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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8601716" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 98: August 1994part 2/5The Ministry of Art: As they said in the newspaper last issue, they've recently managed to get wizards of all specialities and none to sit down together and co-operate enough to form an organised government ministry in the same way as clerics. This has caused much grumbling, both among other power blocs in the city who feel threatened by the new one, and among wizards themselves about the specifics of who was appointed, with plenty of accusations that the chairmembers were chosen for political skill rather than raw power, and many of them were diversity appointments that mean women & demihumans are more common than they are in the general population of arcane spellcasters around here. (Apart from gnomes, who are very peeved one of their number didn't get the Illusionist seat) The meat of the article is short descriptions of the 14 members, one for each specialty school, element, wild magic & Ambassador Carrague in the generalists seat. (They'll need to reorganise come 3e and the introduction of Sorcerers then. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) As you'd expect, they're diverse, eccentric, and many are much older than they appear. If they all agree on something, they could accomplish a lot, but I strongly suspect that they'll spend most of their time bickering and incorporating them into the government was a way of keeping them from just doing whatever experiments on their own. So this continues straight on from the editorial in talking about both the fun aspects and irritations of politics, as well as reminding us that affirmative action & diversity quotas were already a thing in the 90's, along with the predictable reactionary backlash. You could definitely get a lot of adventures out of the interactions of this lot, so I think this article is a success.  The Ambassador and The King: This also follows directly on from the last article by giving us full stats for Ambassador Carrague and his dog King, who is actually a human ranger transformed into a dog years ago who found he prefers the doggy life. The only drawback is that after a couple of decades as a dog, he's already feeling pretty geriatric, and isn't sure how that would interact with his human lifespan if he was turned back. Carrague's life is also pretty interesting, with a long sequence of adventures that got him up to level 19, several decades as the building inspector, his recent "death", and then being given the chairman job at the new ministry of art. He's definitely showing signs of senility these days, although as with many wizards, it's uncertain how much of that is faked, and he's still pretty dangerous in a pinch so few people are going to push their luck with him. The two of them keep pretty busy, so they could turn up in the unlikeliest places. He plays basically the same role in Raven's Bluff that Elminster does for the wider realms, a good guy, but not one you can rely on, as he might be absent, preoccupied with a bigger problem, or choose to help you in an obtuse way, and has no patience for stupidity in his supplicants. That keeps the players from running to him whenever there's a problem, and Raven's Bluff a place where low level adventurers are needed. Once again this takes things mentioned in previous issues and builds upon them, making it feel extra significant, and I strongly suspect we'll be seeing them again in the future as well. This issue is turning out pretty interesting so far.</blockquote>

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