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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8361066" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 64: October 1991part 5/5Bookwyrms: Our second promotional article is for their new Ravenloft novels. Like Spelljammer, they revolve heavily around characters from their more established and popular settings coming to the new one to give it more legitimacy. And even more than Spelljammer, these crossovers are one direction only, as people check into Ravenloft, but they very rarely get out. Jander Sunstar from Toril, an angsty elven vampire doing his best to stay moral over the centuries and do some kind of good in the world despite his hungers. This leads him to a lengthy rivalry with Strahd that's the subject of Vampire of the Mists by Christie Golden. Meanwhile, Lord Soth from Krynn also gets sucked in, but does not change his ways, and winds up Darklord of his own messed up domain, with his own minions, including the dwarf werebadger Azrael Dak, who is not from one of the established D&D worlds. (although his world sounds more interesting, and definitely less generic than Oerth or Toril; an inversion of normal D&D worlds where the surface world is controlled by terrifying behemoths and the dungeons are places of safety by comparison. Why'd we get Dark Sun, which barely does the dungeon part of D&D at all and not this? ) This all fairly interesting, and reminds us that Ravenloft's novels did better than Spelljammer long term, particularly once they stopped bothering with heroes and put the darklords front and centre in the stories. Some of them will even get sequels. Will this column still be going when we get there, so I get to talk about those as well? Let's keep going and find out.The Living City: After last month went into full-on gonzo plane-hopping fantasy, this time they cover something completely mundane from the real world. A guy from Kara-Tur who wanders the Realms doing shadow plays with lanterns and little carved scenes that you project onto a wall to magnify. If the Realms was written with any kind of consistency about how common magic is supposed to be, and how much it is treated as technology that actually improves people's day to day lives, this would be too mundane to even be worth noting against various other things they've covered, just like Raven's Bluff's weird love of dancing bears. But apparently this is indeed enough of a novelty to the common folks that he can make a decent living doing it, particularly as long as he keeps moving around and no-one else is doing the same thing, so it remains a novelty as any particular town won't see more than once a year or so. So this article isn't bad in itself, and is actually quite educational, as it goes into the mechanics of making the lantern shows in detail, but it's also somewhat exasperating as part of the larger picture, or rather lack of it that is the Realms overall editorial direction. This kitchen sink needs a bit of a clean out if you actually want to get any washing done in it, because not all the things they're giving us here really fit together any more. (Unlike Ed's contributions, which generally do fit together quite well despite the quantity of them, because he started this, and seems to have a good memory for things he wrote many years apart.)Wolff & Byrd continue to have to deal with the financial fallout of interplanetary infidelity. Will they have the right jurisdiction to enforce any rulings the judge makes? Once again the amount of goofiness and low usefulness promotional material  is considerably higher than I'd like, making this another issue to move on from quickly and probably never look at again. Maybe next issue'll manage a diamond in the rough, maybe not. Once more into the deepening darkness of the autumn, trying to keep our spirits up until we hit festive season.</blockquote>

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