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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8676350" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 108: June 1995part 4/5Dispel Confusion: Have any dragons or elves ever died old age? (Absolutely yes. It's been a plot point in a fairly recent Dungeon adventure, and several different novels we could mention.)Are your rulings official? (In tournament games, yes. In home games, your DM always has the final say and can change the rules as they please. )Author, Author!: Another repetition of the rules and guidelines for people wanting to submit material to them. Query letter first, don't write the whole thing out until you know we're interested. Put your name on every page and make sure they're numbered so it's easy to tell if we've lost anything. Stick strictly to the code of conduct: PC's always act like heroes, no swearing, cops are good, drugs are bad, mkaay. Use proper spelling, punctuation & grammar, don't plagiarise. Once sold, all rights belong to TSR. Things have changed little here over the past 10 years apart from the fact that they do pay you at least a little bit, and I very much doubt they'll change until the WotC takeover. Meh. Weasel Games: Lester is a second columnist who sends his last missive in this month, despite talking about future plans for it, which makes it look increasingly likely that they were cancelled by the new editor rather than the writers. He's still in the middle of uncovering dirty tricks for both White Wolf's Jyhad and TSR's Blood Wars CCG's, then telling you how to make the best of them by stacking psychological warfare on top. Exploding Famous Caitiffs with magic chainsaws? Man, the Sabbat just don't care how much they violate the masquerade as long as it gets the job done. <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=":)" /> Blood Wars is similarly gonzo, relying on spies in the walls to know when you've exhausted the enemies defences and can unleash divine intervention without being countered. A reminder that these CCG's routinely feature things happening that you'd have to be very high in XP to try even once in the corresponding RPG's, and even then both the system and the roleplaying advice in the books fights you if you do. Which makes a lot of players ask why can't we have games where you start off awesome instead of grinding your way up from 1st level every time? So it's not the lesson he's trying to teach, but this still reveals some interesting things about the gaming trends of the next few years and how they're influenced by external factors. It also shows that despite Lorraine ( :rumble of thunder: ) discouraging playtesting, they are still managing to play the games they created at lunchtime and after hours. He's still managing to be both a useful and interesting read, so I can safely end this by saying this column was cut short before it's natural conclusion, and I would have liked to see more of it, unlike the Living Galaxy, which feels very moribund by this point. The Living Galaxy: Speaking of which, Roger is directly repeating topics again. More alternate histories? Well, I guess there are a lot of ways even a minor change could spiral into a very different world over the course of a few years. Thinking up some more after having published the first set and wanting to share them as well isn't that surprising. A world where the Spanish empire conquered the world instead of the british one. One where the USA is still a colony and Benedict Arnold is on the £10 note as a great hero. Bush winning a second term because Clinton's sex scandals came out earlier. The many ones where the nazis won WWII. Any of the near-misses for nuclear war in our timeline going the wrong way. The references tend to be much more recent than last time, and there's fewer of them, but much of the general advice about how to set tone and make each alternate timeline distinctive is repeated. There's also more emphasis on traveling between multiple timelines rather than sticking to one for the whole campaign. This feels like a reaction to the Sliders TV show, which started just a few months ago, and obviously has plenty of good ideas to steal for your games. So I'm not learning anything new here, but it does at least remind me that the 90's did have some pretty cool genre media, relatively little of which has been lost in the intervening time, unlike previous decades. That can still be valuable inspiration today.</blockquote>

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