NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8585583" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 96: June 1994part 2/5Unnatural Selection: As I suspected, the cover ties in with this month's adventure, an introductory one for Bughunters that's designed to make the setting clear to people who haven't bought the book. The PC's play synthetically produced humans with (often imperfectly) imprinted memories from real people, sent out en masse as disposable grunts to colonise the galaxy. Your life is cheap, but if you can survive against the horrors the galaxy has to offer, a fresh world is yours and your descendants. Good luck, because the odds are against you. For your first mission it's off to the second planet of 61 Cygni A. A pleasant seeming place at first, but it turns out the settler village is being stalked by a creature that's somewhere between Alien and The Thing, a vicious predator able to disguise itself as one of the local fauna, and then later on, one of the settler's dogs, but not bright enough to convincingly integrate itself into human society and come up with long-term plans for our downfall. With only two combats, this is actually about as slow a burn as a single round tournament module can manage, putting plenty of emphasis on the dystopian nature of the society you're from and the psychological damage of your fellow pregens. So this is much more Alien than Aliens, playing up the grimness of the setting and giving you plenty of room to escalate from killing a single bug to flamethrowering whole hordes of them in future adventures. Like most tournament adventures, it is pretty linear, genre savvy players will spot several places where it's obvious what's going on but they'll be forbidden to act on it and short-circuit the plot because their characters wouldn't know that. It's decent enough for what it is, and adds a welcome bit of variety to the place, but is still constrained by the fundamental limitations of their format and so not one I'd really want to play in. If Dungeon could present a more sandboxy expansion on one of the Amazing Engine settings that'd be even better.The Living City: If you find seeking adventure hooks in seedy taverns where the air is filled with smoke and brawls break out more nights than not unpleasant, there are alternatives. Rose's Tea Room, for example. A pleasant, well-lit place where you can enjoy a civilised cup of tea and light (for a halfling) repast, and engage in polite conversation with similarly polite and well-dressed companions. It gets more interesting when you know that many of these individuals are undercover spies, who obviously don't want to draw attention, and Rose herself & several of the staff are high level thieves. If you go here it would be polite to leave the armor and (obvious) weapons at home, otherwise you might not be allowed to book a table and miss out on some juicy information. Basically, if you like putting on an upper-class english accent, introducing yourself last name first and ordering your drinks shaken, not stirred, this is the place to hang out. Have fun exchanging your coded phrases and subtle put-downs with people you don't trust. I can definitely see the value in that, so this is another decent enough entry that you could easily use elsewhere in your own campaign as well. Weasel Games: Fresh from providing this month's adventure, Lester Smith also starts up a new advice column, focussing on how to be the cruelest, sneakiest player or DM possible. He personally derives great pleasure from both backstabbing other players on the way to the prize and designing games where this is the optimal mode of play. There's not actually that much advice in this first instalment, mainly focussing on anecdotes from his own past, but this is a breath of fresh air after years of RPGA tournaments being strictly no PvP. Whether that'll spread to the rest of the newszine and get them to vary their playstyle, or the actual adventures will continue to be as party based as ever remains to be seen, but this is an interesting development and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what he has to say next more than Roger's lists of references.</blockquote>

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