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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8425200" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 74: August 1992part 2/5The Living City: As is often the case, the Raven's Bluff content is the cover story. The eagle is the mascot of an inn called The Ill Eagle. Why is the eagle ill, you may ask? Does it have a rare degenerative illness that some heroes need to go on an epic quest to find the cure for? Or is it known for it's sick lyrical skills and way it busts a rhyme when it gets on the mic? :checks notes: We regret to inform you that the eagle is racist. He was given intelligence by a mad wizard, raised by followers of Wastri, (because the Realms doesn't have any homegrown racist deities to use apparently, another thing to praise Ed's work for over Gary) and now spends his time screeching slurs at any demihumans who enter the premises, to the amusement of the regular patrons. So this is the same joke as people who teach their parrot to swear in real life writ large. Oh, he's such a card, lol. It's a textbook example of Polyhedron's tendency to use casual racism as humour, that Dragon & Dungeon are mercifully free of by comparison. The lower module quality is excusable, as they have to publish more while getting fewer submissions, but racism as a joke (as opposed to something you depict in the villains to make it extra clear they're terrible people you can kick the ass of guilt-free) is the kind of thing you only let through if you agree with it on some level, no matter how few submissions you're getting. The kind of thing that makes me sigh heavily and apply a suspicious side-eye to all the staff, because no matter who's primarily responsible for picking this out of the slush pile, all the others didn't care enough or were too scared for their jobs to complain about it at the time. Is this really the kind of roleplaying you want to encourage in your members? If they weren't already more than 95% white male, this would drive people away and skew the demographics even more in that direction. I think it's pretty safe to say this is one that'll never be appearing in any form in any of my campaigns. Secrets Best Kept Hidden: Fresh from that bit of awfulness, we have a more common and mundane annoyance to deal with, the low-content promotional article that's useless once you've actually bought the thing being promoted. This time it's the Forbidden Lore boxed set, a grab-bag of things for Ravenloft, many of which will be incorporated into the next revision of the core rules. Lots of details on how various spells & psionics are affected by being in Ravenloft, making escape impossible and telling who the good & bad guys are much trickier. Various organisations that do their best to make the domains better or worse places. What you can do with those tarroka cards. But the majority of the preview is devoted to Powers Checks, that reminder that the Dark Powers may or may not corrupt you if you commit evil deeds and cast certain kinds of spells, and it's deeply arbitrary who winds up as a darklord for their sins, as there's only 10% chance of going up a level for even the worst acts. Some people can do a whole ton of them and remain completely normal, some will gain awesome powers and near indestructibility with relatively minor curses, while others will be pushed into falling by events outside their control and then punished disproportionately as soon as they step out of line. (what a coincidence that Von Kharkov, the only black darklord, is one of those) A reminder that part of the horror of Ravenloft is a deep degree of unfairness and disempowerment as PC's. To enjoy a long-term campaign set there, (as opposed to a weekend in hell adventure where you come in, beat the Darklord in a few sessions, and then escape back to your regular setting) you need to accept that as players, no matter how hard your characters struggle against it IC. Some people will love that, others hate it, and it's a good idea to know which type you're playing with and how far you can take inflicting horrifying things on their characters before it stops being fun. Otherwise, you could wind up destroying the biggest city in the setting and turning any adventurers that investigate it into undead, which proved to be a bit much for most players.</blockquote>

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