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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8695809" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 111: September 1995part 4/5Larger than Life: Now there's a column name I haven't thought about in a long time. It appeared twice in Dragon in 1981, as an alternative to Giants in the Earth, but never really caught on. Now it's appearing in here as an alternative to the Rogues Gallery, which has also been inactive for the last couple of years, first replaced by Adversaries, which also failed to catch on. Looking ahead, it appears in here 4 times before once again lapsing, so while that's a little better than the first try, it's still nothing to shout about. Guess it just isn't meant to be, except as a Backstreet Boys song. Our first characters are Vydd Shadowrook and his teenage ward Khugris. Vydd was a Sergeant in the purple dragons when the Horde invaded a few years ago. Khugris was a Tuigan orphan joining the invasion despite being too young to be a useful fighter. When the horde was beaten, he threw himself at the mercy of the Cormyrans expecting death. They turned out to be a lot more magnanimous in victory than he feared, put him to work doing odd jobs with the army, and he soon picked up the new language and made friends. Now they've left the military life behind, run an adventuring equipment shop together in Raven's Bluff and Khugris wants to become a wizard, but they don't have the money for tuition. Maybe some kind PC would be willing to help out for less than the prices listed in the DMG? So this is a fairly positive story of how you don't have to hold a grudge against an entire nation or ethnic group just because you had a war with them in the past, but can treat them as individuals and build a new life together instead. If we'd learned that lesson after WWI we probably wouldn't have had a WWII. It gives both characters a decent amount of depth and reasons the PC's would want to interact with them, and doesn't skip out mapping the shop either. It's basically just another Living City entry under a different name, but it's decent enough one that ties into the wider Realms metaplot more than most, rather than being purely generic and modular. I'd have no problem using it if I were playing in that location and era.A World of Your Own: Thought you'd seen the last of Roger Moore after he quit Dragon and retired The Living Galaxy? Nope! He's still just as interested in worldbuilding, only now he's freed of the need to frame it in sci-fi trappings every time. He can serve you the same advice as a few years ago, only now with specifically AD&D focussed examples. Money for old rope. So it's another round of talking about how to make your campaign world distinctive. What new stuff will you add, what common stuff will you intentionally leave out, what does the geography look like, how high are the tech and magic levels, is the overall tone light or dark, how open is it to crossovers with other worlds and what impact do they have on proceedings? Remember that a cool high concept is useless if you don't also give the players actual adventures to play. Useful if you're a new arrival, but nothing I haven't heard from him before.</blockquote>

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