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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8417969" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 73: July 1992part 5/5The Living City: Since the letters were complaining about too many Raven's Bluff businesses, we don't have one this month, instead filling the space with a collection of items that have histories tying them into the Realms, but are perfectly capable of being used generically as well. Not that we don't have plenty of them from Dragon, so doing this every month would get stale even faster than new setting details, but it's good to mix things up now and then. Let's see if these are the kind of things adventurers would risk their lives over.  Heavy Water has all the quenchiness of several gallons of regular water in a single mouthful. Very handy if you're going on an extended desert adventure, and if enchanted by a cleric, also has concentrated undead scouring power. Get all those tombs extra clean! :teeth ting:The Helm of Asps gives you medusa hair. This does not include turning people to stone, but save or die poison with every attack is nothing to sneeze at either. Some monsters really are overkill, aren't they. Morgrim's Tapestry depicts a brave knight that will step out of the tapestry and protect your home from unwelcome intruders. Probably doesn't have the strength to beat a whole adventuring party, but it's loud and clanky so it'll at least alert everyone else in the building and ruin any rogue's plans at a sneaky burglary. A Ring of Nine Lives saves your life every time you're dropped to 0, with the expected number of total charges. It doesn't heal you though, so if you're in a pitched combat those can go down very rapidly in quick succession. An angry beholder could wipe out all of them in one round if you're very unlucky. The Ring of Scrying Globes creates magical bubbles that let you not only scry nearly anywhere, but also cast spells through it on whatever you're seeing. The kind of thing that's pretty powerful on it's own, but absolutely game-breaking in the hands of an archmage, letting you perform selective scry & fry's or mind control anywhere in the world at no risk to yourself unless you're dealing with another spellcaster similarly powerful & paranoid. It has it's limitations, but this is the kind of macguffin that can comfortably drive a whole plot and make an enemy seem unbeatable. Good luck finding it before Manshoon or some other FR bigwig. These are all pretty interesting and do more than just add more plusses onto your preexisting abilities so they seem quite capable of spicing up a game. An 1889 Crystal Sphere: The cover image turns out to be connected to this article, a Spelljammer/Space:1889 crossover. What happens if your D&D characters stumble across earth, only a little more technologically advanced than usual in an odd direction. Both have Crystal Spheres & Phlogiston, so the cosmologies mesh pretty seamlessly. But the rules systems are pretty different, so here's 5 pages of both way conversion notes, mildly favoring converting from 1889 to AD&D, since that's the more popular and complicated system. As usual when you convert a skill-based system into a class/level one, you can often wind up with characters that are impossible if rolled up natively and played from 1st level, but they encourage you to prioritise cool over strict adherence to the RAW and roll with it. There's class/level limits for the three different types of martian, plus plenty of new types of armor & weaponry, so there's a decent amount of stuff to plunder even if you've never played Space:1889 at all. A pretty neat article that also serves to introduce a new game to the RPGA in general, and hopefully get a few more people playing it. Will we see it in the lists of official point-earning tournaments in future years? This is one I wouldn't mind seeing a few follow-ups for.Bloodmoose & Company find themselves in medieval times, and that the rules of chivalry do not apply to anthromorphic animals. It's a hard life, being a metaphor.Wolff & Byrd make a brief return, to remind us that just because the dead don't respond when you try to contact them, doesn't mean they can't hear you, and grow increasingly irritated that you aren't getting the hint.A fairly decent mix of stuff that's aimed at new people who still haven't become jaded to repetition of the basics, and more advanced material that's still relevant to me. Their adventure choices continue to not really be to my tastes, but at least i have plenty of alternatives at this point, and the attempt to make player choices in tournaments tie into larger-scale metaplot looks like it'll be interesting in the future. Still plenty of reasons to carry on then. Let's head on into convention season and see if they've managed to solve last year's flakiness problem.</blockquote>

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