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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8153047" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 41: May 1988part 5/5The Living City: The Raven's Bluff column goes uptown, to detail Volodar's Stardust Inn, a decidedly swanky place where currently rich adventurers can enjoy fine food and beds, plus a glitzy casino that tempts them to gamble away their hard-won treasures and leave them poor again for the next adventure. Gee, that's not a direct rip-off of a specific real world place at all, is it? <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" /> It even has technomagically powered anachronisms like elevators and security cameras just to make it extra obvious. It's more than a little silly. But I guess that means it fits into the Forgotten Realms perfectly, with it's sense of whimsy and somewhat porous 4th wall. It also fits perfectly into the Realms in it's attention to detail, with plenty of interesting NPC's, who are of course high level enough that you can't roll through this one with violence or rob them easily. Once again, this has enough depth put into it that you can come back to it repeatedly and put it to multiple uses. It's good to see people taking the right lessons from Ed Greenwood's writing and managing to imitate it successfully.New Rogues Gallery: This column also starts including Raven's Bluff references in the character histories. Still a bit early for them to have actually played their history out and gained all these levels in actual play though. So I strongly suspect some fudging has taken place in their backstories, as this does still have the feel of a player telling you about his characters, rather than NPC's specifically written to be useful in other people's games. They're just too darn nice for you to have any real reason to come into conflict with them. So once again it isn't nearly as interesting or useful as the preceding one. It's all a bit baffling as an editorial decision. Couldn't you give your readers a bit more guidance in this area.With some useful crunch, and interesting changes to both their game & administrative systems, this is a well above average issue in both usability and historical significance. It definitely feels like they've got over their post-Gygax slump and are heading full steam for 2e with all that entails. Let's see what progression next issue offers, and how soon they'll hit another roadblock to their plans.</blockquote>

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