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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8617964" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 100: October 1994part 3/5Insect Labs Incorporated: For Amazing Engine material, we get served details on the Caribbean in the Kromesome setting, a biopunk world of genetic engineering and the messed up stuff megacorps get up to with that power. Insect Labs are engaging in some extremely overzealous gentrification, releasing three different plagues on the population to whittle them down before buying everything up and converting it into a shiny chrome utopia. The big executives each think they'll be in charge of the new world, but the company's supercomputer has become intelligent, is playing them off against one another, and wants to reduce humans to it's obedient hive of servants and become the true ruler. Can the PC's figure out what's going on, gather enough data to actually pin the creation of the diseases on the company rather than just being natural mutations, and will they spot the power behind the throne or just take down a few executives by revealing the scandal but not providing a full solution. A complicated and open-ended scenario that seems depressingly plausible after seeing the way big corporations have profiteered off a real life pandemic while regular people lose their jobs or find wages increasing far less than inflation. Who knows how far the likes of Amazon or Google will go to increase their control over the world, or what the algorithms are pushing for their own benefit that their original creators didn't intend? This manages to be genuinely unsettling but also pretty playable. Maybe it might be worth digging up the books for this after all. Conspired To Succeed: Dark Conspiracy has been mentioned in here a few times, and it's obviously one of those games they'd like to see more of, as it's another non-TSR game that they give an article too. This one is some fairly basic new crunch, giving us 4 more career templates to build your character with, some less formal forms of employment than others. (Struggling) Genre writer, hitting a little too close to the truth with your writings and attracting the attention of the monsters as a result. Asylum inmate, framed by the monsters and institutionalised. Whether you've escaped or not, you can actually pick up some valuable skills in there. Zoologist who stumbles across cryptids or worse in your investigation of the wilderness and starts to investigate them as well. And finally, someone who detached from normal society and lived in the sewers for a while, which is an excellent position to observe the weird underbelly of the world from as long as you can keep healthy down there. All quite quirky, as I guess the corebook covered all the more mundane archetypes. It seems quite heavily inspired by Traveller, with every 4 years you spend doing a thing giving you a set amount of skills. A decent enough little article, neither brilliant nor annoying, that adds a little more very welcome variety to the issue. A Squid's-Eye View: Mystara gets our longest article, another bit of correspondence that's particularly interestingly meta. There are no mind flayers on the planet, because they're an AD&D monster, and the Known World was a regular D&D setting, and never the twain shall crossover for reasons of internal politics. But politics shift, so the Known World as a setting is being rebranded and sent across cosmologies to play under the AD&D 2e rules with all the other settings. As with many of their decisions around this time, this would turn out to be a bad idea, making what was a fairly generic setting compete directly with all the other settings made people wonder what the point was, and it would die again having only converted only a small fraction of the previous material over to the new rules. But anyway, an illithid from another world is looking for new places to conquer and this is framed as it's research processes and conclusions, as it looks at various countries and the oddities of the planet like the hollow centre and the day of the year magic stops working. A quite amusing whistlestop tour that comes to a head when it scries Glantri, and find that the wizards there scry & summon back. I guess no matter how much of a supergenius you are, you can't be prepared for everything. <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=":)" /> So this is an article that playfully makes the best of the situation, trying to convert people to the setting who were oblivious or put off by it's "basicness". Will this encourage more readers to send articles in here, or are the ones I've already seen in Dragon the limit of what there is to be known? Let's hope the next few years have at least a few hidden gems for this setting, as I still retain some fondness for it in both it's incarnations.</blockquote>

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