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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8835855" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 126: October 1997part 1/536 pages. Once again, it's the little guys that come off hardest. Dragon & Dungeon plugged onward until December and came back around July, while Polyhedron has been out for nearly a whole year. Let's find out how they've used that time, and if they'll be a little more up to date, or they'll also have a bunch of out of season promotional stuff still stuck in the pipeline long after the events have been and gone. Notes From HQ: Dragon and Dungeon were brought back by WotC pretty much unchanged, and their first editorials presented a sanitised optimistic view of the process. In sharp contrast, Polyhedron was nearly axed altogether and subscriptions folded into Dungeon, as they tell us here. They've got a reprieve (for now), but their schedule has been cut back to bimonthly and they need to show some serious growth if they ever want to get it back. So they've already set out on a radical process of reorganisation. New office in Renton, new mission statement, new logo, new database, a much greater embrace of the internet than TSR, reaching out to RPG companies that TSR alienated so they can run a wider variety of systems, setting up a program to run tournaments specifically for game stores, it feels like they're going full out with a fire lit under their backsides. Probably most immediately significant is adding a new free tier of membership that can participate in tournaments but don't get the newszine or ability to do out of adventure stuff in their Interactives, as well as dividing your XP rankings into stuff earned in one-shots with pregens and Living stuff where you bring your own. So this makes it obvious straight away that WotC won't be as forgiving to underperforming departments as TSR, so they'd better throw as many ideas at the wall to try and improve things and see what sticks. Which will get implemented, which will be pushed back on, and which will be technically on the books but die the slow death of apathy from regular members? Well, at least slowing the issues to bimonthly means I'll probably find out the answers to these questions a little faster. Elminster's Everwinking Eye: As in Dragon, Ed is too popular to cancel, and just continues with his sprawling alphabetical lists of realmslore as if nothing has happened. Now his buffer of unposted material ready to go is probably even larger. Hope you weren't right in the middle of a campaign set in the Border Kingdoms when the hiatus hit. So here we find out just how powerful the people in charge of High Emmerock are. Most of them are comfortably in the mid teens, covering a wide range of classes. As usual, they're all non-evil, but he still manages to cram enough info to make them all distinct into small word counts. The most important and powerful person isn't the temporal rulers  though but the dreaded water witch. Cursed with endlessly crawling flesh, this turned out to also make her immortal and regenerative in a hideous Deadpool kinda way. Now she's the hidden protector of the place, feared by the common folk but valued by the Lords. If you drink any of the water in her domain you make yourself vulnerable to her divinations and mind control effects, which is an easy mistake to make unless you have your own magical researching abilities. So this is one where the Realms transhumanism takes notes from angsty superhero stuff, with a character who's heroic but misunderstood, which may mean she has to deal with well-meaning adventurers trying to kill her and liberate the place when she's actually the one keeping off all the major supernatural threats. That's definitely a scenario that can generate some interesting roleplaying, as every superhero movie where the heroes fight then wind up teaming up to take down the real villain demonstrates.</blockquote>

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