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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8679444" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 109: July 1995part 2/5The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: Having announced the creation of a monster grinding mart last issue with great fanfare, they now muddy the waters with legal challenges by NIMBYs. What if the monsters escape? How dare you pay vampires to work shifts and then just let them roam free when not working like they're just regular people?! Do you really know where the tarrasque is sleeping and plan to use it for the highest level adventurers to kill repeatedly or is that just marketing lies?! On top of that, apparently there's another travelling wizard calling himself Discount Merlin (man, they really have got to reinforce that 4th wall) which opens up the problem of trademark disputes. All the kind of stuff you see in the real world, played up for comedy. Do they ever plan to actually finish this project and let PC's use it, or was making it just to have something to create drama about the plan all along? Either way, this makes for pretty entertaining reading, so I look forward to the next instalment. Elminster's Everwinking Eye: After a full year's vacation in the relatively peaceful environs of Turmish, Ed decides it's time for a little more action and takes us to the Border Kingdoms. A narrow strip of fertile land between the lake of steam and the large empty arid expanse of the Shaar, they're a figurative and literal hotbed of activity. Small kingdoms rise and fall faster than historians can keep track of them, which is good for adventurers looking for challenges to gain levels, but really annoying to Calishites wanting to expand their empire eastward. Even Elminster doesn't know a huge amount about the place, as there's lots of wild magic zones around that could do nasty things to anyone using magic to survive beyond their natural lifespan. So it's taken a fair bit of persuading and lots of alcohol from Ed to persuade him to investigate further, and much of the information in the next few issues may be inaccurate reports from second-hand sources. Another reminder in quick succession that the 4th wall of the forgotten realms is pretty porous, with archmages from there travelling back and forth between earth, oerth, krynn and various other places, exchanging spells and information, not all of it true. This also makes it easy to do retcons by saying that the information in our books was wrong because of the unreliable sources delivering the information between worlds. Not a huge amount of actual useful game information in this one, but lots of flavour, with Elminster's ramblings and his interplay with Ed being the main focus. It shows that he's now big enough that he can get away with things none of their other contributors could get away with, filling a full 4 pages with preamble knowing that the more detailed examinations of individual locations will still be safely published in subsequent issues, not cancelled unexpectedly like several of their other columnists recently.</blockquote>

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