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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8730349" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 115: January 1996part 2/5Mercury Limited: In between all these big additions to the Raven's Bluff social order, they still find time to publish some more little establishments by regular members. Like this newcomer to the scene, a luxury carriage company enabling the rich to be taxi'd around the city in style and safety. The stylings are more victorian than medieval, but that's nothing new to the Realms by this point. Since they're new, they actually only have one vehicle, which means they'd be in big trouble if it were stolen or crashed. The fact that they had trouble with the merchant's guild when trying to set up initially also adds to the suspicion that someone will try to sabotage them in the future. That definitely seems like a feed line for a future adventure. Also notable is that this has another appearance of a character who's trans via reincarnation, going from male human to female elf in backstory after being killed while adventuring with very little fuss. That's the third character in here, compared to zero in Dragon or Dungeon. Despite the tightening of the Code of Conduct in general, it's interesting that they've repeatedly let that idea slip through. So while less significant in the wider scheme of things than the last two articles, this is still pretty interesting and worth including if your own campaign happens to wander in this direction. Say, Aren't You?: Just a few pages ago, they mentioned Fame Points without clarifying what they are. Now they do the article explaining that. (and both articles are precisely a page long, so it would have been no problem to put them the other way around, so what were the editors thinking?!) The details aren't particularly complicated, although it does add another half a dozen numbers to your character sheet as it's not just one number to measure all-purpose notoriety, but separate ones for different social classes, the temples, the government and the city watch. If in doubt as to whether an NPC recognises you, roll d20 vs your appropriate fame category and they do if it's equal or lower. As mentioned earlier, people who engage with the various knightly orders, guilds and other social structures will accumulate fame points faster than ones who just wander around adventuring on their own. Now let's see if this turns out to be useful in actual play, or just another little bit of bookkeeping slowing things down. A World of Your Own: After taking the grimdark thing as far as the code of conduct will let him around here, Roger decides to do something completely different this time. Take the Amazing Engine's Magitech setting, add a pinch of Over The Edge, put them both in an AD&D shaped pot and boil them up. The result is an alternate universe Madagascar where dwarves and lizard men rub shoulders with the human inhabitants, multiclassing rules are extremely relaxed, (but only for the natives, visitors from other worlds are still stuck using their own rules) and many prehistoric animals that are extinct in our world are still wandering free. There's plenty of opportunity for adventure in both the high-tech, rapidly growing capital city and the large amounts of wild land still to be found everywhere else, with both environmentalist and colonialist themes to examine. This combination of elements is very interesting indeed, but it's also an irritating reminder of how bad AD&D is at emulating characters built in nearly any other system, making it a poor fit for a modern day setting where characters need to be able to advance independently in a broad set of skills to function. MotRD has already ran up against that limitation hard, and it's even more troublesome here. Having left the straightjacket of sci-fi behind, it seems like Roger is winding up stuck in a new one of his own making.</blockquote>

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