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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8113980" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 36: May/Jun 1987part 4/5On the road to The Living City: After dealing with two different types of trickery on their journey already, the players would be quite justified in being suspicious of the next encounter. So they take delight in subverting our expectations with a wizardly trader by the side of the road who looks suspicious and weird, but is actually honest. Unfortunately, he's also not very good at being a magic-user, and most of the magic items he's selling have drawbacks or side-effects, but there's a few cool bargains in there as well. This definitely feels like it would have gone in the april issue if they were a little more organised at the moment, as the combination of pure jokes and things that are actually useful despite the humorous veneer are about right. Despite the ravens in the title, the living city definitely isn't going to be a particularly dark or serious setting if these are anything to go by. When you have one of the largest concentrations of PC's in the multiverse, evil can't really get much of a foothold, so the challenges are more likely to be monsters of the week and the overall tone remain lighthearted. At least, until they get bored and decide to have a big metaplot event, but that's very much a mid-90's thing. You need to have a stable status quo for a while before shaking it up has any emotional impact. A Case for Cultures: Speaking of shaking things up, here's a topic that shows up over and over again. The question of why humans have distinct cultures and languages for each country, while other intelligent creatures wind up with a stereotyped monoculture. We only have so much room in our minds, so the more different or far away things are from us, the more we have to generalise. As long as most of your articles are generic rather than for a specific setting, you'll never fix this problem, and if you have a single breakout character, it can wind up replacing the previous stereotype and dominating the characterisation for the race as a whole. (which is why the drow have so many Drizzt clones) So here's two examples of specific cultures from this writer's home setting. The Wild Elves of the mountains of Balon, and the Hobgoblins from the Desert of Screams. Neither go against their basic racial traits, but they add more specific details on top of that of history and technological development to give them more personality depth and make them slightly more challenging encounters. It's only a page each, and still generic enough to be easily ported into another campaign, but it's decently done, and hopefully it'll inspire you to do the same.</blockquote>

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