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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8311773" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 59: May 1991part 3/5The New Rogues Gallery: A particularly interesting foray into unfamiliar systems for this column, as they detail a group of smugglers for the Star Wars d6 system. A half human/half orlac, and three new alien species that don't appear in the movies at all. Like many a petty criminal, they really just want to make a profit and have a little fun on the side, but when you've got a huge expansionist evil empire breathing down your neck, I guess you've got to do a bit of heroics just by default to stay alive and free, so they wound up joining the rebellion forces. This is in keeping with the general tone of the WEG star wars books, where they focussed much more of the everyday folks in a weird universe just trying to survive than the space wizards and heroes journey stuff. You're not going to go from farmboy to psychic master pilot in a matter of hours, so scale your ambitions accordingly. As long as you can accept that, it does seem to support a fair bit of flexibility, with the new aliens including a bird-person, a shapeshifter, and an intelligent giant ant. Are you going to join them on their journeys? Will enough people in the RPGA do so for them to run tournament adventures in that system? It did pretty well with the general public, so hopefully this won't be a one-off appearance in the newszine. The Living Galaxy: Roger continues with fairly generic worldbuilding advice with a sci-fi flavour that's actually useful for most campaigns. Originality is hard, so if you want to make lots of planets for your setting, it's much easier to steal from existing planets and change them just enough to make them interesting to adventure in. (usually by decreasing the lethality and increasing the amount of life.) Make it martian, but the air is just about thick enough to breathe with the aid of a respirator. Europan, but the sea is close enough under the ice for you to dig to it. Earth-like, but with saturnesque rings rather than one basic moon. It's all a pretty strong reminder that to make space adventures work, you need to either soft-pedal the challenges, or provide the PC's with hypertech that we don't even have a theoretical path to creating in the real world, because otherwise the vast distances and hostile environments will either kill your PC's in seconds, or have them die of old age before they even get to another solar system. While you can make interesting adventures in an ultra-hard sci-fi setting, they won't be much like D&D ones, and you'll have to fastforward through large stretches of time even more than in D&D wilderness exploration missions. It does seem pretty challenging, which is why most settings don't even try. Oh well. When it comes to storytelling, It's better to fail in an interesting way than succeed in a boring one. That's another lesson suitable for any genre.</blockquote>

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