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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8373562" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 66: December 1991part 3/5Caravan: In 1987, while they were still busy creating it, they had a whole series of articles devoted to things that might happen on the journey to Raven's Bluff. The city is well developed now, but they still want to bring in new blood, so here's another adventure aimed at starting level characters as an introduction to a Living City campaign. They've obviously been drawn to the city in pursuit of adventure for whatever reason, and all wound up travelling with the same caravan for safety. Turns out they'll need that protection, as there's a horde of tanar'ri and undead on the loose. They'll get ominous dreams for several days beforehand, which none of the NPC's will believe despite this being a magic heavy D&D setting. They have to deal with someone stealing their stuff without any chance to save and spot the culprit, a bandit attack, various small scale interactions with the NPC's, and then the main battle, where the higher level characters do all the work and the PC's only participation is mopping up a few mooks. So this adventure is not only bad in the now familiar for Polyhedron way of being completely linear and railroady, giving you virtually no meaningful choices or character agency, but also an all new one of making you not even the central part of the story, but spectators who's main purpose is to watch other people be awesome, which we'll also see again in some of the more metaplot heavy official adventures, particularly ones that are tie-ins to novels. This leaves me thoroughly pissed off after reading it and is not one I'd ever remotely consider using. It'd set completely the wrong tone for the kind of game I like to run or play in. About the only saving grace is that it's not filled with terrible puns. That puts it just barely above the Fluffyquest series overall in terms of sheer awfulness. With Great Power: Dale continues directly on from last month, venturing even further from the traditional superheroic experience to outright crossovers with other genres. Does all that mad science that normally appears in comics as a one-shot get into mass production, and the setting rapidly become a cyberpunk one? Do Terminators come back to try and change the past, and find it's a much more even fight than in the original movies? How do your heroes deal with Godzilla or Dracula - wait, they've already both appeared officially in Marvel comics anyway. This illustrates how well superheroes combine with nearly every other genre, which is definitely a lesson the Marvel Cinematic Universe has consciously heeded and used to keep itself from getting stale. Individual characters feel like they're existing in their own genre, yet can still interact with other people's stories and the universe is big & flexible enough to accommodate them. Can you pull off the same trick in your campaign without the massive writer's budget? Another fairly competent bit of advice that's aimed at Marvel characters, but generic enough to apply to other games as well. No problems with this, particularly as it mentions lots of other RPG's you can use as inspiration, including ones they've never covered here like Vampire: the Masquerade. Try some new games out. Even if you don't stick with them, you can bring the best ideas back to your main system and combine them into the big stew of genres. Doesn't that sound like more fun than arbitrarily limiting yourself into a category that's purely a human construct anyway?</blockquote>

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