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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8678401" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 109: July 1995part 1/536 pages. Once again it's time for vikings stalking through rugged misty landscapes, keeping an eye out for trouble. Will the trouble come to them, or will they attack first and successfully pull off a raid. Let's see if there's any treasure worth accumulating in here, or just coppers and cursed items to add to our encumbrance rating. Notes from HQ: They haven't just changed editors recently, but also Network Co-ordinators. Scott Douglas is the new guy in charge of that. While Duane does most of the work creating the newszine, he's busy trying to sanction tournaments, get enough people to sign up as Judges to run all of them, adjudicate rules disputes over what is and isn't allowed in their Living campaigns, and other general cat-herding duties. It looks like it's going to be another fairly conservative changeover, as he's not immediately going to start switching things around, but does want feedback from regular members about what could be done better. So until he does start throwing his weight around, I have nothing much to say. Hopefully he will last long enough that we get a chance to find out more about him. Forgotten Deities: More godly shenanigans here as we look at Sharess. She may or may not at one time have been a real god, but now she's just an alter-ego for Shar to hedge her bets with. Supposedly Chaotic Good, her priests who become evil will not lose their powers, and in fact are more likely to be promoted up the hierarchy, such as it is in a small cult comprised entirely of hedonists. A textbook example of using temptation as a honey trap to gradually lure people into darker deeds, although of course they can't go into any particularly salacious details due to the code of conduct. Particularly notable is that among their unique spells is the ability to grant permanent sex changes, which is a particularly powerful bit of bait to dangle before any trans characters who are fed up of using short term spells or magic items to maintain their gender identity and worrying about what happens if they get hit by a dispel in combat or wander into a dead magic zone. A reminder that there was a lot more sex and support of alternate sexualities in the Realms in Ed's original writing, and even after the code of conduct censored a lot of it in the books, there was still more than any other official D&D setting, which only increased after WotC took over and liberalised the editorial regime. So reading between the lines of the bowdlerised text, there's a lot of strong, but also potentially emotionally triggering plot ideas in here revolving around trying to pay the price to get your character's gender identity affirmed, (which will probably involve a quest rather than just paying money, which probably advances Shar's secret agenda in some dubious way) or thinking that these are good guys, then finding out that some of the members are engaging in sex slavery or pedophilia, trying to clean that out and finding out just how far up the rot goes. The kind of thing that's not for everyone, but for those it resonates with, you can really get stuck into the roleplaying opportunities here.</blockquote>

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