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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8280537" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 56: Nov/Dec 1990part 2/5Winter Holiday: The adventure this issue goes full festive themed in a Star Wars Holliday Special style. The evil forces of G.R.I.N.C.H are attempting to spoil the winter festival of YOUR world. (as long as it remotely resembles earthly climate, so that's Athas ruled out. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) The PC's become pawns in their machinations, recruited apparently to save it, but set up to fail and take the blame instead of the real culprits. Will they realise in time and turn on their employers? Eat the magical pears and be teleported to the north pole. Ride the iconic reindeer sleigh, fight a pair of giant turtledoves, four collies, six geese, and other things that would be easily spoilered by knowing christmas lore, and hopefully save the day. It's all very silly indeed, and sprinkled with a little dated casual racism too, but it's still better than last issue's one, because at least it's not a complete railroad, and it's not pretending to be an adventure you're supposed to take seriously and then bait & switching you, turning you into the butt of the jokes. Still not saying it's good, but it's cheesy groan-inducing bad rather than throw the whole magazine at the wall in disgust bad. If you've been at the sherry too much as a group it might be tolerable.Bookwyrms: The Realms has already had one big metaplot event to justify the changes between 1e and 2e. Now they've got the taste for it, and are going to make a regular thing of advancing the timeline and changing things around. Round two! The Horde invades from the east! What will your characters do?! It's better than the first in many ways because it actually gives the PC's an opportunity to get involved and make a difference on a local level rather than just being stuck on the sidelines losing all their spells and watching gods clash. Their actions could save a good deal of lives and property for whatever town they're in at the time the invaders arrive. But it's worse in another because it's just a blatant rip of a real world event, and one that can easily devolve into yellow peril racist nonsense. To their credit, they are writing it in a way that makes it clear that no side is purely heroes or villains, with each book in the trilogy showing things from a different point of view. I'm sure a native reading them could find all sorts of things that are either wrong or grossly oversimplified about chinese and mongolian culture in them, but at least their hearts are in the right place. Plus it actively encourages learning about other cultures both IC and OOC by opening up a huge new area to explore, and creating more reasons for OA and regular AD&D characters to crossover with each other and form mixed adventuring parties. It's just a shame that this came as the OA gameline was winding down, so ironically, contact between the continents actually decreases after this in subsequent FR supplements. We'll be seeing a lot of this sort of shallowly diverse representation over the 2e era, one or two books on a culture, then moving on again. I suppose it's still better than the near total absence of multicultural setting stuff after WotC took over. Another of those persistent problems that never really goes away, as there's only so much media one person has time to consume, and long term, things will trend back towards the lowest common denominator because that's what sells to the largest audience and remains profitable.</blockquote>

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