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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8527914" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 88: October 1993part 4/5The Living Galaxy: What do you do with a module after running it once? Are you already sick of it and can't wait to move onto something else, or do you find yourself longing for a second go to see how differently it could go? (depending heavily on quality and degree of linearity of course) What happens when you convert an old adventure to a different system, chop it up for parts and create a frankenstein's monster of several different ones, or restock it with new, higher level adversaries to challenge the current party level? It saves money and time compared with coming up with something completely new each session, and can make a world feel more like a living, progressing place. Basically this column is a lesson in recycling. It's good for the planet and it's good for you. It also illustrates why you'll get more use out of sandbox adventures long term than railroads, as you can play them multiple times and get a wider variety of results, plus they often include details on the surrounding world, NPC's in the local villages, ecology, religion and all that stuff that hints at a larger picture, giving you inspiration to build off of. Tabletop RPG's should focus on the things they can do better than any computer game, no matter how sophisticated, and this is one of them. A pleasingly above entry for this column.The Heart of Evil: We saw our first Amazing Engine tournament advertised a few pages ago. No great surprise that they've got an article promoting it as well. Fortunately, they take a more interesting tack than straight selling, going for fiction with stats at the end like the first Ars Magica article instead. Dr Watson is home alone when a client calls for Sherlock, goes to investigate on his own and is confronted with a particularly perplexing mystery. A murder using a bronze knife? Who uses bronze rather than iron in this day and age? While he can deduce some things by looking at the evidence and recalling Holmes's lectures on previous cases, he can't make the intuitive leap that the killer was one of the Fair Folk, and it's left on a cliffhanger to be resolved next issue. This is obviously intended to be a lead-in to For Faerie, Queen & Country, easing us into the supernatural weirdness in the same way that your first characters presumably will be. It also eases us into the system, which is lighter than D&D on the mechanics, but puts more attention to things like social class and connections to other people. This falls into the good kind of teaser, showing rather than telling, and leaving plenty of details open for speculation, so hopefully people will actually spend money to get the full answers. Another of those case where it's a real shame the system didn't do better, and was cancelled after a couple of years in favour of yet more D&D material, because they were trying some pretty interesting things.</blockquote>

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