who pays attention to the lore. Also, good luck to that thief trying to fence what they stole, given how well connected this place's owner is in the Raven's Bluff underworld. Let's find out what new things they introduce in this issue, and if they're connected to preexisting ones in a consistent way that makes them both better than the sum of their parts.



Announcements: Time for another big list of who’s in charge of what now, most with email addresses so you can easily contact them. Greg Sherwood replaces Brian Burr as the guy at the top of the Living City organisation. He now has about 30 people underneath him (counting made more difficult by some people appearing multiple times, plus the person running the Harpers is as secretive OOC as they are IC) showing how complex running the Living City has become. Still room for more, they’re in the market for a new person to handle the semi-retirements and high level adventures in particular and always willing to listen to your ideas. (then turn down many of them because they don’t fit or don’t have the resources) If you’re willing to put in the free work you can get in and work your way up. Make sure you diversify what you do, because otherwise you’ll be left in the lurch when they decide to drop LC for Living Greyhawk next edition.



Notes from HQ: Speaking of diversifying, the editorial is also about their support of systems other than D&D. Despite being by far their most played campaign, Living City actually scores fairly low in terms of average rating per adventure. Depending on how they weight the statistics, the games that most reliably satisfy the people playing in them are Alternity and Paranoia, with Virtual Seattle, Threads of Legend, Living Jungle and Call of Cthulhu runners-up. I guess that’s another demonstration of how many people play D&D simply because it’s the biggest thing around and easy to find players for, when in an ideal world they’d be playing something else. You’ve got to have a vanilla option for the other flavours to make sense. A good reminder that pleasing all the people all the time is a near impossible task, organised play involves lots of compromises, which only grow the bigger a setting gets and that there’s lots of different ways you can interpret the same set of statistics. The people playing smaller games are more likely to be playing what they want to play and less likely to be swept along by metaplot that they can’t do anything to influence or bogged down in bureaucracy. There’ll always be a place for home games no matter how much technology improves the massively multiplayer ones.



Table Talk: Lots more decathlon stuff filling up this column. First up, a new competition asking you to come up with the story behind the cover image. Who is she, and why is she risking this robbery? The winners of the monster creation competition, which we’ll see the results of over the next couple of issues. The next few deadlines coming up: Best new event idea for next year, best multi-round tournament, best report on what happened at Gen Con, most new certified Judges, most non Living tournaments played. A bunch of things deliberately intended to patch their current weak points and get more people doing them. Finally, a little promo for NASCRAG and their “insane” attempts to get tournament gamers to roleplay a little more. Will you get into the spirit of things and join them? Business as usual then, revealing the RPGA’s flaws, but in a way that makes it obvious they’re aware of them and want to do something about them. Add a few volunteers, then they can solve them and expand their goals again.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 136: June 1999



part 2/5



Member Spotlight: Our profilee this time is Jeffrey M. West. (Not the same one recently put away for several decades for making child porn if you google the name, thankfully, unless he's also lying about his age here.) Not one of the volunteers maintaining the Living stuff, he's just a regular guy who's been roleplaying even before the term was formally invented and going to tournaments since the late 70's. All this practice has obviously worked, as he made it to the final table of the Best of the Best tournament last year. (only to be scored worst at that point, but that still leaves him number 6 in the overall rankings.) He is a member of a particularly large club called Magma Gamers though, which have raised over $5000 for charity over the past couple of years. His day job is similarly compassionate, deciding what charities get federal funds, which probably involves some tough choices, but is still much more satisfying than working retail. There are many ways to be a hero in real life, few as spectacular as in D&D, but without anyone doing them, society would be in far worse shape. See if you can find your own little unique niche as well.



Internet 101: This column is in theme, as it gives links to all the RPGA websites of the time. This makes it particularly depressing to read now, as all of the links here have long since been redirected to the WotC front page with their contents deleted, or simply ceased to exist in the case of the third party websites. Even less useful than the average one of these, and a reminder of how much D&D history from that era is now lost, as it was all websites with no print version.

