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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8903309" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron UK Issue 1: July 1998part 1/548 pages. We're already juggling three different connected threads here at the moment. Time to add a 4th, even more obscure one. Tracking down a complete collection of Polyhedron UK was one of the hardest parts of doing this. If I'd skipped it, I could have set out on this journey a couple of years earlier. But it would have been a real shame to miss it, since what little internet info could be found on it said that it had higher production values than regular Polyhedron despite it's smaller circulation. The full-color cardstock cover definitely seems like a promising start, even if the picture is somewhat pixelated as it's been compressed down to fit 1998 hard drive sizes before being blown up again for printing. Let's find out how the contents compare in quality and choice of topics.Martial Arts in AD&D: No lengthy editorial here, after the table of contents and a brief request for more submissions covering any system, not just D&D, they dive straight into a good 8 pages of new optional rules for martial arts. Not that you'll be able to use them in the Living settings, but that's true of most of the new crunch they introduced in regular Polyhedron as well. The kind of dense look at various martial arts styles, who can learn them and how good they can get at them that'll probably only make sense if you have the Complete Fighters Handbook and like tracking heavy crunch in a system that still leaves you less deadly overall than just picking up a sword and hitting someone with it. But then again, maybe you want to play a game where you can knock an opponent out or numb their limbs by doing a called strike rather than going straight to killing people and taking their stuff as a default. The kind of thing that's trying to kitbash D&D into a playstyle it wasn't intended for, when it'd probably be easier to write a whole new one designed so the characters have lots of choice of martial arts moves learned independently. Heck, even the storyteller system worked better for this, as the Street Fighter RPG demonstrated. So there's plenty of interesting stuff here to analyse, but unless you really want to play a gritty martial arts game (no leaping on rooftops or hadoukens here) but your players refuse to depart from the D&D system it's probably not worth the effort.Words to Survive by: A little Call of Cthulhu action cements their commitment to keeping up diversity in the games they cover. Never visit an abandoned ancestral home, no matter how impossible getting on the property ladder otherwise may seem. There's always a good reason it wound up empty. Don't drink the water, don't read anything written by someone called "the mad". Don't keep a journal yourself, that's just asking to die horribly and have someone else be sucked into the adventure in your stead. Don't go out in the dark or fog, don't travel to anywhere weird, don't keep weird artifacts in your bedroom, don't bother with guns, as they probably won't help against eldritch horrors anyway. Your basic humorous bit of genre awareness. Of course, following this advice as a PC may well mean there's no game, but oh well. Finding the right compromise between seeking adventure and doing it in a smart and tactically effective way has always been a tension in RPG's, particularly ones trying to emulate genres from other media.</blockquote>

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