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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8592667" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 97: July 1994part 4/5Adversaries: This column goes Star Wars to give us another scenario where you could wind up on either side, although there's a clear hero & villain this time. Tyanna Tymb and Alara Fax were once business students at the same academy until Tyanna framed Alara for cheating and got her expelled. With the skills but not the formal piece of paper, Alara was forced to turn to organised crime to survive, while Tyanna remains technically within the bounds of the law, but using every dirty trick at her disposal to increase her company's profits, and probably evade taxes as well. Now both successful traders, they're set on collision course again as they compete for the resources of Bestal Three. Your basic LE vs CG situation. Since Star Wars is already all about plucky rebels vs the evil empire it's pretty obvious which side you should be on. While not a marvel of innovation, this is at least considerably superior to the first two instalments in terms of problematicness, and seems usable enough in other spacefaring sci-fi settings as well. Not saying I'm going too, with the sheer quantity of other options I have just from these magazines, but not ruling it out entirely either. Your Tax Dollars At Work: The guy at the top in Raven's Bluff may be heroic and true, but there sure are a lot of pieces of work in middle management. Bradlie Tagart, for example. This incompetent numpty is head of the Special Advisory Council Guard, (shortened derogatorily to Spags) a position he keeps because for all his self-serving corruption and organisational uselessness, he is good at bootlicking, toadying up to his superiors and shifting the blame whenever things go wrong. Your PC's wind up working for him, framed for kidnapping a nobleman's son (which he actually did himself) and arrested. Then, as usual for this place, they're released on bail and it's up to them to prove their own innocence. Watch out for the scammer lawyer who'll try to get you to sign a contract that entitles him to all your worldly goods in the small print, because that could wind up getting enforced even if you solve the main challenge, resulting in your character being even worse off than a regular starting PC for any future adventures. So this is a particularly obnoxious railroad at the beginning, before allowing you multiple levels of success or failure and the potential to lose quite a lot while still surviving at the end. In a campaign setup like the Living City, where you only get a few adventures a year unless you spend a ton on going to conventions that's actually crueler than TPKing the group and forcing you to start from scratch. The kind of bad adventure that's interesting to read but leaves me with absolutely negative amounts of desire to inflict it upon some poor group of players. I thought we played RPG's to get away from being jerked around by incompetent corrupt managers who only keep their jobs via bootlicking or be able to kill them without consequences. Going, Going: Another of their charity events gets promoted. Support a children's hospital and purchase new magic items for your Living City characters with a part IC, part OOC auction. Some items are bought using your real dollars converted into GP, while others can only be bought with actual GP won in adventures. Sounds a bit confusing, and like a precursor to MMO lootboxing, giving people who are rich in reality an advantage in game, but at least the money is going to charity rather than just profiting the coffers of the RPGA. Fingers crossed they can avoid getting sucked into that rabbit hole of corruption.</blockquote>

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