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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8629619" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 102: December 1994part 1/532 pages. Is that bow really going to be enough to take down all those dinosaurs? I guess it depends on if they can climb up the tree, or the wonders of even basic hands and the technology they enable will be enough to separate man from beast. Time to see if there'll be anything festive for us to enjoy this christmas, or overly cheesy stuff that leaves me rolling my eyes again.Notes From HQ: Well, it turns out straight away that we do have a big present, even if it's not remotely wintery. They're starting up a whole new Living setting! They're going halfway around the world, to Toril's equivalent of southeast asia to give us the Living Jungle. That's a very interesting development indeed. I can be pretty certain in hindsight it's not going to be as big as the Living City, as that already has the network effects from being fully established, as well as being much more generic, but props to them for trying something different. Even they know it's probably going to be an uphill struggle, as unlike the development of Raven's Bluff, and the several years they spent failing to get a Living Gamma World area off the ground, they're not crowdsourcing the basic details. They've spent the last year or so writing them up in house and are unleashing them fully formed here without any kind of teasers or buildup. You're still encouraged to build on them with new locations & NPC's and submit them to the newszine, but the basic parameters you're working under are much stricter than last time. Well, no point sitting around here then. Let's find out what those specifics are and if they've aged badly in the way they handle a very different culture. Malatra - The Living Jungle: Although we might still be on the same planet, it doesn't look like they'll be doing crossovers between the two Living locations any time soon, as they're putting great pains into making this place isolated from the outside world. Not only is it in a thick jungle hundreds of miles away from the civilised areas of Kara-Tur, it's further isolated by being an improbably high and steep plateau, so you'll need flight or significant mountaineering skill to get on or off, and magical wards around the edges, which just seems like overkill. If this setup looks artificial, that's because it was. It was originally settled by ancient aliens, who raised the plateau so they wouldn't disturb the development of the natives. Their civilisation collapsed mysteriously at some point, a few Toril natives of all kinds of races managed to make it up there anyway, and now there are six different races sharing the place relatively harmoniously, mostly ignorant of both the wider world and the remnants of ancient technology. So it's obvious that real world cultural analogs are not on the agenda here, and while they're referencing both Oriental Adventures and Spelljammer, they're doing their own thing with the parts. Like Athas, you'll have to get used to not having many bits of equipment that you'd take for granted in other campaigns, and wilderness travel being a significant challenge in itself. That's the theory anyway. If it actually gets many adventures and locations submitted I'm sure there'll be some feature creep because all grim & gritty tribal struggles for survival make Jack a bored boy.</blockquote>

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