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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8136523" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 39: Jan/Feb 1988part 5/5With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: So far, Polyhedron's Marvel output has been mostly adventures. This time, they do one that's more like Dragon's Marvel-Philes, giving us the stats and brief history for a fairly obscure set of characters. The Crimson Commando, Stonewall and Super Sabre, patriotic war heroes turned murderous far-right vigilantes, who when beaten and exposed, then got put on the decidedly morally grey government-sponsored superhero team Freedom Force, where they continued to be generally unpleasant people and get in the X-men's way until finished off in the Gulf War. An excellent example of how the "right sort of people" can fail upwards and do all sorts of horrible things with token punishments at the most when caught, because the way they're bad aligns with the way the system is corrupt and discriminatory. Gee, that's totally not political or incredibly relevant in the modern era at all, is it now? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> A strong reminder that the USA has always had serious issues with police/military brutality and corruption, and ubiquitous camera phones merely made it much harder to sweep under the rug. The Marvel writers have known about and been commenting on that social injustice since the 60's, and it's still not fixed. If only we had some proper superheroes in the real world who could do something about it without becoming corrupted by that power and winding up worse in the long run than the system they replaced. Then there wouldn't be a need to keep on telling these kinds of stories. The Critical Hit: This column ventures out into the wider realms of roleplaying again, to look at MERP, the current official licensed game for if you want to play in Tolkien's world. But not particularly in the same style as his writings, as it takes a lot of liberties with the design like putting in D&D style clerics when nothing in the source material even hints at them. The core system is a simplified version of Rolemaster, and is still considerably heavier than AD&D, retaining the love of large and brutal critical hit tables, and granular spell lists with lots of escalating versions of the same effect. Surviving a long-term campaign in it seems difficult. While he tries to be positive as usual, this is the closest he's come yet to a negative review. It could definitely be both more fun, and more faithful to the source material, possibly even at the same time with a bit of a redesign. Convention Judge Appeal: We finish off with another attempt to get more people actively involved in running officially sanctioned convention adventures. They never seem to have enough for the number who want to play, and really want to get up the number running non-D&D systems in particular. They keep the form pretty simple, so hopefully people won't be intimidated by the idea. I guess we'll see in the september issue or so if they managed to increase their turnout yet again, and if their system can handle all the scoring and xp tracking in a timely fashion now.An issue that feels particularly of it's time, both in covering a lot of current events, and in it's somewhat dated attitudes. Many of those problems have been solved, but some are still all too present, or could crop up again at any time. Quality-wise, it's also a very mixed bag, with both good, interestingly bad, and boringly bad. Let's see if next issue is more progressive, regressive, or merely closer to the present by a linear amount.</blockquote>

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