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<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8107855" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 35: Mar/Apr 1987part 4/5The Undead Bole: They follow straight on with round 5, so they're filling a full 17 pages with this adventure, more than half the issue. Having long since given up on maintaining consistency of naming in their NPC's, they now decide to blatantly rip off The Black Cauldron, which was in turn based on Welsh myth. That's almost on the other side of europe entirely! So you have to take on a cavalcade of souped-up turn resistant undead, wind up being naughty word over by another bit of no save trickery, and then railroaded into another linear quest to destroy the macguffin. They do at least include a full-frontal assault option and a stealth one for getting through the challenges, and some attempts to build spooky atmosphere, but this is really showing how linear and annoying multi-part tournament adventures become, especially ones where the parties are remixed every time, so you can't even have any consequences from previous rounds carry over to the next one if a team does do particularly well or badly. You have to completely idiot-proof the exposition and turn the scenery into static invincible backdrops to keep things on the rails. It just goes against the things an RPG is good at, to the point where you might as well be playing a computer game.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 8107855, member: 27780"] [b][u]Polyhedron Issue 35: Mar/Apr 1987[/u][/b] part 4/5 The Undead Bole: They follow straight on with round 5, so they're filling a full 17 pages with this adventure, more than half the issue. Having long since given up on maintaining consistency of naming in their NPC's, they now decide to blatantly rip off The Black Cauldron, which was in turn based on Welsh myth. That's almost on the other side of europe entirely! So you have to take on a cavalcade of souped-up turn resistant undead, wind up being naughty word over by another bit of no save trickery, and then railroaded into another linear quest to destroy the macguffin. They do at least include a full-frontal assault option and a stealth one for getting through the challenges, and some attempts to build spooky atmosphere, but this is really showing how linear and annoying multi-part tournament adventures become, especially ones where the parties are remixed every time, so you can't even have any consequences from previous rounds carry over to the next one if a team does do particularly well or badly. You have to completely idiot-proof the exposition and turn the scenery into static invincible backdrops to keep things on the rails. It just goes against the things an RPG is good at, to the point where you might as well be playing a computer game. [/QUOTE]

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