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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8175654" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 44: November 1988part 5/5The Living City: The Raven's Bluff location detailed this issue is an open air farmer's market. Not an obvious place for adventurers to tarry long, so they put plenty of effort into filling it with plot hooks. A half-elven elf supremacist who will be overly obsequious to any full-blooded elves passing by, but then get bitter, creepy & stalky if snubbed. An exceedingly misogynistic thief (but also an exceedingly good cabinet maker who could easily make a decent living from just his cover job) who's backstory is cribbed from Greek tragedy. A bored young mage with a much older husband who will eagerly join any adventuring party with an interesting plot lead & plan to accomplish it, then get cold feet from all the bloodshed and go back to him after a bit. And the owners of the place, who are relatively mundane by comparison but still have full stats and detailed personality quirks. Like all the best Realms articles, it's dense with quirky information that you can use in all sorts of different ways, and any one group will probably only scratch the surface of, but really helps in making it feel like a big, complex world filled with moral ambiguities and minor problems to fix. Much more interesting and handy than it needs to be, which definitely deserves praise. Ed Greenwood has taught them well. New Rogues Gallery: Former RPGA boss Kim Eastland returns to Polyhedron as a normal contributor, with some Gamma World material. You've seen the modules for sale based on his home campaign, now read about the characters that originally played through those plotlines. Well, this is certainly more historically significant than D&D characters sent in by some random player. Let's see how well written they are.Boris the Bear is not the same Boris the Bear that got a comic in the wake of Turtlemania. That one was a mean-spirited parody of the mutant animal genre, while this one plays things completely straight, which is particularly weird because this is Gamma World. He adopts the trappings of an arthurian knight, and strives to be a fair and chivalrous hero at all times. In a wacky postapocalyptic world this kind of exaggerated seriousness is inherently funny in itself. He seems very usable in other people's campaigns. Cody Matrix is a cyborg with an absolute ton of unique modifications, giving him a truly Inspector Gadget level of flexibility. He believes he's just a robot, but is actually the true heir to a kingdom overthrown and taken over by a dictator. If his memory returns and people see the birthmark on the small part of his body that is still human, they'll rally behind him. So this seems to be projecting high fantasy tropes onto Gamma World, seeing how they work for building a long-term campaign in a different milieu. It's less kitchen sink gonzo and more the humour of juxtaposing just a few clashing ideas. I wonder how people will react to that. Another pretty good issue overall, with plenty of variety in both game systems and approaches to playing them. After a lot of hard work to get things running smoothly, they finally have both good staff and a decent number of submissions to choose from. Hopefully they can keep that up for a good few years before diminishing returns and being caught up in the general downfall of TSR. Let's head on into 1989 and see how the RPGA deals with the changing of the editions and it's effects on organised large scale play.</blockquote>

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