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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8441195" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 76: October 1992part 4/5Bestiary is also in theme, with a motley collection of undead all submitted by different people. Probably been saving them up all year, just waiting for the stars to align again. Ghost Dragons can only be permanently laid to rest by giving them an amount of treasure equal to the size of their original hoard. Since they'll probably have part of it already made up from previous people who crossed their path and tried to fight them, this makes them a particularly counterintuitive guardian which will let you come out with a net profit without fighting if you're rich enough. The kind of trick that only works once in a campaign, but can be a pretty cool twist the first time the players face it.Scavenger Spirits are another of those monsters that's primarily there to lighten the coffers of over-endowed adventurers. After a lifetime of grave-robbing, they stick around and try to add to their collections from whoever passes by, invisibly filching from your pockets and hopefully not being noticed until later. Ironically, they can't steal from other dead people, but can encourage the living to take their stuff, at which point it becomes fair game. That's an interestingly quirky set of powers and limitations that makes them feel suitably folklorish.Grave Watchers do the complete opposite, protecting graves and tombs from anyone who would try to rob them. If both exist in the same area, they're going to come into conflict pretty quickly. Bloodstone Zombies retain their intelligence, and are actually even prettier than they were when alive, but become always chaotic evil homicidal maniacs who will infect other people whenever they get the chance and turn them into more bloodstone zombies. Basically the same idea as buffyverse vampires, they're too strong to be mooks until you're very high level, but lack the special powers that would make them truly scary as big bads. You can do a pretty effective monsters among us plot with them. This collection is a pretty good one overall, with lots of stuff that isn't just a straight-up fight, but can actually be spooky as well. That's what you ought to be doing with undead, not just throwing more waves of dumb enemies at the players.The Living Galaxy: Dale talked about horror in relation to superheroes, Roger predictably does the same with sci-fi. As usual for him, there's lots of references, not all sci-fi themselves. They've got to plug Ravenloft, as it's their largest remotely relevant product, but he can also talk about Traveller & Dark Conspiracy, which do have a decent amount of sci-fi elements. In terms of movies that combine sci-fi & horror most successfully, he references The Thing, Alien, and A Space Odyssey, all of which go heavy on the isolation aspects of horror that happen when you're trapped with something dangerous, and can't trust the other people either. Even better are episodes of The Outer Limits & Twilight Zone, many of which pose some excellent "what if" questions with horrifying ramifications. There's a certain amount of redundancy here, both spend a lot more time on heroes being captured and put in over-elaborate and impractical deathtraps than modern writers would, which reminds us how that kind of cheesiness has gone out of fashion over the past 30 years. If I had to choose between them, Roger's is both longer and better written, so there's more useful info in there overall, but neither is particularly groundbreaking. Just more generic advice to fill page count with.</blockquote>

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