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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8621225" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 101: November 1994part 1/532 pages. Dragon featured a bit of falconry at the start of this year, now it seems Polyhedron is rounding it off with the same idea, albeit with a much lower budget. It's not a particularly common gimmick for adventurers to use, as it falls prey to the usual problem of animal companions failing to scale with the PC's and becoming uselessly fragile in combat. I very much doubt this issue'll do anything about that, but hopefully there's still some interesting and relevant material inside.Classifieds is particularly New York heavy this time, with 5 different players seeking other players adverts in quick succession. Hopefully they're paying attention to other people's posts as well and some of them manage to pair up. Notes From HQ: Round about this time of year, they normally talk about how Gen Con turned out. They've been bigger and busier than ever this year, so instead of devoting a whole article to it, this is a whistlestop tour of what happened at 5 conventions this year. 8 hours of running Chemcheax at Origins when they'd only scheduled for four, because people were so desperate for magic items. This was then quickly beaten again at DragonCon, forcing them to spend 13+1/2 hours selling and trading so people could customise their living city characters. Dex Con was notable for it's awesome pinball machines and sweet selection, they've obviously been hitting those Caves of Confection hard. Gen Con itself was a LARP extravaganza, with many of the staff dressed as their characters, a whole load of living city tournaments, and plenty of money raised for their choice of charities. And finally, AndCon featured the first showcase of the updated high detail Raven's Bluff maps coming out next year. All seems pretty optimistic. If they keep on working at it they could still grow the living city by several more orders of magnitude without it becoming stale. As long as there's new people coming in, even the repetitive bits will still be new and interesting to someone. The Book of Exalted Deeds: Here we are again at the release of the Encyclopedia Magica, where slade went through every D&D book and periodical ever released (so far) and collated all the magical items. It got a decent amount of promotion in Dragon, but here's where you get the real behind the scenes dirt. The idea of a big index of magical items was originally pitched as a series of articles in here, along with the Chemcheux magic shop framing device that did make it in, before Jim Ward realised it's potential and promoted it to a full product. Just listing the items and where they could be found did not satisfy the general public at all though, and it's taken them several more years to put the proper definitive four-volume set together. In the process, he had to decide how much editing to do on items that were scrappily described, jokes, or horribly unbalanced, of which the newszine has been responsible for far more than it's fair share. In the end, they included them pretty much as they are, including both the overpowered sword of Babette Maelstrom and the exceedingly irritating sword of underwear snatching. It shows that these books had a more dramatic genesis than the average book, and also that the battle about how much whimsy to include in their products is an ongoing one in the TSR offices. I'm not the only one irritated by Jean & Skip's excesses. Still, at least they're just as willing to poke fun at themselves, otherwise we'd never have seen this article published. Much more interesting than a straight promotional article in any case, and it's nice to view this particularly epic bit of history from a different angle. This still feels like it was worth reading and writing about.</blockquote>

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