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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8430081" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 75: September 1992part 2/5The Living City: We have not just one, but a pair of linked establishments here, courtesy of future Changeling: the Dreaming authors Carla Hollar & Nicky Rea. A spell component shop for the discerning spellcaster, then right next door, a restaurant that's specifically designed to be familiar friendly, so you can bring nearly any well-trained pet in and they'll have something suitable for it to eat. No more worrying about hiding them away in your coat pocket or leaving them at home on a date, here your wizardly eccentricities are expected and catered for. They're run by a typically chalk & cheese married couple. He's meticulously organised, she's messy, and only by setting boundaries so they each have their own spaces the other leaves alone do they keep the partnership stable. They have a daughter, who after a lifetime of the little annoyances of being around other people's spell components wants to be anything but a wizard, to her dad's disappointment. An entry that's full of both attention to detail and opportunities for roleplaying, this definitely has several good plot hooks for your characters to engage with, be it being employed to get hold of some particularly rare & valuable spell components for the shop, forming friendships or rivalries and negotiating to learn new spells with the other wizards who shop there, or the increasingly ubiquitous cliche of the teenage kid rebelling and leaving their parents to join an adventuring party. It won't win any awards for originality this far in, but it's another light-hearted but structurally solid entry that you can use to fill out your higher-magic settings with. The Everwinking Eye: In the course of publishing the Realms books, errors inevitably slip in. Elminster of course takes no responsibility for this, foisting all the blame on that incompetent scribe Ed Greenwood and his cow-orkers. They even managed to screw up the literal cows! How hard is that to get right? Messing up the rules for Spellfire is understandable, as it's ultra-rare and even the people who have it struggle to control it properly, so no-one really knows how it works, but basic geography and history errors? Any educated native would spot them straight away! So this is him taking the issuing of errata, which is normally very dull indeed, and making it more palatable by spicing it up with his distinctive sense of humour, bending the 4th wall and blurring the boundary between author and character. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, etc, and he doesn't forget that even when dealing with serious topics.  Another demonstration of why he's the guy at the top of the pile when it comes to worldbuilding.</blockquote>

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