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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8921524" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 131: August 1998part 1/548 pages. You can accumulate all the magic weapons, armor and items you want, but at some point you'll be caught without them and forced to resort to fisticuffs again, as they show on the cover. Well, Polyhedron UK did just fill a big article with optional martial arts rules. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar made it's way over here. Let's see if they'll be recycling material, or it'll be a completely different incompatible set of options.Notes From HQ: Despite the membership drive going nowhere fast, making it pretty clear they won't be going back to monthly anytime soon, they're still pursuing new projects and figuring out ways to speed up response times in general. If you all sign up to the internet and do all your ordering of tournament modules through their online portal they can cut the deadline to get them to a mere month before the convention you want to run them at. It's win win for everyone in both cost and efficiency so why wouldn't you do it? They're still working away on the Living Galaxy, but are also releasing a Living Rolemaster campaign called Run out the Guns! (which is being run out of house, so I suspect we'll see about as many articles on it as we do Threads of Legend ones) What we'll hear far more about are their ambitions to create a new living world that will hopefully be so awesome it eclipses the Living City, which I strongly suspect will become the 3e Living Greyhawk campaign in all it's complexity of linking real world areas to Oerdian ones. Knowing that won't actually launch for another couple of years reminds us that no matter how much technology may speed up the basics of communication & commerce, developing a big creative project still takes years of wrangling, compromises and people changing their minds. If you rush it it simply won't have the depth and probably fall flat. It's still going to be a long journey full of surveys, playtesting and tweaking before they get to third edition and it does look like a little more of that process will be talked about in the newszine. Table Talk: They give up on the thermometer here, as the membership drive obviously isn't going anywhere as well as they'd like. Instead they're celebrating the best of this year, with one page dedicated to the winners of the Origins awards and another to the highest scoring RPGA players. The nature of the scoring system means there's a lot of equally ranked people in the middle parts of the charts, so a system with a little more granularity might be preferable. Notable new games include Delta Green, In Nomine, and the Legend of the 5 Rings RPG, while Knights of the Dinner Table takes the best RPG related magazine. There's still lots of interesting gaming going on, even if not as much of it is under the RPGA umbrella as they'd like. Since it's the middle of convention season, they only mention each one with very short descriptions. The most notable one was Ben Con in Colorado, which raised over $10,000 for charity, an order of magnitude above their nearest competitor. Depending what it's being spent on, that could go a long way. (or not so much if they want to buy property or a mobility vehicle)your 1nitiative: First letter complains in detail about how their tournament scoring system doesn't actually reward roleplaying, with predictable results in actual play, particularly in multi-round ones where mostly the ruthless gamists get through to the finals and people who want to give their characters personalities left in the dust. If they want to make the actions at the table reflect what the game is called, they need to revise that.Second is from New Zealand, and wishes they'd reprint a bunch of the more whimsical articles from both Polyhedron & Dragon. Well, the Dragon ones will all be made easily available again soon thanks to the epic CD set of the first 250 issues. Old polyhedron issues will continue to be much harder to get hold of.</blockquote>

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