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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8290118" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 57: Jan/Feb 1991part 3/5Mutations: The longest article in the issue is not the adventure, unusually, but a 7 page list of new Gamma World mutations. Dale Henson gives us 39 of them, presented in alphabetical order. They're a decidedly motley bunch, some useful, some mixed, and some just bizarre, like the one that makes you lose your sexual characteristics and instead become able to reproduce by parthogenesis, which has no real effect on your abilities, but seems designed to annoy the same people who hate the AD&D girdle of gender switching if acquired randomly mid-campaign. There's also mental illnesses as mutations, which I don't think passes modern standards of political correctness either. The powers are also not remotely balanced either of course, ranging from instant death ray twice/day, to super-acne that also just happens to give you poison resistance, and bioluminescence which is mainly just a pain in the ass. Most baffling of all, the stats are 2e ones, despite that being very old news indeed by now, and an acknowledgement of how badly 3e flopped by comparison. This is all a bit messy and uncomfortable on multiple levels. Not that I'm planning on playing Gamma World any time soon, but even if I were I don't think I'd be using this one. The Everwinking Eye: Ed acknowledges that he may be overdoing it a bit in his detailing of Maskyr's Eye, as Elminster manages to waffle even himself to sleep by the end of this. In the meantime, we get to find out even more about their diet, unique breeds of farm animal, and system of government. The kind of thing that aren't so immediately useful for adventurers, but make the world more solid, and illustrate just how vast his stores of general knowledge are in all sorts of fields. (particularly the culinary arts.) It's ironic that his day job as a librarian actually allows him to be more prolific than most of the TSR staffers who spend all day in the office, and lets him be exposed to all sorts of books that you wouldn't think to buy (or these days, google) on your own. Who else here would note on the use of vinyards to make practical use of hilly terrain that doesn't support other crops and reduce erosion? It's the kind of thing that makes me fall in love with his writing all over again. No-one else manages the degree of depth he does over the long term, and it's these little seemingly extraneous details that make it all possible, far more than the ridiculously overpowered famous NPC's.</blockquote>

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