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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8577854" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 95: May 1994part 4/5Bestiary goes for a bunch of centaur variants, as combining various upper and lower halves is a formula with a lot of interesting possibilities. 3e would make a template of it, making it ultra-easy to customise tauric races for your own campaign, but for now, we just have to see what they've hand-crafted for us and if it's any good. Zebranaur have zebra bodies and human halves of the ethnicity where zebras are found in the real world. Since that contrast is not so great for maintaining camouflage they're pretty good at body-painting & tattoos to compensate and have photographic memories for furlike patterns, which seems like a minor ability but could be crucial in a detective story. They're not as cringe as they could have been, but do still fall back on tribal primitive stereotypes because we can't have a race introduced in a supplement having any significant control over large areas of a campaign world. Dorvesh combine dwarves and donkeys, which synergises to produce a truly epic level of stubbornness being the norm for them. The hexapod body plan isn't so great for mining, so they tend not to delve as deeply, but are still well equipped for doing so and defending themselves against whatever comes up from beneath. Ha'ponys combine halflings and miniature ponies. They have a truly epic appetite for fruit, so any settlement will be surrounded by plenty of well-tended orchards. Both genders love ribbons and you can tell who's important amongst them by who has the most elaborate braiding. Pretty much as twee as you'd expect. Gnoats (not to be confused with warhammer Zoats) mix gnomes and goats, obviously enough. They live above ground in the warm months and then disappear into caves with their extensive supplies of jam, honey and other preserves for the winter. If you can prove yourself a friend you can get some yummy stuff and excellent pottery to contain it in. All of these fall on the obvious side of the spectrum then, rather than trying any oddball combinations. Meh. The Living Galaxy: Instead of several small campaign ideas, Roger decides to pick one big one and stick with it for the whole column this time. Look at the Pacific front of WWII, and examine how it relates to space based war. You have relatively little solid land, and large gaps between those strategically useful places so you need to adapt your tactics accordingly. Just travelling can use up a lot of resources so you need to pick your moves carefully, and if things go wrong you might wind up in a situation where you have to land and take them from the other side or face starvation/running out of fuel & drifting helplessly. Having the right information is as important for victory as raw numbers, so if one side can intercept and decode the other's transmissions they'll have a huge advantage. Many of the small islands are covered with either sand or jungle so you need to be able to adapt to extreme terrains when you do. If they have primitive natives caught between the two spacefaring sides, how do you get them on your side and make them useful, particularly if there's a vast health & education gap? As usual when the theme is more specific and in depth, this is more interesting to me than lots of generic ideas. WWII has been documented and analysed in exhaustive day to day detail, so you have some excellent sources to look at individual battles, why a particular side won there, and then convert them into a suitably interplanetary milieu. You could easily fill a years long campaign with adventures using this method, so this gets my approval.</blockquote>

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