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[Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon
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<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8063845" data-attributes="member: 27780"><p><strong><u>Polyhedron Issue 26: Sep/Oct 1985</u></strong></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>part 5/6</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Gamma Mars: Our cover article takes us into space for the second time this issue. Unusually for Gamma World, it's treatment is actually less silly than the D&D one, giving us a perfectly sensible future history of human colonisation of mars, and the things they found there, including a mostly extinct extraterrestrial race that colonised mars a long time ago, then went into suspended animation after being mostly destroyed in their own apocalyptic conflict. Mutants are somewhat rarer but hardly unknown, and human civilisation is considerably more functional than back on earth, while the aliens are fully statted out and playable as PC's, so you have plenty of chargen options. It's a harsh frontier environment, and there's plenty of wilderness to explore, but at least there's not so many insane racist factions that'll try to kill or enslave outsiders on sight. I can definitely see the upsides of setting a campaign here, so that makes this article a success. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Unofficial New Illusionist Spells: Jon Pickens finishes this series off by stealing some powers from monsters as well as magic items, with mongrelmen, dark creepers, wands of illumination, and robes of blending's tricks getting turned into a form illusionists can memorise and use over and over. Plus a psionic power gets converted for some reason, several higher level variants of existing spells that last longer, cover larger areas, or affect more targets, and two variants of magic-user spells with a more tricksy shadow based flavour. As before, they're iterative rather than inspired, but many will still wind up appearing in Unearthed Arcana and future corebooks. D&D may not standardise it like some systems, but there's still solid demand for variants that are basically X spell, only more powerful in one way or another. Many an article will be filled by them in the future.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Fletcher's Corner: This column takes a somewhat leftfield turn, and spends a couple of pages talking about the demographics of magic items in his campaign. While there are some unique ones, one-shot stuff like potions & scrolls and low power permanent ones like +1 weapons are available for sale. On the other hand, remember that just because an item is in the books, doesn't mean it has to exist in your campaign, and this counts double for ones that aren't in the books that the players made up or were given by another DM. So his tastes are more high magic than nearly any non-D&D campaign, which don't have the same escalation of power and treasure baked into the system, but he's still trying to hold back the worst excesses of monty haulism that ruins games. It's a tough line to draw, as you don't want to drive players away, and you want them to do cool things, but if one player comes in with a ton of items from another game and outshines the others, then you have a big problem. An interesting column, that reminds us that these things are much less of a problem now, with the expectation that you'll create new characters for each new campaign a default, and much better rules in term of expected items & treasure by level. It's good to see we have actually learned and grown since then in some ways.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 8063845, member: 27780"] [b][u]Polyhedron Issue 26: Sep/Oct 1985[/u][/b] part 5/6 Gamma Mars: Our cover article takes us into space for the second time this issue. Unusually for Gamma World, it's treatment is actually less silly than the D&D one, giving us a perfectly sensible future history of human colonisation of mars, and the things they found there, including a mostly extinct extraterrestrial race that colonised mars a long time ago, then went into suspended animation after being mostly destroyed in their own apocalyptic conflict. Mutants are somewhat rarer but hardly unknown, and human civilisation is considerably more functional than back on earth, while the aliens are fully statted out and playable as PC's, so you have plenty of chargen options. It's a harsh frontier environment, and there's plenty of wilderness to explore, but at least there's not so many insane racist factions that'll try to kill or enslave outsiders on sight. I can definitely see the upsides of setting a campaign here, so that makes this article a success. Unofficial New Illusionist Spells: Jon Pickens finishes this series off by stealing some powers from monsters as well as magic items, with mongrelmen, dark creepers, wands of illumination, and robes of blending's tricks getting turned into a form illusionists can memorise and use over and over. Plus a psionic power gets converted for some reason, several higher level variants of existing spells that last longer, cover larger areas, or affect more targets, and two variants of magic-user spells with a more tricksy shadow based flavour. As before, they're iterative rather than inspired, but many will still wind up appearing in Unearthed Arcana and future corebooks. D&D may not standardise it like some systems, but there's still solid demand for variants that are basically X spell, only more powerful in one way or another. Many an article will be filled by them in the future. Fletcher's Corner: This column takes a somewhat leftfield turn, and spends a couple of pages talking about the demographics of magic items in his campaign. While there are some unique ones, one-shot stuff like potions & scrolls and low power permanent ones like +1 weapons are available for sale. On the other hand, remember that just because an item is in the books, doesn't mean it has to exist in your campaign, and this counts double for ones that aren't in the books that the players made up or were given by another DM. So his tastes are more high magic than nearly any non-D&D campaign, which don't have the same escalation of power and treasure baked into the system, but he's still trying to hold back the worst excesses of monty haulism that ruins games. It's a tough line to draw, as you don't want to drive players away, and you want them to do cool things, but if one player comes in with a ton of items from another game and outshines the others, then you have a big problem. An interesting column, that reminds us that these things are much less of a problem now, with the expectation that you'll create new characters for each new campaign a default, and much better rules in term of expected items & treasure by level. It's good to see we have actually learned and grown since then in some ways. [/QUOTE]
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