Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8255404" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 53: May/Jun 1990part 5/5The ABC's of Acronyms: A short one that's focussed on Top Secret, but really is useful to any game, giving lots of suggestions for good words to fill out the acronyms of your alphabet soup agencies. Be they official government ones, or the secret villainous ones they're trying to foil, they still need a name, preferably one that's suitably catchy and symbolic. You probably don't have time to go through the whole dictionary, so this is a handy shortcut for those situations. Not bad, but there's probably something similar but better to be found on the internet these days so hardly indispensable.A Magical Contest: Having just finished their third membership drive, time for another contest to encourage engagement. New magical items are one of the most popular kinds of articles, but Polyhedron doesn't do many of them. Want to change that? There are big prizes to be won! As ever, I look forward to seeing the results, and hope they'll be good.The Living City: So we've finally reached the cover story. Before the invention of refrigeration, ice houses were big business for thousands of years, with an emphasis on the big,  as you'd need to buy in serious bulk to take advantage of the square/cube effect on heat transference and have enough to last the whole summer, even with a heavily insulated storage space that's also built underground with a single vertical entrance to take advantage of convection effects for additional cooling. Pleasingly, this place shows that the writer has done their research, with a shaded entrance that leads to an underground cavern full of nooks and crannies. There's rumours that it contains a secret exit to deeper caverns with monsters and stuff, but it's not on the map, so that's probably false unless you really want to change it in your campaign. What might become an adventure though, is that one of the junior employees is also a thief, and his guild wants to use the place to secretly store stolen goods that are too hot to fence right now. He actually likes his employers and would rather not expose them to the liability, but once you're linked to organised crime, it's hard to say no to "requests" like that. It'll probably take the PC's involvement to cut the knot one way or another. Another fairly interesting entry that strikes the right balance between drawing on real world history and making the worldbuilding useful for a D&D game where you're expected to be adventurers passing through. The much greater number of submissions they get for this column continue to reap dividends in terms of quality compared to everything else here. Bloodmoose & Company kill the monsters with several dramatic twists, then reveal that the whole series has been building towards a single terrible pun. And so this comic can conclude with us all making a hearty groan. Don't you just love a happy ending. An issue that would definitely have read a lot better if I was reading it when it was released first time around, as it has a lot of riffs on themes that aren't terrible in themselves, but I've grown jaded on from decades of seeing variants of them. Once again, as they try to expand, they're catering more to newbies, leaving me a little bored. Oh well, I got through the last cycle of that approach. This too shall pass. Onward we go once again.</blockquote>

Verification