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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8691782" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 110: August 1995part 5/5Living City Character Generation: Having spent a big chunk of the issue expanding the things people can do in the Living City, it's time to reprint the basics again. Most things haven't changed. 84 points to put in attributes, still keeping Comeliness despite it being 6 years since that was official now, max hp at 1st & 2nd then half for all subsequent levels, dual-classing costs extra and is tightly restricted. The gains in attribute bonuses have been mildly scaled back since last time, particularly when it comes to favouring charisma, so high level characters will need to revise their sheets accordingly. CN characters are added to the banned list with all the evil alignments, because too many people were playing them as lolzrandom fishmalks or indistinguishable from evil. Kits from the race handbooks are banned, as that's where the most twinky ones were introduced, but most of the class handbooks are still fine. Weapon specialisation is restricted to single class fighters. Specialty priests are restricted to choosing from a fairly limited set of core FR deities, which does not include the ones currently being added in the newszine. And finally, they've been going long enough now that a few players are reaching high levels where it's a bother to write adventures for, so they're capping things off at level 12 or 1,125,000 XP, whichever is less, and forcing you to retire any characters that exceed those limits. No 7th level spells for you to break the game with, no matter how many tournaments you attend per year! While a few new things from supplements are now allowed, the overall trend is towards more restrictions. If you had things that were allowed previously and didn't abuse them, sucks to be you I guess. Just cross them off your sheet and move on, because there's no point fighting it.The Living Galaxy: This column finally comes to an end after more than 5 years, although it looks like it's definitely Roger's decision, unlike the other columns cut recently. But he still has another trio of alternate history timelines to give us before being completely tapped out. A world in which Texas became a country of it's own, resulting in the USA as we know it never forming and the cowboy era continuing decades after it did in the real world. One in which the english colony at Roanoke survived, resulting in Virginia having the largest city in the USA and the British empire being even bigger in general. Finally, and most interestingly, one where the Napoleonic empire never fell, which has now developed interdimensional technology and is interfering in other timelines. Why should the Nazis have all that fun? You can't keep on jumping from one unconnected challenge to another. Eventually a big bad you can't beat easily will show up and the campaign will become more serialised. Then you have to add aliens, civilised apes or weirder still to keep things interesting. Keeping a hard sci-fi campaign hard isn't easy. Maybe the DM getting bored explains the current absurdities in our own world. Anyway, this feels like a decent enough conclusion to a long-running column that somewhat outstayed it's welcome, but not so much as to become completely pointless. Hopefully he'll be able to come up with something fresh once freed from the limitations of the format.Another issue filled with significant and ambitious attempts at change in quick succession, quite possibly overreaching the level of commitment of the average player. Looks like Polyhedron is mirroring the overall progression of TSR quite well in this respect, throwing out a whole ton of settings in quick succession and then changing them with metaplot developments without worrying about splitting the base. Well, at least I can go onto the next issue fairly confident that it'll be interesting at the moment, even if it might not be good.</blockquote>

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