Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8680483" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 109: July 1995part 3/5Races of Cerilia: The second part of the Birthright teasers leans even heavier on selling to the race realism crowd than the first one by applying ability score modifiers to the human ethnic groups. All of them are very obvious expys of real world human ones, unlike, say, Oerth or Athas, showing they're really not bringing their A game to making this new world original. The Celt analogs are wise but clumsy. The germanic ones are agile but reckless. The arabic equivalents are smart but soft. The vikings are tough but ugly. And finally, the Mongols are strong but dumb, and the most likely to be seen as evil by all the other races. That's a … series of design decisions alright. At least they all get a +1 to one and a -1 to something else so you can't say any of them are objectively superior overall to the others. But it's still pretty jarring that they make a big deal of no racism being allowed in the Code of Conduct for freelance submissions, and then turn around and say a setting built on blood purity and objective differences between races is just fine and dandy. Did no-one at all in the offices see the inconsistency between those two statements? It's all very baffling in hindsight. It also makes it very obvious that the campaign world isn't actually a world, but a UK sized island in a much larger world that will mostly go unexplored, including any of the ramifications for how the powered bloodlines would affect the rest of the world if they ventured elsewhere, facing natives who don't have that supernatural advantage. ( or if those places do have their own gods and bloodlines, and if so, how they differ from the Cerilian ones. ) It all feels like the designers just wanted to put the wargaming with ethnically coded sides back into D&D after a decade of that being in decline, and didn't think many steps beyond that. I'm not sure if this or Dragonlance has aged worst overall, as it's a competition between lots of little problematic bits vs a few huge ones, but it's a pretty fierce one.The Age of Legend: Having finished putting together Virtual Seattle just a couple of months ago, they're striking while the iron's hot and trying to do a Living setting for it's fantasy counterpart Earthdawn. That's taking us from 1 to 5 in less than a year, which is definitely starting to seem like an unsustainable explosion of expansion. Earthdawn is less famous than Shadowrun as well, so they've got a tougher job selling it to complete newbies. So here's a single page, system free primer to the setting. Your basic fantasy world, only the magic level goes up and down according to cosmic cycles. When it gets too high, astral horrors can enter the world and things all get a bit cthulhuesque, so the people retreat to underground bunkers (ie, a good excuse for there to be tons of dungeons across the world) to wait out the worst of it. They're currently just coming out of the high magic phase, which means the world is fresh for the exploring and rebuilding, which will probably also involve a fair bit of warring for territory. It's easy to see how that's a setup custom designed for adventurers to thrive in. Now onto the next page to see how they restrict things to make it suitable for a tournament based campaign.</blockquote>

Verification