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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8046972" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 23: Mar/Apr 1985part 3/6New Magic Items: New classes and new magic items? When the newszine started, they intentionally said they didn't want to include these kinds of things because they didn't want to step on Dragon's toes. Of course, they also said the same thing about modules, and eventually changed their mind on that front too. So while these are joke articles, I strongly suspect they'll be serving as a gateway drug to serious ones in the future. After all, new classes, spells & magic items are popular submissions, and you can do much more of them without repeating yourself than generic advice about how to run a game properly, so it's only natural that they'd increase in frequency as time goes on. That said, while some of these items are silly, all have practical uses, often quite flexible. The Canister of Condiments is a particularly good melding of silly trappings with substantial usefulness, and both types of sweet tooth are incredibly powerful and have the additional benefit of not filling a standard item slot. Meanwhile the Eye Bead and Stone of Cold immunity are just perfectly straight items, no jokes at all, easily put in any campaign. Only the Hurricane Lamp is more nuisance than benefit. As with the Encounters, this melds humour and usability quite nicely, making this issue not just a bunch of gags you'll read once and discard. In the Black Hours pt 2: After part 1 put the PC's in the defensive position for a change, part 2 reverts to a regular dungeon crawl, where the PC's have to get through the monsters and save the town from Jubilex and his minions. There's still plenty of nonlinearity, trickery, and the prospect of exploiting factions within the bad guys to keep it from being just a slugfest through, and it'll definitely reward scouting things out and sneaking around over barging in the front door with weapons waving. So the two halves of this adventure are quite different, but compliment each other well. In an extra positive, the second half has bits that play differently depending on whether you succeeded or failed at the first half, instead of using offscreen railroading to enforce a status quo. That's what I call good writing, that also makes good use of the RPG format. Giving an adventure stakes other than succeed or perish allows you to have multiple instalments in a less linear fashion. That makes this by far the best adventure they've done here so far. Let's hope next issue doesn't let us down too badly by comparison.</blockquote>

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