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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8387845" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 68: February 1992part 4/5Everwinking Eye: Ed gives another couple of Mulmaster adventure ideas that serve to illustrate the degree of constant paranoia you need to live in if you want to flourish there. There's a constant churn of both "legitimate" traders and organised crime jockeying for money & influence, and the boundaries between them are pretty blurry since the laws are so bad & inconsistently enforced that you pretty much have to break them to get ahead. You'd think such a high stakes environment would be bad for the mental health, but there's always a few people who actually find the thrill addictive, and can't deal with the boredom of living elsewhere. Plus leaving can also be difficult because once you've made a few allies and enemies, things can snowball and you keep on being threatened or offered large amounts of money for one more job, which turns out to not be the last one after all. They'll even attempt to make the rest of the world as unpleasant and dangerous as their home, as one of the other plot ideas shows them doing with Cormyr. The right kind of abusive relationship can not only be sustainable over many decades, but also get passed on down the generations, as the real world has shown many times. That becomes even more true when you can add magical mind control to your list of tools. This is why you actually need heroes to foil evil, because staying away and waiting for them to collapse from their own counterproductive decisions can be a long wait with a lot of collateral damage. Hopefully some of you will get something from these complicated and intractable challenges.With Great Power: Dale talks about a problem very specific to the FASERIP system. Since it was released 8 years ago, there's been a distinct rise in superheroes that don't fit it's mold, that have much darker adventures and no problem with killing their enemies. What we to do with all this grim and gritty realism? Do we ignore it and keep playing the same we always have, and see sales drop as we fall ever further behind the times? Or do we change the system so a murder doesn't drain all your karma and make character advancement near impossible? Since he's feeling in a nice mood, he'll give you several different options so you can dial the amount of punishment for killing up and down to suit your campaign. None of them are as permissive as D&D, where you're actually rewarded for it instead. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> They may be adding a lot more boxes for you to play in, but they still don't really want you to think out of the box entirely and throw in everything from any genre at once. That would be messy. This is mainly interesting as another historical landmark. The whole grim and gritty thing is going to get a lot bigger over the next couple of decades, and things only start going back in a more optimistic direction once the MCU comes along. (and even now it's still a far cry from the old 4 color antics.) We probably won't be seeing much of it here because they lose the licence and stop covering non D&D stuff long before then, but that's a whole other dissertations worth of reading and analysis for someone to do if they feel like it.</blockquote>

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