Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8634052" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 102: December 1994part 5/5The Glowing Ember: After finishing off our trip to Malatra, we still have space for them to promote an upcoming book. City Sites is a selection of 13 fairly generic locations to stick into your fantasy game. Polyhedron readers already have tons of those as part of the Living City, many of which are easily extracted and used in other worlds, so you might wonder why they're promoting it here. The obvious answer is that it's written by Skip Williams, who despite having moved off regular editing work here still retains connections with the staff. So here's an smithy run by gnomes, filled with the usual selection of plot hooks beyond the obvious one of buying stuff from them. Unfortunately, many of the ideas in this are silly and the names are even worse. A gold coin stuck to the floor by the door to prank people who try to pick it up. A horse called Charlimane. A female gnome called Brandy, who was rescued from the sea as a baby and is indeed a fine girl by gnome standards. A strong reminder that Skip should stick to sageing, because every time he writes setting or adventure material it leans into the most irritating of comedy. This would be somewhat subpar as a standalone Living City location. Knowing that this is getting into an official book while many better entries languish in the newszine never to get a wider audience adds considerably to the aggravation. Who's going to edit the editors, when the editors themselves think basic punnery like this is the height of hilarity? This just makes me groan and facepalm. Weasel Games: Lester is the only regular column in here, continuing to build his thesis on when you should and shouldn't engage in treachery. So far, most of his examples have involved board games, where you're supposed to be in competition, and the field starts afresh every time. Now he's turning his eye to RPG's, where you have to choose your moments much more carefully. Some people do not though, and either attack their own party straight away and die, or every NPC they see regardless of if they're friendly or not or how badly they're outnumbered, and die only slightly later. You'll never get past 1st level like that. Betraying your party at 1st level is a joke that'll soon be forgotten, particularly if you keep on doing it until they simply don't invite you back to make another character. Betraying your party once you've reached double digits and amassed enough resources to become an effective evil overlord is a dramatic climax (or midpoint, depending on how you want to play it) to a campaign that people will talk about for many years, particularly if you do so in a particularly ingenious way and then deliver a dramatic monologue about how you've been sowing the seeds of your scheme for years in advance. Basically, think before you betray, and do so in a way that won't alienate you from the other players even as you do horrible things to their characters, otherwise you won't have a game at all. From purely chaotic evil beginnings, his advice is actually maturing rapidly. He'll reach full eusociality and have to change the name of the column before we know it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />A very interesting end to the year that stands out from the regular issues even more than issue 100 did, presenting a big new challenge to the players that hopefully they'll rise too and build upon. There's still a lot more the RPGA could be doing if they were larger and had more resources, and supporting more settings & systems is probably the most important one. Let's head into next year and see how well this new attempt at worldbuilding sticks.</blockquote>

Verification