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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8331412" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 61: July 1991part 4/5The Living City: One of the very first facts they settled on about Raven's Bluff was that it's a port city. So here's another ship based bit of setting for your games. Eldritch, Lightfoot, Findrol & co are a trio of elf ship captains who've set up a joint trading company. Their long lifespan means they've been going longer than humans could with no turnover in the upper ranks, and they've worked their way up to becoming the second largest trading company in Raven's Bluff. Since they can take the long view without pandering to the quarterly demands of shareholders they're actually pretty good employers, sticking to any deals they make and paying their crews decently. While each of them has their own statistical strengths and personality quirks, they're all pretty well-balanced mentally and none of them is secretly plotting to betray the others or running scams on the side. If your PC's take a job from them, they can sleep safe knowing any dangers on the journey are purely external ones. Like many of the Rogues Galleries, this is competently written, but just too darn nice to be top tier gaming material, and will probably be mostly a background element rather than something your players interact regularly with and become attached too. I Blew Up The Car: Another convention story from the organisers that makes it clear that RPGA headquarters runs on mercilessly taking the piss out of each other. Chris Schon is the latest in a long line of people who volunteered to help out at Gen Con, and found that once you've done it once, it's very hard to escape doing it again, and suffering from duty creep as they offload tasks on anyone available at the time. He gets revenge by exposing Skip's terrible hygiene, Jean's terrible organisation, and the strange cuisine they serve up their "guests". He then tried to blow up Skip's car (in-game of course), which the GM made backfire with hilarious consequences (they were playing Paranoia, so that makes sense) He spent the rest of the weekend grumbling about this, only mildly leavened by the sadistic amusement at Skip suffering a real life fire in his house due to a faulty toaster, then losing the key to his filing cabinet just before a game, forcing them to use brute force to bust it open. It's a surprisingly hard life being the Sage, it seems. Despite spending the whole article complaining, he then ends it by saying he looks forward to seeing them again next year. It's all in good fun, but I can also easily see how it would be alienating to newbies, particularly people who's social skills aren't the best. If you don't realise that it's all part of the game, and they want you to get stuck in and give as good as you get, this environment would definitely seem bafflingly abusive and might drive potential gamers away if it was their first experience of roleplaying. If these are the staff at the biggest RPG company in the world, you can see why it remains a niche interest overall. The Living Galaxy: Roger continues to deal with the challenges and potential rewards of making a spaceship PC. You definitely won't be going on most dungeon crawls with the rest of the party, although you might be able to make something with a hollow asteroid work. Overall, it definitely seems easiest if each player controls multiple characters, so you can have at least one that's useful both in space and away party missions. For the first time in here, he actually engages with the system side of things, looking at Battletech, Buck Rogers XXVc, GURPS, Star Trek & Wars, and multiple editions of Traveller for their suitability to large scale mechanical PC's. GURPS definitely seems like the least hassle, given it's extreme modularity and lack of a default setting that restricts your options, although you'll probably have to allow them a higher point total than the humans. (or milk those no limbs, and generally unable to function in gravity disadvantages for all they're worth, or make the ship into a combiner constructed of several smaller mechs, each owned by a different player to spread the cost around) This is definitely the most useful instalment he's done yet from my perspective, even if it does spread itself pretty thinly, it gives you lots of examples for you to choose from, and may well have introduced less experienced players to the wide world of sci-fi RPG's. If it encouraged people to step out of the tight bounds of the D&D formula while still making a fun game, that's a definite positive overall.</blockquote>

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