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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8489010" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 83: May 1993part 3/5Milk Run: Last issue they set up a Star Wars contest. This time, we have an adventure in a galaxy far away and a long time ago. The PC's are rebels sent by their commander on a smuggling run for various useful but restricted equipment. Deal with a pirate hijacking while en route, then when you do get there you find your contact has been arrested. You're then specifically ordered not to bust him out, but to sneak into the warehouses where the stuff is being stored and leave with it. Once you do that and blast off again, you suffer a computer malfunction that will probably result in you crashlanding. You then have to stick around and survive the local challenges until the rescue team can arrive and get you & your cargo to it's final destination. So it's pretty typical in both structure and quality for the tournament adventures in here, only for a different system. It has an irritating mix of expecting them to act like courageous heroes at some points, and comply with the authorities at other points, and if the PC's guess wrong, they'll die abruptly or go out of bounds, forcing the DM to improvise. The overall result definitely doesn't feel much like the movies, turning the PC's into minor lackeys following orders and running around after other people, not making any real difference to the overall course of the rebellion. If you like being led by the nose and rolling dice at appropriate moments you'll enjoy it. For anyone else, it'll need a good bit more work to allow PC's to go down the other routes that are obvious options, but arbitrarily closed off for page count/runtime reasons here. The Living Galaxy: Roger gives us another load of little bits & pieces of GMing advice here. Stretching before and after exercise helps with your mental muscles as well, making sure you're in the right mood to get into character and remember what happened in previous sessions. An interesting way to save effort as a long-term GM is using PC's from a previous campaign as NPC's in a new one. Remember this isn't a wargame, and don't just give all the info on what's going on away in a scenario freely. Hell, even most modern wargames don't do that, particularly computer ones that can show only what each side's units can see automatically. Extraneous worldbuilding details make it easier to slip a few red herrings in. A cliched plot can be made a lot less cliched by combining it with another idea, and once several are interacting chaotically it's much easier to wind up with a unique story, as the number of possible combinations increases exponentially with the number of interacting elements. Another column where none of the ideas are new to me, but I guess it helps to be reminded of the basics sometimes, and hopefully they were useful to some group. The New Rogues Gallery: In comparison with the other Raven's Bluff material, this is intentionally very small scale indeed, as it talks about a rat-catching business. Jedderk Aldo is a crude and grumpy man who drinks heavily and doesn't scrub up very well even when not down in the sewers. He has a couple of kobolds as assistants to help hunt down vermin in tight spaces. He's not above rooting through people's garbage for whatever he can sell, and if he finds anything incriminating, using it for blackmail. How delightful. Fortunately he's only a 0th level character and the kobolds are even wimpier, so if he tries that on PC's, they'll have no trouble kicking his ass. So this is one they're more likely to have an antagonistic relationship with than a friendly one, but it's not set in stone, and he could appear in several different roles depending on the events of your campaign. It's definitely much more usable than yet another heroic well-balanced adventuring party, which thankfully they've been cutting down on lately.</blockquote>

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