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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8428615" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 74: August 1992part 5/5The Living Galaxy: Like James, Roger can't think of a theme this month, so he offloads a bunch of little ideas that wouldn't have made a full column on their own. The danger of a computer virus pandemic destroying all your data and connections. (much scarier and more plausible now the internet has become ubiquitous.) Gritty sci-fi where players have to deal with all the hassles of zero-g. Definitely not enough systems that go into that in the same way D&D does with encumbrance tracking. The merits of making a smaller setting where you travel between the multiple habitable moons of a gas giant rather than having to deal with the hassles of FTL travel. Going the opposite direction, and having a campaign set entirely on a STL generation ship, dealing with internal politics and occasional repair crises. The hassles of interacting with intelligent creatures from vastly different environments, like the underground seas of ice planets or deep in the high pressure clouds of gas giants. The many ways you can upgrade your characters with genetic engineering, possibly enabling them to cross those great divides, but also raising serious questions of character balance & screentime in an RPG environment. There might be full books on each of these topics, but they're mostly ones that don't convert very well to the small group tabletop RPG formula, either due to the challenge of finding rulesets that cover these situations, or being generally unfun when you try to track all the realistic details. Like adventuring in the elemental planes, you're dealing with things that make no allowances for your squishy organic body, and while there might be great rewards to be found there, you've got to know what you're doing and be well prepared before even starting. Good luck finding a similarly nerdy group willing to take on these topics and explore them in detail over the course of a long-term campaign.Wolff & Byrd wish a good knight to all, especially the dark knight who badly needs teaching some manners in his interactions with the peasantry.Bloodmoose & Company find out that a well-designed gun is not a double-edged sword, so make sure you know which end is which. Another issue where there are some good articles, but they almost seem to be in spite of the terrible standards of the editorial team, rather than because of them, with some of their choices being actively unpleasant. It's becoming increasingly obvious that they're not held to the same standards or subject to the same scrutiny as their bigger-selling books & publications, which leaves them free to indulge their worst impulses here. Once again I find myself looking forward to the next big changeover and not wanting to stick around. Let's see if next issue manages to be interestingly bad, or just typically linear and hack & slashy.</blockquote>

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