(un)reason
Legend
Polyhedron Issue 48: July 1989
part 1/5
32 pages. The focus on building up shops and other commercial establishments in Raven's Bluff continues, with a cover that looks surprisingly everyday, only with somewhat different fashion to the modern world. They obviously get a lot of these submissions, so let's hope they can continue to give us places that are useful not just between adventures, but as springboards to adventures in themselves for quite a while more before they start repeating themselves and diminishing returns set in.
Notes From HQ: This follows directly on from the cover in encouraging people to create Living City locations, and the format they ought to use. It's not that hard. You just need to juggle an interesting premise, functional mechanics, and making sure your submission isn't too similar to an already existing one. The rest of it is pretty familiar. Another of the regular reminders to tell them if you move address, and keep track of when your membership expires, because otherwise you won't keep getting your newszine's delivered regularly. An equally regular reminder that they are not made of money, and so cannot give you free stuff to serve as prizes for tournaments. And a little promotion of their new comic at the back. Let them know if you like it or not so they can tell if they should keep it going. No real surprises here.
Letters: The worries about roleplaying a character properly even when if might hurt your tournament scoring continue. Both of the two letters published put different perspectives on it. The first want to see key personality traits pointed out on the sheet and maybe even mechanically incentivised. There's plenty of games that will do that in the future, but D&D is not one of them. You may want to switch.
The second reminds us that people should know the mechanics and be playing to win as a team. Roleplaying should always be secondary to achieving the goal of the adventure, particularly in a pregenerated party playing a tournament module. Vote for people who know what they're doing and get on with it, not ones that stand around yakking. (an inherent flaw in the democratic electoral system, where no matter what you want to do, you also need to master the art of getting people to notice you on top of that, which means the system favors amoral self-publicists who's primary goal is getting into and staying in power over people with actual goals and principles who would actually improve the world for people in general if elected.)
part 1/5
32 pages. The focus on building up shops and other commercial establishments in Raven's Bluff continues, with a cover that looks surprisingly everyday, only with somewhat different fashion to the modern world. They obviously get a lot of these submissions, so let's hope they can continue to give us places that are useful not just between adventures, but as springboards to adventures in themselves for quite a while more before they start repeating themselves and diminishing returns set in.
Notes From HQ: This follows directly on from the cover in encouraging people to create Living City locations, and the format they ought to use. It's not that hard. You just need to juggle an interesting premise, functional mechanics, and making sure your submission isn't too similar to an already existing one. The rest of it is pretty familiar. Another of the regular reminders to tell them if you move address, and keep track of when your membership expires, because otherwise you won't keep getting your newszine's delivered regularly. An equally regular reminder that they are not made of money, and so cannot give you free stuff to serve as prizes for tournaments. And a little promotion of their new comic at the back. Let them know if you like it or not so they can tell if they should keep it going. No real surprises here.
Letters: The worries about roleplaying a character properly even when if might hurt your tournament scoring continue. Both of the two letters published put different perspectives on it. The first want to see key personality traits pointed out on the sheet and maybe even mechanically incentivised. There's plenty of games that will do that in the future, but D&D is not one of them. You may want to switch.
The second reminds us that people should know the mechanics and be playing to win as a team. Roleplaying should always be secondary to achieving the goal of the adventure, particularly in a pregenerated party playing a tournament module. Vote for people who know what they're doing and get on with it, not ones that stand around yakking. (an inherent flaw in the democratic electoral system, where no matter what you want to do, you also need to master the art of getting people to notice you on top of that, which means the system favors amoral self-publicists who's primary goal is getting into and staying in power over people with actual goals and principles who would actually improve the world for people in general if elected.)