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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8807795" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 124: October 1996part 2/5Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed skips back to your regular alphabetical schedule to cover Hawkgarth. Once a monster-infested wood, it's now a well-pacified pastoral place due to the hard work of it's eponymous founder, the dense thickets replaced by winding lanes and delicious fruity orchards. The most interesting danger zone is a floating mansion inhabited by an unusually chatty demilich. You don't even need to kill him & take his stuff to profit from a visit, just sit in his magical throne and keep him talking for at least an hour and you'll get a full accounting of all your magical item's powers & how to activate them, plus probably a whole load of other ancient lore on top. Of course, if you do enrage him he's as deadly & near indestructible as any demilich, so it's still not a sure bet by any means. If you want to overthrow the current system of government and take over, you'll need to go through a married pair of weredragons who are also highly skilled wizards on top of that, which also seems like a pretty stiff challenge. For lower level characters, there's still a fair few brigands lurking by the roads on a watch for people who have fortunes they could be parted from, so it's best not to look like an easy target. A place that looks pleasant then, but is neither safe nor dull for visitors, giving adventurers plenty of opportunity to test their mettle and maybe even come out better off financially. Just take care not to bruise the fruit in your fights, as that'll spoil things for all the neighbours as well.  A Few Of Our Favorite Things: Monte Cook gives us his advice this month, which is noticeably less irritating than Skip's. Remember the effects manipulating the real world environment can have in establishing in-game atmosphere. If they're getting too savvy to your tricks, don't be afraid to change your plans mid-session to keep them on their toes. Continuity is what really makes a campaign feel like a real world, so don't be afraid to reuse places, people and antagonists. Once again the single page format means this is pretty basic stuff. We'll see all of these ideas again in much greater detail when he takes over the Dungeoncraft column in the early 2000's. It's not that he doesn't have the depth, they just don't have the room for it yet.Making The Terror Live: Last issue this column focussed on the player's side. Now quite logically it gives some more GM centric advice for running horror games. Prepare music, lighting, etc to properly support the mood, as Monte also said just a page ago. Remember that the tension building is just as important as the combat, so vary things between subtle spookiness and things going wrong in more obvious ways. Expect the players to do unorthodox things to try and beat the enemies and be ready to roll with it. At the same time, if they do something that's a bad idea, don't be afraid to make them suffer for it. In fact, even if they do play it smart, you shouldn't be afraid to kill or permanently harm at least some of them, particularly in a one-shot. Just make sure you do it in a way that doesn't spoil the OOC relationship, because that will stop the game being fun pretty quickly. Once again, no new lessons in here for me. Modern Minions of Cthulhu: Finally, something a little more specific. Some CoC monsters based on things from the annals of the Fortean Times, your regular monthly catalog of unexplained weirdness. (at least, until the internet, and ubiquitous cameraphones in particular made their business model much less sustainable and the conspiracysphere refocussed more on secret government stuff than bigfoot and alien abductions. ) There's plenty of potential in there for gaming material, with entire other RPG's based around it, so I think we can add some of this without diluting the overall theme of the game. Mannegishi are your typical faeish tricksters, only crossed with gray aliens. Since this is Call of Cthulhu, these tricks may well turn fatal, and even if they don't you'll still lose at least one SAN point just from seeing them. They'll have no problem summoning more dangerous creatures if they feel threatened so best to try and take their pranks in good humour no matter how scary they are.Mothmen bypass the questions of how such a large creature can fly under wing power by having telekinetic abilities, which are powerful enough to do things like mysteriously collapse bridges. Good thing they're not usually inclined to use them that way, but still makes tangling with one a dicey proposition.The Jersey Devil is just a lesser Shantak that somehow crossed over from the dreamlands. You can make it discorporate with electrical attacks, but it won't finish it off for good. If you have the right kind of magical skill you can summon one to use as a mount. Tri-Pouncers are our cover stars, although their origin remains just as mysterious even after we have their stats. Are they the product of a mad scientist, or from a parallel universe where trilateral symmetry is the norm? Either way, those legs are quite effective disemboweling weapons if you retain enough sanity after seeing it to try and fight it, so don't think you're getting off easy just because it looks goofy.</blockquote>

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