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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8254408" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 53: May/Jun 1990part 4/5The Living Galaxy: Roger zooms in now, and asks how you can make every city on a world unique, but still fitting with the overall character of a planet when there could be hundreds or thousands of them. Realistically, this is an impossible task. You could spend years worldbuilding and still feel like you've barely scratched the surface. Ultimately, if you ever want to actually get to gaming, you're going to have to cheat, sketching broad strokes and then making up details as the players choose to focus on something. The general advice is stuff I've read plenty of times before, but it's the specific examples that are interesting, drawing on a wide range or real world inspirations from different countries and time periods. If you want variety in your worldbuilding, it helps to have a broad range of real world experience to make sure you don't unconsciously put the same old default assumptions everywhere with a few stereotyped differences. Nothing too controversial here, good or bad.The Skorpio: They find half a page free and decide to fill it with a new monster entry. Want a scorpion-esque humanoid in your campaign, but manscorpions are too deadly, between their HD, save or die attack every round and plentiful clerical abilities? Have a weaker, dumber variant which needs 3 minutes to recharge it's poison reservoirs before it can deliver another lethal sting, which in D&D combat means just one use per fight. Rather than a centaur body plan, they're bipedal, with humanoid hands, which makes doing some things easier, but without the brains, all they are is another marauding humanoid variant for mid levels, suitable for using once goblins and their relatives are no longer a threat unless in huge hordes. Pretty boring really. Another variant monster that doesn't really add anything new or clever to the game in either theme or mechanics.Character Adjustments: The promotional piece this issue at least tries to be useful in itself rather than just selling you a recently released book. Jennel (nee Paul) Jaquays tells us about Central Casting: Heroes of Legend, a multisystem book advising you on how to create interesting characters in all sorts of RPG's. One they forgot to do, though was GURPs, which ironically is one of the easiest to make unique and flavourful characters in due to the finely grained point buy system. So along with the general advice on thinking about your character's personality, history, and other general connections to the world around them that we've all seen a million times before there's the quite specific advice on not spending all your points straight away to get high basic stats, but give them interesting skills, flaws, and social connections, quite possibly holding some back until after you've played the character for a session or two and have a better idea of how you want them to be. Definitely can't do that in D&D. A reminder that there are a whole variety of systems out there now, and some are definitely better at certain things than others. Your games will go better if you pick one that's good for the genre you want to play in, instead of trying to shoehorn everything into D&D because it's the most popular. Did any of you actually buy and make use of this back in the day?</blockquote>

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