Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8495661" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 84: June 1993part 2/5Letters: The first letter suggests that twinning with a club in another country and exchanging letters & things that are hard to get hold of in the other place is a good way to build international understanding and make the world a better place in a small way. Another thing the internet will make massively quicker and cheaper over the next few years. Second is that depressingly common tale of a girl who had a few bad experiences at cons and now just buys RPG books to read not play. Jean assures her that not all gaming groups are that bad, after all, she made it to the top of the RPGA. Just use the classifieds section here or the bulletin board in your local game shop to hunt for a new one and take care when screening your responses. Third asks what the hell service points are. You get them for helping with RPGA organisation & admin stuff and running charity events. Don't be surprised if you have fewer of them than you do player or judge points. You'd have to specifically go out of your way to earn many of them. Finally, someone giving a list of their likes and dislikes, some of which seem to miss the point of what polyhedron is for as a facilitator of organised play. Not every subscriber also buys Dragon, so they kinda need to keep the convention stuff in here, even if that does result in some redundancy if you read both. The New Rogues Gallery: A couple of months ago they reported on Mellisa Eldaren's election to the role of Lord Speaker. Now we get full stats. It seems a little odd for a 22 year old to get into one of the highest offices in the city, but I guess D&D adventurers do regularly go from nothing to terrifyingly powerful quite quickly, and in that respect Raven's Bluff is still a little more restrained than most home campaigns, as it's taken her 3 real and in game years to reach 7th level. (ignoring that the FR timeline advances 2 years per real year in the supplements at this point, because they were never that good at interdepartmental co-ordination.) As she's worked her way up through the tournament adventures in game, she doesn't have any particularly interesting magic items, but apparently the promotion to public office came with ability score boosts, as her total is considerably higher than the standard 84 points regular PC's are stuck with. Another demonstration that when it comes to hard crunch and continuity, their editorial standards aren't the greatest, and they're entirely willing to deliberately make exceptions to the RAW for their favourites, which further reinforces the feeling that it's a stacked deck where there's different rules for normal PC's and NPC's or admin's pets. Now that's one area they improved immensely after WotC took over. (at least until 4e) So this is a reminder that linking your metaplot to the result of tournaments regularly throws up weird results, and continuity in a shared world is an almighty headache to deal with, regularly disrupting people's attempts to give their characters some kind of arc whenever a big crossover happens. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that, either as a player or an admin. The Living City 1: Yet another modern day thing Raven's Bluff lacks is any kind of socialised medicine system. Magical healing is still strictly cleric only(unless you manage to steal The Symbul's Synostodweomer), so you need to be either in with a specific deity or pay through the nose if you need any serious medical attention. But there are enough genuinely nice gods that you can find some places that'll treat anyone and only worry about payment afterwards. The Bandaged Wound is one of those. It's main administrator is actually a wizard, which neatly solves questions of ecumenical dominance and lets him employ priests of any religion with useful spheres. The other two highest level clerics both belong to Mystra, which isn't an obvious choice if you primarily wanted to be a healer, but I guess she's less strict than most gods and has a really good sphere selection so it's a good one if you weren't really certain what you wanted to do when you started adventuring, but really don't want to wind up in the wall of the faithless. They're all solidly united in their desire to help the needy, so there's no politics or dark underbelly here to provide adventure hooks. So this'll mainly be useful as a stop between other adventures rather than a source of them, particularly at the levels where you can't cure diseases, curses and other more esoteric maladies yourself. Spending a few hundred gold pieces is a much better idea than labouring under a persistent penalty for several levels, particularly if it's severe enough that you probably wouldn't survive the fights needed to gain enough XP. Useful, but a little bit dull.</blockquote>

Verification