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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8243974" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 52: March 1990part 2/5No Dice: The module this issue is an ultra-meta one for Paranoia, putting your troubleshooters up against the forces of the Gamers, the newest secret society on the block. Pretending to be someone you're not? Recreating events from the past? Engaging in creativity?! Sounds like the sort of things commie mutant traitors would do. Your troubleshooters are ordered to deal with them. Hijinks ensue, packed with references to all sorts of roleplaying games. The transport is as unreliable as ever, most people's names are puns, and the "magic item" you recover from their bodies makes things much much worse, as it swaps people's minds to help them get into character more convincingly, giving you plenty of opportunity for chaotic roleplaying as you try to play each other's characters in quick succession. Your superiors then try to adjust this device to give citizens in general more pleasant, tractable personalities, and make alpha complex a better place. This, as usual, goes horribly wrong, turning everyone into pompous douchebag Roy G Biv, so you need to figure out how to keep your own personalities in the right body long enough to get near it and shut it down. Presuming things don't go completely off the rails or you run out of clones before getting through the adventure, which is very much a possibility. This is more linear than the average Dungeon adventure, but less than many of the D&D ones in here, and a lot funnier than Rick Reid's attempts at humour. The references actually have some intelligence to them instead of being just twee and tiresome, and the setting gives you enough room to try intelligent approaches. (even if many of them will backfire and kill you, or get other players to kill you for betraying the computer, because this is Paranoia, after all.) This has my approval as both variety and comedy. Making a comedy RPG adventure fun is all about getting the PC's to participate in the mayhem, not using them as the audience for your stand-up routine. That's the way to do it! (oh no it isn't) OH YES IT IS!!!!! Riding Rules: Straight after the adventure for one less frequently played system, we have an even rarer one. Rolemaster never got a single article in Dragon, so like Palladium's TMNT, it's a very interesting turnup to find out there is one in Polyhedron. It's a very sharp contrast too, as Paranoia is very system light, and what rules there are are frequently broken in the name of comedy, while Rolemaster is very crunchy indeed. So here's a couple of pages of new riding manoeuvres, for more dramatic horsetop combats. Presuming you're good enough to pull them off reliably, of course, for fumbling them, having your horse trip on an imaginary molehill and both dying from a bad critical hit is a very real danger if you aren't. It is a rather lethal system, sometimes to the point of silliness. Interesting for the sake of variety, but not really that useful to anyone who doesn't play Rolemaster, due to the specificity of the rules. I guess that's a constant struggle when trying to maintain diversity of systems. You can please a few people a lot, or everyone a little bit. Which is more likely to keep them coming back and paying money for your material?</blockquote>

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