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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8236722" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 51: January 1990part 2/5For a Few Gunfights More: Boot Hill material has always done relatively well in here. So it's no surprise that when publishing a new edition, they decide to promote it extra hard in Polyhedron rather than Dragon. So here's another of their full page pieces where they tell us what's changed in the new edition (much of it inspired by articles in this very publication), and why these changes are a good thing so hopefully you'll go out and spend some money on it. They've thoroughly rejigged the stats and added a skill system to make the game more than just a gunfighting simulator. (although the gunfights still get priority over everything else) They've got a whole chapter on customising and advancing your horses, so they can feel important and keep up with the humans over a campaign. And the back of the book is filled with both general campaign advice, a sample town and several specific adventures. (although some of those may well be reprints of old modules. ) It all reflects the general trends in roleplaying towards longer campaigns and more detailed settings these days. Hopefully it'll do well enough to inspire a few more articles in here before it fades away again, this time for good. Unless someone gets hold of the rights and publishes a new edition. But how well would that sell? Westerns were already a genre in decline in the 90's, they feel thoroughly anachronistic now, where you really can't use cut-out stereotypes of other human ethnicities or nationalities as the villain without serious complaints. How could they go about squaring the circle of making a Western set game fun but non-flamewar causing?On a Roll: A second promotional article in quick succession, although this one is a little more interesting and useful than just a straight advert. Lou Zocchi has spent many years trying to improve the science of dice, creating new forms of increasingly complex polyhedron that are still symmetrical and so have equal chances to roll any side. His current goal is a 24-sided one, which seems relatively simple, you just get a 6-sided one and expand each side into a pyramid. But calculating the precise angles to make it roll smoothly while keeping each side well-defined, that's the tricky part. Anyway, to celebrate this, they want you to send in random generation tables with 24 entries on RPG related topics. The winners will get 24 sided dice to use the tables with, and the top three will get a deluxe jeweled hundred-sided die as well. This is one article that's particularly appropriate to the newszine's name, making people aware that there are more kinds of polyhedrons out there than the familiar 6 used in D&D, and it wouldn't hurt to add a few of the rarer ones to your collection. They may not ever be as popular, even 30 years on, but they sure do add a lot more speed and granularity to generating various probability spreads. Get your Dungeon Crawl Classics out and give them a roll.</blockquote>

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