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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8652521" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 105: March 1995part 4/5Gothic Heroes: As they build up to the launch of the Living Death campaign, it looks like they'll actually be making an effort to give us a decent amount of teaser material. First up is a full set of stats for the heroes of Dracula. Jonathan & Mina Harker, Van Helsing, John Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincy Morris. Their ability scores are mostly average or above, but nowhere near the twinkery of the old Giants in the Earth columns, as this is supposed to be a more grounded story. They've all managed to gain a few levels, but only Van Helsing has any kind of real supernatural power. All the survivors except Arthur continue to be active fighters against supernatural evil who could serve as allies in your own game. Of course, if you've got the Masque boxed set, you'll know that they didn't actually finish Dracula off, because you get to fight him in one of the example adventures. This all shows that victoriana is an easier sell to the average gamer than an entirely new lost land setting because there's lots of familiar stories that you can just convert directly, using that nostalgia as a promotional tool. There are enough famous victorian horror stories to easily tide us over to october, quite possibly beyond if it proves popular enough to get regular submissions from ordinary members. I would prefer good original material personally, but this is still an interesting development expanding their ambitions beyond dungeon crawling. Let's see where it leads once the biggest, most obvious bits of source material are exhausted.Weasel Games: Lester talks about some more subtle ways you can antagonise your group. One interesting one is when a character has inherent danger to their companions built into their mechanics. Berserkers who can't switch off their rage automatically once it's started and keep on attacking even when all the enemies are dead. Wild Mages who's every spell has a chance of going haywire. Conan Wizards who accumulate weird disadvantages with every spell learnt. White Wolf characters who nearly all have some kind of self-control issues of varying degrees. If you should wind up hurting your companions it's not your fault, but that of the dice. (the fact that you chose to play a character like that is irrelevant <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) There's also the more subtle conflicts built into settings with proliferation of splats, once again exemplified by White Wolf and now copied by Planescape factions. You have a bunch of stereotypes and goals from your inherent splat, another set from your social splat, and lots of places where you get pushed in different directions by the two and have to choose where your loyalties lie. Having a party in those systems is pretty much guaranteed to turn into self-perpetuating internal dramas if played by the RAW, which is great fun as long as everyone expects it and is on board with that playstyle. This is taken to it's ultimate extreme in Amber diceless, where the bidding system for stats makes your group the most powerful thing in the universe right from the start, and nearly all the significant conflicts will inevitably be PvP ones. A reminder that system matters, and that there are lots of RPG's out there now that are much more amenable to PvP conflict than D&D. One area where the 90's really came into their own and a good reason to explore those games if the D&D formula is growing boring.</blockquote>

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