There is still a bit of useful advice though. General warnings on trading or selling secondhand material through sites like these. Make sure addresses are accurate, there's a real person at the other end of them, and if possible get references of other successful transactions they've made. All still valid even if it is a bit easier to find records like that now, with ebay still going strong and many people having accounts stretching all the way back to then. As long as we sell and buy stuff, some people will want to make a quick buck by delivering substandard goods or taking the money and running.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: After last issue's urban dystopia, time for some good old fashioned wilderness crawling dangers in the Neth Stand. Apparently, this is where a lot of the people from Netheril fled just after that was destroyed, which is a long way to go, but when you have all that magic, you can fly or teleport where you want. This didn't work out too well for them long-term though, as it's now abandoned, with a large dead magic zone that moves around the area making it rather unpredictable what resources you'll have available when exploring. There are plenty of carnivorous plants and giant spiders that'll be just as dangerous either way, and quite possibly more intelligent creatures at the centre, probably backed up by one of the Realms' many Deepspawn that keep the monster population above what a realistic ecology could support. Plenty of challenges here, but no new ideas. It's all just variations on a theme from other places we've already seen. A somewhat subpar entry by his standards.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 136: June 1999



part 3/5



City Stories: Selune is a pretty popular god for PC clerics, so it's mildly surprising it's taken them this long to cover her temple in Raven's Bluff. It's a pretty big place too, with different wings devoted to each phase of the moon (except gibbous for some reason, because that's the most boring phase) and observatories that let you get a good look at the sky while also being protected from bad weather. To underscore their popularity, each of these is headed by a PC priest, showing that they're making more prestigious positions available on top of the knighthoods and council elections. Curiously, these don't get fully statted up, probably because if they're being played regularly their stats would be inaccurate anyway by the time it got to print. They do give full stats to 5 NPC clerics though, all of which are very young for people so high up in the hierarchy. I guess we have just had a big war that killed lots of people, so that's got to open up some top slots, but a clergy entirely comprised of under 40's does feel a bit odd. (no demihumans, either) Fairly interesting reading, but with several structural oddities that leave me a little puzzled. I suppose it is a chaotic religion so I shouldn't expect consistency in the first place.



Bestiary: Scorched Ones are undead created when people die slowly in the desert. Unsurprisingly, their attacks inflict both heat and dehydration damage, making them very dangerous if you're already low on supplies, but also relatively easy to become completely immune to if you have the right magic items. They can only be permanently destroyed by total immersion in water, which does seem pretty tricky unless you have some conjuration spells handy or lure them out of their home terrain. They're intelligent, but like many undead, their irrational hatred for the living overwhelms them, so their intelligence is used purely to come up with more cunning ways to inflict a slow horrible death on anyone who crosses into their domain. A formulaic but mechanically well implemented entry, these look like a good mid-level challenge for your game if you're in the right kind of area. Another pretty decent creation coming to us courtesy of the decathlon competitions.



Rockroost Hunters & Gatherers: There’s all kinds of plot opportunities in competing businesses. But interestingly enough, Raven’s Bluff has been pretty low on publishing multiple of the same kind of thing in quick succession. (apart from that one year where they overdid the dancing bears) Here’s one though. The Rockroost family are adventurers who's main income comes from selling the body parts of things they hunt. This puts them in conflict with both the merchant's guild in general, because they class themselves as a service rather than a business and refuse to pay dues and also the furriers guild from issue 133 due to hunting on the same turf. One thing they share with the furrier's guild though, is refusing to hunt for the body parts of non-evil sentient beings. So they face plenty of challenges in both the physical and social arenas, as not only do they have to kill things and get their stuff back to sell it, they also have a bunch of rivals that are eager to sabotage them or shut them down if they're caught violating regulations in the city. Still, all this stress is definitely good for the XP, so all of the core team are pretty high level. This definitely looks like a setup you could build an interesting campaign around, signing the PC's up, sending them on missions, then slowly giving them more responsibility to choose how they run things as they move up in levels and the IC hierarchy. This gets my approval both as something that fits neatly into the Living City and as an idea to use in your home campaigns.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 136: June 1999



