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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8797487" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 122: August 1996part 4/5Living Death: Compared to the heavy player buy-in required for the last two settings, Living Death is relatively simple, as it's just the real world with hidden monsters. This does not mean you can't get deep with it, as that also means you have the full range of real world history and fictional horror stories to use as source material. You can make characters and write adventures set anywhere in the world, meet all sorts of interesting historical figures, maybe even kill them. This leads neatly into the other big selling point, that they're leaning heavily into the player-driven metaplot, with the clock moving forward one game year per real world year and events decided by what choices the majority of groups who run through a particular module make. The more tournaments you attend, the more you'll feel like you're making a difference to the overall direction of the world, even if you don't have the freedom to create new spells and have other players learn them like in Threads of Legend. As horror is pretty popular in general, it seems likely this setting is comfortably second in size to the Living City despite being the youngest of these. They definitely have more talk of people they've met and things that have happened in actual play. Your odds of having a lengthy set of adventures and getting to advance in levels if you stick with them are relatively high.Welcome to the Nightmare: After all this highly specific themed promotional material, we still have room for a bit of generic gaming advice that could have turned up any time. Horror is one of the most popular genres in fiction, but requires a bit more player buy-in than hack & slash dungeoncrawling. It's supposed to be scary, which means no matter how powerful you get, you'll have to accept that your enemies will probably still be stronger, quite possibly in unfair ways like ghostly insubstantiality that prevent you from even hurting them at all unless you solve puzzles and find macguffins that can affect them. Even if you do everything right, some of the characters may die, particularly in slasher movie style one shots where most people not making it through is coded into the rules. The worlds tend to be less fantastical in general, with the weird bits thrown into sharper relief by the way they intrude into people's everyday lives. Even the heroes are rarely incorruptible paragons of righteousness, with the monsters often preying on or responding to their secret fears and vices. If you don't engage with the roleplaying part of RPG's, but treat it like a video game where you fight things, take their stuff, level up, repeat, just jump back in and try again when you lose, the whole genre won't make sense. All pretty basic stuff that I've seen before and fully expect to do so again before this journey is through. Meh.World of Your Own: It's been an issue full of lots of little articles so far, and even Roger's column is shorter than usual. Fittingly, he decides to take a look at island campaigns, where the limited area and number of things to see can actually focus things better, and definitely makes it easier for a DM with limited time to build their world by setting obvious boundaries. There's a lot of them, if anything more than ones spanning huge areas. Of course the definition of island is pretty flexible, as it ranges from Ravenloft domains that are basically one spooky lair and their grounds to the Council of Wyrms Blood Isles, which are easily the size of a full continent spanning from arctic to tropics when put together. They can be actual islands surrounded by sea, or otherworldly spaces with boundaries limited in some other way. AD&D sure has done a lot of both over the years and he does his best to provide a comprehensive list over a couple of pages. Very little actual GM advice though, which is apparently coming next month. Another very formulaic entry that does little to excite me. Network Clubs: Back to the promotional material, with lots of different people submitting short pieces about their club experience. Some are democratic, some are dictatorships, some existed before they joined the RPGA, some didn't, some are purely RPG focussed while other play board & computer games, LARPs, etc, but all agree that they have more fun with more people around and get to pull off things a single DM and half a dozen players couldn't. Just turn back a few pages and fill out that form! Will repeating that lesson again in all sorts of different ways get more people to sign up? I guess peer pressure can be a powerful tool on some, but this grows increasingly tiresome for me, and if anything, the scent of desperation would put me off.</blockquote>

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