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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8810688" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 124: October 1996part 5/5The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: They spent well over a year on the war plotline, and it finally reached it's climax at Gen Con. 60,000 enemies attacked and were repelled by the brave actions of the people who attended. Truly, one of the largest scale battles ever to actually be physically represented with minis. Huzzah! The celebrations afterwards were also pretty epic, with lots of alcohol being consumed both IC & OOC. While they're still telling us to keep our guard up IC, I get the impression that they're getting tired of this OOC, and aren't going to drag it out to the length of many real world wars. Unless you're in a setting like Warhammer, where the eternal war is the whole point, that would wind up driving players away long-term, so you need to switch up your metaplot changes to keep them interesting. Despite the overall happy news, there were still several notable casualties though. An attempted assassination in the Knight's Council made organising a proper response to the hordes at the gates even harder. Meanwhile, magic item traders Zeno & Navarre fell out over a price gouging argument and Zeno bludgeoned Navarre to death, then got arrested himself. They just have no luck with magic marts around here. The majority of players may want them, but the admin people obviously don't, whether for reasons of worldbuilding verisimilitude or just how much time & hassle they are to run at conventions, so they keep on finding new ways to destroy them. Will anyone step up to fill the gap, and if so, what fate will they meet in turn, because I don't see the underlying tension behind this problem going away.  Notes From HQ: They've struggled to implement all the changes they wanted to this year, but it's nowhere near enough. There's a huge list of often conflicting demands from the userbase about how things could be improved. More humour, more people taking the whole thing seriously. More water adventures, fewer water adventures. More tough enemies like fiends, more easy enemies like giant rodents, more weird enemies like rust monsters. More detail to Raven's Bluff, blow it up and start from scratch, keep it going but let players roam farther from it in adventures. No way they can please everyone whatever they do in those areas. Then there are the suggestions which are popular with the players, but they can't or won't do, like bringing back Chemcheaux, implementing downtime rules or bringing management of the knightly orders back in-house. The two they are fairly certain they can do, but just want to double-check before finalising are to completely ban trading IC magic items for real cash, as it's just a bad look all round, and only let people write for the Living City if they've already done at least one generic tournament module with pregens, as they're getting a decent number of LC submissions now and think they can raise quality control while still getting enough new adventures to keep the hardcore players from repeating themselves. Bold move with overall membership declining but I guess the ones that are staying skew towards the experienced & hardcore. I suspect these plans may be derailed or implemented late as events overtake them.Gen Con is just finished, but they put the preregistration forms for next year in straight away? What kind of game do you want to judge? One of the many AD&D ones, another popular system like Shadowrun, Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu, Their vain attempts to make Dragonlance 5th age happen, or even sign up to run their still unnamed upcoming sci-fi game despite no-one knowing the details of the system or setting yet? Since I already know Alternity doesn't come out until 98, this is another thing that's going to be made inaccurate by future events. A whole bunch of mediocre and basic generic articles here, while the more specific ones wind up looking very inaccurate in hindsight. Since October issues are usually of above average quality, that make this one stick out particularly harshly in showing how things are slipping around here. Let's struggle onward to the end of the year and the hopefully better times that'll come after they hit rock bottom.</blockquote>

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