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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8301595" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 58: Mar/Apr 1991part 4/5With Great Power: Turns out the cover star is a Marvel one, and the only thing in the issue that's strictly April Fool themed. The Joker is fine as a Batman adversary, but in a shared world full of genuinely superhuman superheroes, he'll fall pretty quickly without the aid of serious narrative fiat or an explicit dramatic editing system that lets competent normals operate on the same scale as powered ones via greater luck and retconned planning. The solution? Say hello to …… (drum roll) The Harlequin! All the insanity of a regular name-brand Joker, plus superhuman acrobatics and the ability to materialise mind-warping pies at his fingertips that'll really ruin your day if they hit you! Like his DC inspiration, he spends most of his time in an asylum, but only because he likes the decor, and can break out again pretty much whenever he feels like it no matter what clever new restraints they try to implement. In the meantime, there's plenty of fun to be had gradually driving the psychiatrists who try to treat him to insanity as well, while giving just enough hints that his old personality is in there somewhere that they don't give up entirely. Even if this wasn't still a superhero universe where heroes don't usually kill even the worst villains, he has a healing factor on top of his other superhuman abilities. Well, he seems like an almighty pain in the butt to deal with. So this is obviously derivative and goofy, but at least it's in a way that's solid rules-wise, patches the flaws with the original character and makes it more usable in game, particularly if your players aren't as rigidly virtuous as Batman & Superman in never killing their adversaries no matter how annoying they get. I think this falls within the bounds of usability. The Everwinking Eye: Ed thought he was finished with Maskyr's Eye last issue, but no, turns out he still has more to tell. Two mini-adventures set in the vicinity, each about half a page long, plus several more adventure seeds where you'll have to fill in the details yourself. These reveal a few of the secrets he's spent the past half a year teasing, but not all of them, and as usual, raise more questions than they answer. Yet again, he packs more game-useful information into half a page than many of Dungeon's 2-3 page mini adventures. With all this detail, you could start off a campaign there even without owning the main Realms corebook, although you'd probably get tired of the size of your sandbox and want to venture into the wider world eventually. Still, it's an excellent demonstration how individual parts of the Realms like Raven's Bluff, Neverwinter or Baldur's Gate wind up more detailed and popular than most other entire campaign worlds. Every part manages to be fractally interesting, with each entry somehow creating more room for adding further details instead of closing them off. Dragonlance could never. The Living City: This column makes a somewhat goofy side turn, giving us a logic puzzle. Which 2 out of these 5 wizards are also thieves? Each lives in a different color house, has a different type of familiar, smokes a different kind of pipeweed and prefers a different beverage to drink. Can you eliminate all the impossible combinations from these clues and figure out the culprits? The kind of thing I'm very familiar with from easter treasure hunts, so I guess this is seasonal, just not the particular festival they usually celebrate in here. Amusing as a diversion, but not the kind of thing they could run every month without hitting diminishing returns rapidly. I wonder if any of the wizards named will actually show up again with proper stats in future columns, or tying this into Raven's Bluff was merely a branding thing with no thought to continuity.</blockquote>

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