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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8709931" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 112: October 1995part 5/5A World of Your Own: Roger details two more fantasy worlds he came up with at some point but didn't fit into the previous column's format. Neither are completely original, but he details his sources carefully. First takes the basic topology of a world from SJR4: Practical Planetology, small, ringed, short days but looooong years, then mashes up arthurian mythology and dragonlance - it's inhabited by elves who've lost most of their magical knowledge, but are now building a new chivalrous civilisation and are about to see the gods come back in a big way. Will this lead to a new golden age, or be a brief punctuation of glory that leads to disaster and centuries more darkness? Well, I guess that's up to the PC's.Second expands on one of the worlds casually mentioned in Q1 as being invaded by Lolth. The day length is closer to our own, but everything else is much weirder, dominated by ultra-vertical crystaline mountains and a purple sky filled with small, close, independently moving stars. (making sea navigation much harder, among other things.) Non-drow elves have been hunted to extinction by Lolth's forces, and many other races aren't far behind. You get to be one of the elite high level members of the resistance, striking to sabotage their supply lines and eventually seal the gate to the demonweb pits. Could be played as grim and gritty tactical wargaming in a Sword & Sorcery world, or could turn out very She-Ra, depending on how you handle it. Both of these make it clear that what you intentionally leave out is as important as what you put in if you want to make a world distinctive. The Realms can be a kitchen sink but still have it's own flavour through Ed's decades long obsessive prolificness, but you probably don't have that long to develop a world before letting people play in it. Virtuosity: After all this Living Death stuff, they still have room left to give you some more advice on how to write and referee Virtual Seattle adventures. A lot of the advice applies to all tournament ones: write something that can be finished in 3+1/2 hours, which they've found in practice works out as about 6 encounters of various types, don't make it too easy or too tough, type everything up neatly with each page of the adventure numbered. The differences obviously come with treasure and XP awards, as you need a lot more nuyen to pay for most things than GP, but fewer karma points than XP to boost your powers. As you'd expect, they want adventure writers to be conservative with both money and karma awards to keep advancement slow. They're also even bigger on your characters keeping a low profile and not using violence as the first solution to every problem - if you try that, you'll rapidly find yourself facing increasingly powerful teams of special forces police with orders to kill on sight. Another strong reminder that twinks and munchkins are not welcome in Living settings, nor are people who don't stick to the railroads provided. For it to be plausible that there's that many shadowrunners jammed into one city and not have a complete breakdown of law & order, their individual adventures have to be kept pretty low-key. Hopefully if they start out strict, they won't have to do too many retcons to keep things from falling apart. Yet another issue where the continued expansion of the various Living settings continues to be the most interesting part, showing their attempts to increase not only the number of them, but also run each one in a slightly different way. Will they be able to give all 5 decent amounts of screentime going forwards, or will the Living City be bigger than all the others put together in the same way as the Forgotten Realms in general to their wider worlds? Time to see if next issue has any big special theme, or they've finally run out of ideas for this year.</blockquote>

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