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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8621858" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 101: November 1994part 2/5Adversaries: The final attempt at this column that never really caught on decides to ditch the moral ambiguity, and put you in the middle of two chaotic evil monsters. Both really ought to be destroyed, it's just a matter of what order you do it in and if you'll temporarily side with one or the other in the process to make it easier. A mummy who resents her noble family's loss of wealth and status, and curses anyone who tries to take their ancestral home with lycanthropy, and the latest contender, a robber baron who forged documents to the place and is trying to go legit. Now she's losing a servant every new moon and in denial about the cause. She might hire the adventurers to help, but if they ask the wrong questions to the wrong people and find out about her  criminal past she'll have to turn on them. Or as the deaths rack up, other people are bound to get suspicious anyway and investigate. This seems like it could be expanded out into a decent enough horror/mystery scenario in which the players have plenty of freedom of choice to affect the outcome. Another of those cases where the column improved as it went on, and it's irritating that it never got the support it needed to reach it's full potential. You have to give people a chance to get through the ultra-cliched basics before they can start to come up with decent material. Back In Black: The Living City material this month is particularly continuity heavy, only really having full impact if you've been subscribed for a while. Lord Charles Blacktree was the former Lord Speaker removed in last year's elections due to his pomposity and laziness. A child of privilege, he'd taken the luxuries of his status for granted all his life, while his supposedly loyal servant was skimming money off all the house's business deals and this humiliating public loss was a big wake-up call for him. He disappeared from Raven's Bluff for a year and came back several levels higher, toughened up and with his pretensions knocked off from adventuring with people who treated him as equals and expected him to pull his weight. He then spent the subsequent 5 months taking a much more active role in his family affairs, trying to rebuild his reputation and growing increasingly suspicious something was up. This culminated in a criminal trial that thankfully, he was exonerated from and the guilty servant caught through the joys of lie detector spells. That brings us up to the present, where a few people are still suspicious of him and think the new leaf he's turned is fakery, but most have accepted the new Charles for who he is. All's well that ends well, although hopefully this isn't truly the ending, and he'll make further appearances in the ongoing Living City metaplot, particularly as said servant escaped before he could be executed and is likely out for revenge. That's an obvious plot thread left dangling for future writers to grab. Interesting stuff, but also quite dense, and I could understand if it annoyed new players unsure about how they could actually interact with the big Raven's Bluff movers and shakers. People who've been playing since the start might have earned a few levels and have a chance at winning government posts, but for everyone else, the bar keeps on getting higher.</blockquote>

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