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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8398158" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 70: April 1992part 3/5The Living City 1: Another month, another business run by an ex-adventurer with a dark past that might come back to haunt them. Kavan Brenzan is a low level Illusionist who uses his spells to liven up the signs of many of the other businesses around here. Because the sea air is rough on wood and paintwork, he has plenty of repeat customers who need things touched up every few years. He's quiet and keeps odd hours, but as long as he does the job well no-one really minds. The twist is one more commonly found in superhero stories than fantasy ones, as he was captured by the Zhentarim and experimented upon, giving him regeneration by splicing him with troll blood. He was rescued by a mysterious heroic Drow (now who could that be? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) and is quite understandably somewhat traumatised and paranoid  they're going to catch up with him some day. Not everyone who gains superpowers from secret government experiments is of the right mindset to dress in a spandex costume and fight crime with them, plus a singular power like that is less of an edge in a world full of weirdness and monsters like Toril. This is another pretty decent entry with a very obvious adventure hook embedded, as you don't even need to have a sign painted yourself to be in the vicinity when the Zhents catch up with him, giving you an easy opportunity to be a hero and get entangled in further conflicts involving them. The easier you make it, the more likely DM's are to use it in their home campaign, and this is particularly strong on that front.Pod Mutation Increases: Hmm. another of those rare instances where Polyhedron covers something Dragon never did. In 1987 TSR released Gammamarauders, a wargame system that tied into Gamma World 3e. It got one supplement and a tie-in comic book series, but wargaming was well in decline in general by then so apparently it never got that much of a fanbase. But one person cares enough to submit a trio of new scenarios for the game (which are also fairly easy to expand into RPG ones as well.) As usual for Gamma World, the premises are wacky, but the stakes are very real indeed, as you're playing with much higher-powered creatures than you usually see on the RPG side. It reminds me of the differences between Warhammer Fantasy as a wargame & an RPG, where you casually get to pull out monsters & powers that are depicted as rare & terrifying in setting, requiring years of XP if you ever get to use them as a PC at all. It's pretty interesting, and shows that this obscure game was at least more loved by the readers than Buck Rogers or Indiana Jones, which still have a big fat total of 0 reader submitted articles. Whether that difference is enough to get a game going online in the present day is another matter, but hey, it's worth a shot. With Great Power: Having just seen an intrusion of superheroics into Toril, the superhero column does the opposite, and asks what people with superpowers would do in a more realistic world where they don't naturally form into clean lines of heroes and villains and fight each other for the fate of humanity. There's a lot of jobs they could earn more than enough money at legitimately using their powers, with much less stress than being constantly in and out of superjail or worrying about holding down a normal job and preserving their secret identity while moonlighting as a costumed crimefighter. As with the recent one on grim & gritty heroes, this shows them tiring of the superhero comic formula while still being interested in the idea of people with superpowers and getting increasingly deconstructive. That's also going to get increasingly common in the next few years, with games like White Wolf's Aberrant exploring the ramifications of superpowered beings forming societies and having real long term impacts on the setting & technological development of the world that aren't reset at the end of the story. More signs of wider historical progress here that would be a whole other interesting field of study in themselves. Just watch out for the multiple collectible hologram covers, those things can be real budget drainers.</blockquote>

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