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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8630625" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 102: December 1994part 2/5Tribes of the Nubari: A fresh start with an interesting bit of history, but you can't resist making the new setting as human-centric as ever. Both the Toril natives and the ancient aliens use human stats, are fully capable of interbreeding, and the only difference for those with strong alien blood is having three fingers per hand, golden eyes and elongated conical heads. They give us six example human tribes, but only 2 demihuman ones, not even one for each race. I'm more than a little disappointed. The tribes themselves are pretty easy to boil down. The big one without a stereotype, led by a corrupt dumbass, because even 500 people is enough for politicians to start to appear in a group. The militant feminist tribe, for those of you who want your amazon fix. The fishers that use boats & nets. The other tribe of fishers who use bows & spears. The lion fanboys. And the spiritual ones with an unusually high proportion of spellcasters. Not any kind of rigid philosophical division of splats like Planescape factions, so there's plenty of room to add new ones. (hint hint to all the readers at the time) As usual for polyhedron, they can't resist putting some comedy in, because even in a gritty low technology setting you've got to have bad jokes apparently. It's becoming apparent that this is going to have some irritations beyond the inevitable ones that come from it being a shared world tournament centric game. Heroes of Malatra: Having got through two articles mostly mechanic-free, now it's time for the important meaty bits you need to create characters. As expected, things are changed from core in some quite significant ways. The new races have quite low level limits more similar to 1e demihumans than 2e ones, further reinforcing the human-centricness of the campaign even if they are including other options. Classes are restricted to the basic 4 and Rangers, not even druids, which seems odd but I guess their powers would be a little too useful in this environment and might short-circuit some railroads. Wizards have very limited spell selections and use fetishes to rememorize their spells rather than spellbooks, reminding us that spontaneous spellcasters aren't even a twinkle in a developer's eye yet, and a sorely needed bit of design space. Rogues don't get Read Languages, as no-one can read or write. Clerics, weirdly enough, get full access to all spell spheres, making them more flexible than regular ones. Their ability to conjure the basic necessities will be much in demand on any extended expeditions. Everyone is heavily restricted in what armor and weapons they can get hold of, and equipment purchasing works completely differently as they haven't invented money yet. Since everything works on a barter system, the number of items you start with is equal to your Charisma, making using that as a dump stat a genuine sacrifice for a change. You're definitely not going to be able to stock up everything you want. There are a few ways they're better though. You get 75 points to spread among your abilities, which will give you a higher average than Living City ones without having to worry about Comeliness, and a new proficiency slot every level, which is a fairly decent boost to most classes, if still nowhere near 3e levels of skill advancement. HP gained per level after 1st is fixed at about 3/4 the max die roll rather than the 1/2 of LC ones. Lots going on here, and their choices are even more idiosyncratic this time around. Campaigns using these rules definitely aren't going to play out like regular D&D ones. You can't fault their ambition, even if I can see ways they could have implemented it better in hindsight.</blockquote>

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