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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8533292" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 89: November 1993part 4/5The Living Galaxy: Roger's theme this time is EPICNESS!!!!! How do you make your campaigns more epic? It's not just a matter of how long it runs with the same characters or how high level you reach while doing so, though neither hurt. It's also a matter of giving your story themes and big stakes rather than just a series of dungeoncrawls and random wandering monsters. Save the world, overthrow the tyrannical regime, save the princess, find the macguffins. The examples are unusually mainstream for him, going straight for the obvious blockbusters like LotR, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. This isn't exactly boring, but it is one of the most generic articles he's done using this column yet, aimed at fantasy and sci-fi games equally rather than maintaining any pretence at being sci-fi focussed. Plus he uses it to promote their brand new Bughunters setting for the Amazing Engine, which feels edited in as a reminder from the marketing department rather than organically written. Another month, another go on the sausage making machine. I can't work up any strong feeling about this at all, positive or negative.The Heart of Evil: Another 4 pages of Amazing Engine fiction show that they're taking promoting this seriously, and not just jumping straight into revealing the supernatural side of things. Watson and Holmes meet up and compare notes on their latest cases. Holmes quickly deduces that they're connected and part of a bigger picture, and corrects Watson on details he missed or interpreted wrongly. They go back to investigate the next day, and things get even stranger, and Watson stumbles across a man killed by a great black dog. Holmes notices that the details of it's claws and teeth are not those of any mundane dog, and it's obviously controlled by someone else using the murders as opportunity for robberies, but still isn't jumping to supernatural conclusions. Just how much weirder will things get before he's forced to admit there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. This is one of the slowest burns they've published in here, pushing at the limits of how much they can pad things out in their small page count in a way that only a few of the multi-part adventures have surpassed. It's that weird mix of interesting because it's different, and dull because it's taking ages to get to the point, and I can only imagine how interminable it must have seemed when you had to wait a month between each instalment. Let's keep going and see if it can stick the landing or not.</blockquote>

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