part 4/5



the House of Spice: Growing spices is generally somewhat less dangerous than hunting animals for their body parts, but it still has a decent amount of adventuring opportunity. Some only grow in very specific climates, requiring long trips to collect it and then take it somewhere you can sell it for a high price, plus the knowledge of how to preserve them properly to survive said trips. Since there's plenty of rolls for wandering monsters on even the safer roads in the realms there's once again plenty of reasons a bunch of adventurers would be hired by this company. The big difference is the framing. The previous article was your typical OOC factual delivery. This one is mostly second person narration in an arabian nights style, as the founder is apparently from one of the realm's several middle eastern inspired areas. Actually, he was born here in Raven's Buff and is ginger, as it reveals at the end, but he pretends to be more exotic than he is. Given his flair for the dramatic, he unsurprisingly turns out to be a high level bard, who moved into the spice business because it was more profitable than just singing songs & telling stories, plus it was easy to combine the two as spices are fairly low encumbrance for their value. His wife is genuinely from far flung lands, and it goes into great detail about how hot she is even after having 6 kids with him and how many other men still hit on her, which publicly enrages him but probably also makes him secretly smug. Basically, he's the arabian equivalent of a weeaboo, going to distant lands, falling in love with the culture, adopting a native name, marrying one of their women and bringing the cuisine back home, setting up a whole trading empire to make that possible and make a profit. So there are plenty of useful ideas in here for a game, but it's presented in a weird and weirdly horny way, and not the flavour of weird horniness we're used to from Ed by now. Whether this'll be comfortable to use or not depends on how well it aligns with your own fetishes, as it could be pretty cringy if it doesn't. Still, at least it keeps things interesting around here.



No Honor Among Thieves: This one, on the other hand, is much more basic. A sketch of “Blind Dick” Corder. (he’s actually only one-eyed, but the other one is getting a bit dodgy with age too.) A beggar who lives in a miserable leaky hovel and will do anything to earn a quick copper, he’s the kind of person most people will pointedly ignore and heroic parties try to save. No good deed will go unpunished, as he’s the kind of NE guy who’ll take advantage of any kindness to rob you, sell your information to anyone who pays or even spitefully kill your pets. In short, he entirely deserves to be in the position he is, and get everything that’s coming to him, because even if you did help him it only gives him room to be nasty on a larger scale instead of constantly struggling to survive. The amount of adventure you can get out of him is directly proportionate to how nice your players are and how many times they’ll put up with being betrayed before they lose patience and simply kill him. Will they be as forgiving as Megatron, or will they go more for the Galvatron style and blast first, make quips later. Definitely usable but also a mildly depressing read. Couldn’t we have a bit more punching up and less punching down.



The Happy Hippocampus: The Living City setting no longer ends at the bounds of Raven’s Bluff. Now you’re encouraged to send in material on Sarbreenar and Procampur as well, and here’s our first Procampan business. Unsurprisingly, it’s an inn which is the kind of place new arrivals from nearby cities might want to stay. Once a brothel, (not a festhall, I note) it’s now a slightly more upscale establishment which stamps down hard on any groping the waitresses or brawling. One of the waitresses is secretly a priestess of Shar, which will probably lead to trouble long-term as she grows more powerful and ambitious. Other than that it’s a pretty well run place, with decently described NPC’s that give you enough info to roleplay them quickly, a full map of the joint in case the PC’s decide to do some breaking and entering and multiple potential plot hooks they could pick up on if they make it a regular. Solidly above average but not exceptional as these entries go, this ticks all the boxes that make the information useful for actual play, but doesn’t depart from formula.