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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8270115" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 55: Sep/Oct 1990part 2/5Gaming With Computers: The RPGA has been keeping track of it's membership with a computer database for a good half a decade now, although not without it's share of teething troubles and glitches. Home computers grow more affordable and powerful by the year, meaning using them to assist your gaming becomes increasingly viable. So here's one of those reminders of how things that we take for granted now were a real struggle just a few decades ago, and gives us a better idea of what became possible when. Character sheets, adventure outlines, session recaps, maps, all become quicker and easier to do and much easier to copy, edit and revise once you have a decent computer program set up to handle them. Obviously it's not telling us anything new or particularly useful to modern gamers, as the specifics of what programs they used are laughably out of date, so it's only interesting as a historical artifact, but that's true of a lot of these articles. There'll probably be another in a few years time, given how rapidly they were progressing back then. Bookwyrms: This column takes the time to promote all the books TSR publishes that don't fit into an established game line. The highly meta murder mystery Bimbos of the Death Sun. The post-apocalyptic western The Earth Remembers. Monkey Station, Aradath Mayhar's take on Planet of the Apes. Warsprite, Jeff Swycaffer's tale of two robots landing on earth that seems very suitable for a movie adaption. The far solar system mining exploits of Outbanker. Surprised how few of these I've actually read, which is another reminder how much non D&D stuff they tried that didn't sell particularly well, and so never got any follow-ups. Even once I've finished this seemingly endless journey through the more obscure parts of their output, there's still a load of standalone things to go back and check out if I can find them. (Not always easy, as if they're both decades out of print and obscure, it's quite possible no-one's even bothered to pirate them.) In a world as big as ours, you'll never run out of things to do if you've got a little imagination. It's just finding the time and resources to actually do them that's tricky. Easy Money: The adventure this issue is another one heavily tied into Raven's Bluff, taking advantage of characters and places already statted out in the sourcebook to link things into the bigger picture. The circus is in town and they want more dancing bears. The PC's get hired to go capture as many of them as possible, with a particular bonus for capturing a golden one that's been seen in the hills near Raven's Bluff recently. There's no real sense of exploration though, as this is a linear adventure that eschews a map for having them experience exactly the same encounters in order wherever they wander. Your basic orc and worg attack ripped straight from The Hobbit. A pair of ghosts that'll bicker and heckle your characters with a Statler & Waldorf routine, and probably mop the floor with characters of the expected level if you try and fight them. An awful asian monk stereotype who will speak only in inscrutable koans with a heavy accent, and is also probably capable of beating the whole party single-handed if they lose patience with him. And the climactic encounter, where the golden bear turns out to be a werebear who will pretend to let himself be captured and use the journey back to subtly prank the characters. So with a premise built around animal cruelty, plus railroading, racism and bad comedy as toppings, this manages an impressive catalog of yikes that makes it an absolute nope from me. Surely in the Realms there are enough fully sentient weird creatures with interesting powers that could be persuaded to participate in a stage show that dancing bears would seem too trivial to bother with in the first place? This is gross and stupid in both premise and implementation. A failure on every level.</blockquote>

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