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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8544242" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 90: December 1993part 4/5The New Republic Campaign: Bill Slavicsek once again juggles the desire to tell cool stories in the Star Wars universe with an editorial mandate that wants to stick strictly to canon and make anything the PC's do not as cool and universe-shaking as the events that happen in the movies. The battle of Endor was big enough that you could have multiple rebel groups that never even see Luke, Han or Leia, because they're busy fighting their own fights and disabling other key locations. Here's a trio of example things they could be doing down there, each of which is a decently heroic challenge in itself, but it doesn't really matter if they win or lose, unless the GM is going to abruptly depart from the timeline here. Another adventure outline that's more interesting than their completely linear D&D tournament adventures, but still feels heavily constrained compared to the adventures we're seeing in Dungeon, and underwritten in terms of setting building. It would work best if you build on it further with some more locations and potential encounters and are willing to break from canon if the PC's actions merit it. Otherwise, you may be following the letter of the movies, but not the spirit.The Living City: Magical chess sets are a fairly familiar idea around here, with multiple covers featuring them and a previous one fully statted out in issue 82. Here we have another one, as Marbol's Chess Shop has a magical chess set that comes to life when people aren't looking and helps the owner keep the place immaculate and well stocked. They're nowhere near as powerful as the ones a few months ago, but can remain active longer and show more personal initiative, and have developed a loyalty to their owner so anyone stealing them won't get nearly as much benefit. Marbol himself is one of those wise old gents who's always willing to play a game with anyone, and use it as a learning experience to help them deal with any problems they may have in other areas of their life. If the PC's are stuck on a particularly puzzling conundrum, be it tactical or of the heart, he's a good mouthpiece for the DM to deliver some cryptic but highly effective advice. So this place is unlikely to be the main driver of a plotline, but might well be a stop on the way to resolving one, and has a decent amount of flavour to make it distinct from the many other shops we've seen by now. Fairly middle of the road in usefulness and writing quality overall. Road Trip!: Another of those somewhat humorous articles where we get to see the RPGA staff from the outside, as one of the regional co-ordinators pays a visit to TSR HQ. Their urges for heroism were satisfied by the 500 mile trip from Connecticut to Lake Geneva, as they encountered not just one, but two damsels in distress who's cars had broken down along the way. Once they got there, they found things were memorable for good reasons as well, as the arrival of Dave Gross seems to have lightened the mood in the offices, as he's good at solving other people's computer problems and getting things working smoothly. Skip Williams in particular was so much more cheerful than usual that they worry if he's been replaced by a pod person or something. So this is mainly notable in that their usual impulse for teasing and taking the piss is mitigated by things going well enough that there's not much room to get a foothold upon. Bring on the next outbreak of con crud, because being this nice consistently would get boring very quickly.The Living Galaxy: Roger looks at another 11 overarching concepts for your campaigns, some in much more detail than others. Hunting for the promised land, in whatever form that may be, which then has an obvious follow-up of what happens when you get there and it isn't what you expected, or already occupied by people who don't want to share. Alternately, you could go the Star Trek/Princess Ark route, and have the ship and it's supporting cast feel like home in itself, so you can concentrate on the fun of the eternal journey. If you want something with a more definite endpoint, even if it could take years of actual play to achieve, there's things like being kidnapped and trying to escape and get home, crashing on a primitive world and trying to build up civilisation to the point where you can get spacebound again, long running wars of the hot or cold kind, cheesy reclaiming your legacy/fulfilling your destiny stuff (which fits better in a fantastical campaign than a hard sci-fi one), and sweet revenge on a specific person who wronged you. Most of these have had whole columns on them, some in this very series (particularly the stuff on developing/escaping a primitive world) so I'm getting a distinct sense of deja vu reading this. Another of those articles that isn't exactly bad, but would have more impact on someone who hasn't already read hundreds of issues of periodicals and seen how they repeat topics every few years. How many times can you repeat the same ideas before people get jaded and seek out weirder ones even if they aren't optimal for creating the kind of arcs that make for good stories? I guess it would also explain the explosion of increasingly weird settings in TSR at this point, even though it hurt their profitability having so many of them competing for people's money at the same time. There's a definite price for doing something like this for so long.</blockquote>

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