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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8576708" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 95: May 1994part 3/5Sweet Revenge: Urgh. Here we go again. Ongoin's chocolate mines are infested with monsters, and only the PC's can save the day. Rick Reid takes us back to the Caves of Confection, in a style that foreshadows the way they'll do Return to the X modules for a whole bunch of classic adventures on their silver anniversary. Same map, but a whole new set of challenges. Instead of a senile wandering grandpa, you have a fussing overprotective grandma. Instead of marshmallow harpies, jinsu orcs and a snack dragon, you have a lemon drop golem, syrup elemental and a demonic gingerbread man (who's movement rate is not actually that high, so you'll have no trouble catching him) as the ultimate nemesis. The overall tone hasn't changed though, it's still an obnoxiously linear series of comedy vignettes designed for tournament play that would not work very well in a serious campaign where people examine the logical ramifications of the existence of things and exploit them. The quality of the cartography & layout is slightly improved, and the challenges are a little tougher this time around, but minor iterative improvements don't change the fundamental mismatch between what he does and what I'm looking for in gaming. Hard pass.Adversaries: The two characters in here are a classic tale of LN vs CN where you could easily side with either. Twin brothers, separated at birth who are opposites in nearly every respect. One is an emotionally repressed chiselled blond nobleman with a paternalisticly disdainful view of the lower classes. The other is a hairy savage beast of a man who was abandoned at birth due to his unsettling appearance, taken in by a nomadic tribe and becoming their leader through his raw ferocity as a fighter. Both are fighters of the same level and exactly the same total points in attributes, but their choices of weapons & equipment similarly contrasting. When the ugly one finds out he was actually born slightly before the handsome one and so is rightful lord of the southern reaches, this puts them on collision course. He wouldn't be particularly well suited to that highfaluting city life anyway, but the knowledge still rankles, particularly upon seeing the kind of person his brother has become. Which one will your sympathies be with, and how will you get involved in their rivalry? Once again they're going straight for the most obvious fairytale influenced setups, complete with the problematic bits about people with noble blood being inherently superior and winding up in charge even if you take away all their stuff and raise them in a different culture. Well, they are literally developing a campaign setting called Birthright so I guess there's a lot of that going around the offices at the moment. So it's another one that's interestingly written and very gamable, but won't be to everyone's tastes. Will they be able to keep this column going long enough to get to slightly less cliched and more sophisticated concepts?</blockquote>

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