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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8262103" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1990part 2/5The New Rogues Gallery: For the first time, this column takes advantages of the 2e changes to give us a full party of Bards, which would have been thoroughly unfeasible when you needed at least 11 levels before you could even start as one. Adagio Jones and the Goodwinds are a five-piece group of travelling troubadours with a strong sense of social justice (apart from the horn player, who's a bit of a dick and likely to wind up splitting over artistic differences eventually), singing about protecting animals and plants, the fight for legal rights for humanoids, mocking the powerful, and maybe a few love songs too for good measure. That'll give them plenty of reasons to come into conflict with pompous authoritarians and get involved in adventures with your PC's. They all have both clearly defined personalities and varying skillsets that give them different functions in the band, while not being one-trick ponies either. The writer has done their research not only on real world music, but also the unique instruments of the Forgotten Realms, referencing several different Dragon articles and combining them in a way that makes sense and produces more adventure hooks along the way. And to top it off, there's two new spells that allow them to amplify and distort sounds, letting them play to bigger audiences and with different textures that would be familiar to modern audiences, but still relatively novel in the Realms. It's mildly 4th wall breaking, but that's hardly new here, and the references are the right level of humorous rather than groan-inducing. This performance can have a hearty round of applause and a few cries of encore into the bargain.Bring Your Game To Life: Time to return to another familiar topic, with some more advice on painting miniatures. As usual when it's been several years, they start from scratch, advising you of all the things you need to get going, and how much they cost at current prices. It's actually very precise, talking about specific gauges of knife and brush that'll serve you best working with things of this size, the pros and cons of different kind of paint, and various other peripherals that you otherwise wouldn't think of until you're halfway through and suddenly realise you need. Obviously there's a fair bit of repetition from previous takes, but taken in isolation, this is pretty good, being both technical and easy to understand, which is always a tricky needle to thread. I have no objections to this.The Art of Magic: Another Ars Magica article? That clinches it, it's definitely more popular here than it was amongst Dragon readers. How interesting. Unfortunately, on looking closer, it turns out that this is also their second game material free promotional article for the issue, telling you about the game and why it's cool & worth buying rather than showing through IC fiction and cool new crunchy bits. The one in issue 40 actually got this right, so it's extra disappointing to see them defaulting back to straight promotion that's of no use once you buy the products. It is longer and more detailed than most of their promotional articles, and shows that they must be doing pretty well given the number of supplements they've released in the past couple of years and are planning to release in the near future, but ultimately, this is pretty dull. Wake me when you include an actual adventure for the system in here or something else worth actually reviewing properly.</blockquote>

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