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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8264226" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1990part 5/5Wolff & Byrd: One comic ends, and a new one moves in to occupy the same page. More oddly, it's not a Polyhedron exclusive, but a long-running one that's been syndicated in multiple publications as well as it's own comic and compilation books and is still going today despite the death of it's original creator. Alanna Wolff & Jeff Byrd are attorneys for the legal issues of various supernatural creatures. In this instalment they're arguing for the legal rights of Frankenstein's Monster, which is of course a term they thoroughly disapprove of. Call him a Reanimated-American, or some other more respectful euphemism. Will they manage to win, and how will they collect their legal fees if he's not a responsible citizen with a job yet? Let's see how long this one sticks around, and if it'll be an ongoing story or a different standalone gag each time.Living City Tournament: Ooh. Here's where the Living City really starts becoming properly live and interactive, as they set the rules for creating persistent characters that you can use and advance from one tournament adventure to the next. Since they can't trust you to roll characters unsupervised and want to keep things fair, they're going entirely point-buy with the stats, with a pool of 84 to distribute as you choose. This seems pretty decent, but remember they're keeping Comeliness when most home games have dropped it or never even included it in the first place, which means you'll have an average of 12 across the board, and subclasses with high requirements will be very limited in how they arrange their other stats. HP are max at 1st level and half for each die after that. No evil alignments allowed, and magic items restricted to a small set of bland plus adders that make sure you can't ruin their railroads with a cheap trick like turning gaseous. So there's some interestingly forward thinking stuff here, as completely eliminating the randomness in character generation will still take quite a few years to become the default in RPG's, but also a fair bit of irritating restrictiveness and weird legacy cruft as well. Hopefully they won't have to pile on even more restrictions to counter rules lawyering crap from players too quickly, and some people will make it to decent levels through a whole load of adventures over the next decade before the edition change sweeps everything away. With multiple new things being introduced this issue, including a couple of very interesting long-term technological advancements, this issue feels pretty significant historically. They're making more steps to make the RPGA a club with plenty of ways for people to get involved, and allowing you to play modules with persistent characters rather than pregens really rewards putting the effort in and making tournament-going a regular part of your social life. If they can pull it off, it means the 90's are going to be a lot busier for them than the 80's were. Let's keep on going and hope that process of increasing connectedness and interactivity is interesting to watch in hindsight.</blockquote>

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