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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8431249" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 75: September 1992part 3/5You've Lost Your Marbles: After seeing they can still do decent length adventures in here, it's quite disappointing that they go back to a short, easy and linear one that easily fits in a single tournament slot, so the vast majority of groups will get through it in one session with time to spare unless they really faff around in the roleplaying portions. A kid has lost his marbles in the sewer. He's a rich kid, so they're actually quite valuable marbles and his parents will be mad if they find out, but still, this is already immediately silly and inconsequential as a premise. The contents are similarly inconsequential, leading you on a straight line from one encounter to the next whichever route you take, so the recovery doesn't even involve getting lost and using proper search procedures with a chance of getting some, but not all of them back. (unlike, say, the Dungeon one where you hunt down dinosaurs in Waterdeep's sewer.) Fight crocodiles, & leeches, maybe fight a mimic, maybe talk to it, and talk to an intelligent toad & a pitiful mongrelman (unless you're in an ultra-killy mood, which you might be after putting up with this despite the flavor text discouraging it.) it does at least have a decent mix of roleplaying & combat encounters, but neither are particularly challenging, and many of them are played for comedy. It's not so much an adventure for people who roleplay for the challenge of solving puzzles, the worldbuilding or the character immersion, as an excuse to get together and socialise for a few hours, and maybe add on a few points to your RPGA ranking in the process. It once again shows that a big part of the problem is their editorial direction, as the old tournament modules were at least challenging (in many cases far moreso than ones aimed at home campaigns. ) and nonlinear within the bounds of their time limits. This is just weak formulaic drivel by comparison. Why are they making current adventures so much easier? Is that really what the players want? Is being able to carry over characters between adventures and the fear of losing them making them overcautious? Another one that makes me want to finish this issue quickly and get back to the decent adventures in Dungeon.With Great Power: Dale follows on from last time, reminding us that if you're going to be point-buying your characters rather than rolling them randomly, you need to have more of a concept for what you're doing. Fortunately, they already did an article on common character types in Dragon 171 fairly recently, so he can recycle a big chunk of that to pad this out. The rest of it is fairly familiar advice on not only designing your character's personality & history, but also their relationship with the team, and how they fit together as a combat unit as well as what everybody in the group thinks of each other & their original reason for getting together. A bunch of individually powerful characters may overlap a lot and get in each other's way if you don't talk it out as a group, leaving themselves open to weaker ones who are capable of teamwork. Nothing we haven't seen before, but it's good to see they're applying it to this genre as well as their fantasy works. Thri-Kreen: Ed talked a little bit about Forgotten Realms linguistics last month. Not to be outdone, Tim Brown goes into the linguistic quirks of Thri-Kreen, which is obviously most useful for Dark Sun players, but might well become important in other settings too. Having mandibles and no lips, some of our consonants are impossible for them to duplicate, but they can also make an array of clicking and grinding sounds that the human mouth would find similarly problematic. Sign language runs into similar problems, as four four-fingered hands vs two five-fingered hands also creates some puzzling translation ambiguities. It's a good thing psionics are so frequent on athas, so hopefully someone in a group'll have the telepathic capabilities to enable smooth communication. Like Roger's talk on playing alien creatures that live in dramatically different environments to humans, this is a reminder that it's a big universe out there, and all it takes is a few small differences from the basic human body plan to cause all manner of hassles in interaction and getting through adventures. The addition of flight and the removal of opposable thumbs in particular can completely throw off any normal expectations of what is an appropriate challenge for a group of a particular power level, and being even one size category above or below normal can also make things unexpectedly effortless or impossible. But anyway, this is a pretty interesting and logical little bit of worldbuilding, showing how the communication problems go both ways, and one isn't obviously superior to the other. If you're playing a Kreen character, leaving out your labial fricatives is as important as the scottish accent for dwarves or the attitude of insufferable smugness for elves. Used in moderation, it can really improve your roleplaying.</blockquote>

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