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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8653828" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 105: March 1995part 5/5The Living Galaxy: Roger goes into depth on another way to make sure your characters engage with the adventure at hand. Make them part of an organisation, then you can give them direct orders and have it make perfect sense in setting. They also are hopefully getting paid by said organisation, so searching every nook and cranny of a dungeon for loot so you can afford to continue adventuring rather than getting a day job is no longer a concern. Whether they're an open organisation like the police, or a secret one devoted to solving more esoteric problems, there are a vast number of examples of this kind of TV show. So this is another one where the advice isn't telling me anything new, but there's a lot of reference material, much of which I haven't seen, that I could check out at some future date if I ever have the free time. Presuming I can find it, because some of these examples go back to the 1950's and what are the odds that streaming services have bothered to licence them even if the original film stock hasn't degraded or been lost in the archives? Hunting down a complete collection could be almost as much of a quest as issues of this newszine. Talon's Tattoo Parlor: Fresh from having a question about using tattoos to scribe spells, we have another variant on the idea. Talon Darkoak is a half-ogre who's human side of the family is actually of noble blood. This meant that while he still had to deal with a fair bit of bullying as a kid, he did get a decent education and a comfortable start in life, and has turned his artistic talents into a lucrative career as a tattoo artist. If you're willing to pay extra, he'll use magical pigments that let you extract the item depicted on command, which has all sorts of applications for sneaky sorts. He does only have a limited supply of the magical pigments though, and the formula for creating more has been lost, so he'd pay handsomely if anyone did recover or recreate it and make providing this service sustainable. That's both a decent short and long term plot hook for players to get involved with, probably by first seeing someone else do the tattoo item trick and investigating further. To top things off, once you've known him for a while and used his services repeatedly, there's also the question of succession when his father dies, as he has a fully human younger half-brother and certain other members of the family would not be happy about some halfbreed getting to be a lord. Whether this comes in the form of legal machinations, assassination attempts or both is up to you, but there's definitely a good fantastical racism story to be had in there somewhere. This packs a pretty good density of useful ideas into it's short page count, so it has my approval. Uninhabited 3 - The Deep Trove: A much quicker follow-up between the second and third of these. This time we have a 24x8 gridded, three level dungeon with lots of little rooms and secret doors. The layout doesn't seem particularly logical, so this is for those of you who like the old school dungeon crawls filled with monsters placed without any consideration for why they're there, what they eat, where they go to the toilet and how they relate to one-another. Have fun trying to make any sense out of this one. The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: The newspaper makes another attempt at a big metaplot event. Chemcheaux is destroyed in a freak thunderstorm! Genuine accident, act of spiteful god, or sabotage by the Mage's Guild for undercutting their prices with cheap extraplanar labor?! Does this mean the end of magic marts in the Living City as the new head tries to make things a little grittier, or will it stick about as well as Ambassador Carrague's death and status quo will be restored in a few month's time? Will the answers appear in here, or some adventure where the PC's investigate the case at an upcoming tournament? I'm very interested in seeing how they'll follow this up and if it'll be an anticlimax in the end.In contrast with the previous issue, this one does feel like things are changing at a decent pace, as they add on new settings and make changes to the existing one. Seeing that the new editors are going to be including fewer railroading adventures and bits of annoying comedy is also a relief. Whether they'll wind up getting too serious and boring at some point remains to be seen, but at the moment, they seem to be moving closer to my tastes, unlike Dragon, which was increasingly becoming more of a slog around this era. Let's head onwards and see if it'll make enough of a difference to the rate I get through these to shift my posting schedule this time around.</blockquote>

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