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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8014905" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 17: Mar/Apr 1984part 2/6Encounters: Along with adding a full adventure, the mini adventure expands to 3 pages as well this issue, although a significant fraction of that is made up of artwork. Explore an abandoned temple and discover it's secrets. There are a fair number of snakes involved, so unprepared characters may die abruptly, but some of the challenges have rotted away, so it's not as dangerous as it could be. A nice diversion on the way between bigger quests that could pay off nicely, or be a dead-end, depending on the skill and caution of the players. That's a good little bit of dungeon-crawling which I could happily use several times.Cryptic Alliance of the Bi-Month: Our second alliance are written pretty strongly as villains. Pureblood racial supremacists who use knightly symbolism and want to exterminate all mutants? They know exactly what they're doing here, and only an idiot would nazi it even if they don't explicitly spell it out. You can't help having politics in your gaming if the setting building goes beyond white room one-on-one fights, it's just a question of what kind, and how directly they parallel our struggles in real life. And it's obvious that issues of racism are still all too relevant in the postapocalyptic radioactive wasteland, with creatures judging each other on their appearance rather than their behaviour. If they could all learn to get along and use their various mutant powers in harmony civilisation would rapidly be rebuilt bigger and better than ever and then it'd be an entirely different game.Variants, House Rules & Hybrids: Sigh. Time for another lengthy bit of largely negative DM advice exhorting players to tone it down, play it by the book, and look very carefully before introducing new stuff into your game. Too many poorly thought out creatures, classes and house rules will rapidly make the game less fun, not more. They really are having to repeat the same basic idea a lot, in different wordings, from different angles, over and over again, as the nature of gamers means they'll lawyer every ruling and push at every limit you impose upon them. It's very tiresome to read, and I'm sure even more tiresome for them to write, as people keep sending in ideas that they think are awesome, but are mostly both poorly written, and poorly designed on a mathematical level. (and also surprisingly repetitive, somehow the same "cool" class ideas pop up over and over again, showing their imaginations aren't actually all that imaginative either.) This shows no signs of resolving itself any time soon, and is another waste of space from my perspective.</blockquote>

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