(un)reason
Legend
Polyhedron Issue 44: November 1988
part 1/5
40 pages. How many nuyen for that sword, chummer? A curiously cyberpunk looking cover, especially considering Shadowrun hasn't even been released yet. Looking at the credits, it's by Tim Bradstreet, which explains everything. I guess his art style was just naturally like that, and the writing eventually caught up to give it a proper place in gaming history. Well, that's an interesting turnup for the books even before we've got properly started. Let's see if anything else is conspicuously ahead of it's time in here.
Notes From HQ: For a second year in a row, things actually went smoothly at Gen Con, which they're very happy about. Somehow Polyhedron managed to win both best professional gaming magazine and best amateur gaming magazine, which obviously they're even happier about, although it does raise questions about the nebulousness of the qualifying factors for each of those categories and if that loophole ought to be closed for future years. As with every year so far, there were both more attendees, and more different tournament games to choose from, making for increasingly difficult choices if you wanted to play everything. An unusually large number of the modules are familiar names to me, and will be republished as official ones on sale to the general public in the next year or two. Hopefully this means they were good, rather than the publishers being lazy. An equally large number of familiar names get their fair share of the credit for putting in a ton of unpaid work in to organise all this. It all seems pretty positive overall. Just don't forget the hard-earned lessons of a couple of years ago, otherwise you'll once again find yourselves dealing with the same problems.
Letters: The first letter is a rather long one by one of their regional directors defending the decision to keep the precise details of their scoring system secret. You proved you couldn't be trusted to know all the details without lawyering them. This is your own fault. Well, maybe not you personally, but you know what I mean. In any case, you'll just have to trust us. Why would we mess around and play favourites with the scoring anyway?
The second complains about people going to conventions as a group and then all signing up to the same game as a group, crowding out any other players who also have to play with them with in-jokes. This is why randomisation of groups is helpful, especially in multi-round competitive tournaments where there's lots of them all playing the same modules at once. It prevents nepotism and forces you to actually talk to new people. Might be a bit more stressful, but more fun in the long run.
Finally, we have another letter of generalised praise, and request for info on their current publishing guidelines. Both need repeating regularly to keep things running smoothly.
part 1/5
40 pages. How many nuyen for that sword, chummer? A curiously cyberpunk looking cover, especially considering Shadowrun hasn't even been released yet. Looking at the credits, it's by Tim Bradstreet, which explains everything. I guess his art style was just naturally like that, and the writing eventually caught up to give it a proper place in gaming history. Well, that's an interesting turnup for the books even before we've got properly started. Let's see if anything else is conspicuously ahead of it's time in here.
Notes From HQ: For a second year in a row, things actually went smoothly at Gen Con, which they're very happy about. Somehow Polyhedron managed to win both best professional gaming magazine and best amateur gaming magazine, which obviously they're even happier about, although it does raise questions about the nebulousness of the qualifying factors for each of those categories and if that loophole ought to be closed for future years. As with every year so far, there were both more attendees, and more different tournament games to choose from, making for increasingly difficult choices if you wanted to play everything. An unusually large number of the modules are familiar names to me, and will be republished as official ones on sale to the general public in the next year or two. Hopefully this means they were good, rather than the publishers being lazy. An equally large number of familiar names get their fair share of the credit for putting in a ton of unpaid work in to organise all this. It all seems pretty positive overall. Just don't forget the hard-earned lessons of a couple of years ago, otherwise you'll once again find yourselves dealing with the same problems.
Letters: The first letter is a rather long one by one of their regional directors defending the decision to keep the precise details of their scoring system secret. You proved you couldn't be trusted to know all the details without lawyering them. This is your own fault. Well, maybe not you personally, but you know what I mean. In any case, you'll just have to trust us. Why would we mess around and play favourites with the scoring anyway?
The second complains about people going to conventions as a group and then all signing up to the same game as a group, crowding out any other players who also have to play with them with in-jokes. This is why randomisation of groups is helpful, especially in multi-round competitive tournaments where there's lots of them all playing the same modules at once. It prevents nepotism and forces you to actually talk to new people. Might be a bit more stressful, but more fun in the long run.
Finally, we have another letter of generalised praise, and request for info on their current publishing guidelines. Both need repeating regularly to keep things running smoothly.