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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8263379" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1990part 4/5GEnie in a Computer: We've already seen them talking about the technological advances in their membership cards. Now the RPGA has it's own messageboard. Call this number and you can play-by-post with people from all around the world, find out about and order new products direct from TSR, or simply exchange messages like any forum. Call now, and get some traffic going! Good luck. After all, the internet is still tiny and expensive, and the RPGA is only about 10,000 people in total. Is the intersection between these groups enough to sustain critical mass of interactions or will it languish with days or weeks between posts? Are the communications from this era still out there archived somewhere on the internet? If they are, I'd very much like to know where, to get a better picture of what's changed and what's stayed the same over the past 30 years. A Haunting Contest: Scary season will be on us again soon, so the next competition is to design rooms for a haunted house. Send in your ideas with either AD&D or Call of Cthulhu stats, and the best ones will be put together into a full home which hopefully we'll get all the details on and be able to play through ourselves. Another thing to look forward too and hope the contestants come up with something inventive the regular writers wouldn't think of.The Living Galaxy: Roger has done the large scale details now, so he's free to concentrate on more unique specifics. So here's a look at what artificial satellites a world might have circling it. Why are they there, who put them there, what do they look like and how do they interact with one-another? In a peaceful, civilised world there'd be a whole load of infrastructure up there supporting day-to-day communication, and they'd all be in nice neat orbits catalogued so there's no risk of collisions. This is boring, of course, so there's plenty of potential for a more dynamic system, with tiny satellites latching onto larger ones, stealing their data, taking over their systems or destroying them. It's a field of conflict that would work very differently to ground wars, with stealth only possible by being very small and making no course changes for long periods of time unless you have technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic. It's all very interesting stuff, only marred by still being completely system free when something like this really needs custom designed mechanics to make it playable. What game would handle this kind of LEO manoeuvring in a way that's fun and not too complex? Any suggestions? The Living City: This column delves into increasingly niche retail establishments to keep from repeating itself. A shop devoted entirely to cloaks? I guess the Realms does have a lot of maniacally cackling villains who need a suitably dramatic outfit to monologue in, so you're never going to be short of trade if you've got the skills and reputation. Not that the proprietors themselves are villains, quite the opposite, being reliable, conscientious and charitable as well, taking in old worn out cloaks, trimming them down & patching them up and giving them to poor kids for free. There's no real conflict between father and son in how they should be running the operation here, so any adventure seeds will stem from their proactive niceness instead and how that might spark envy from less pleasant competitors, or adventurers needing to obtain rare and valuable materials so they can craft custom magical cloaks for them. Theres definitely some use to be got out of this, but it's unlikely to be somewhere you go back too between every adventure unless your adventurer is a dedicated fashionista who's constantly blowing all their loot on upgraded outfits. (Carrie's the Bard, Miranda's the Wizard, Charlotte's the Cleric and Samantha's the Barbarian)</blockquote>

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