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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8937444" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 132: October 1998part 4/5What do you know?: Nonweapon proficiencies have been standard in all the Living campaigns right from the start, and pretty popular in home campaigns as well. So advising us that you ought to pick your proficiencies based on your character's backstory rather than just pure powergaming is the kind of ultra basic advice we've seen plenty of times before and will probably do so again. Really, it's just an excuse to reprint the list of proficiencies allowed for Living City characters from the august edition of the Trumpeter. Still plenty of people not reading that who need to know about their latest rules revisions and clarifications.The Game of Masks: More Ed Greenwood material here, this time an excerpt from the new Raven's Bluff sourcebook. Like his column last issue, it's one of those demonstrations of how they keep adventurers busy when there's no real threats to fight. The Game of Masks is basically IC LARPing for Forgotten Realms characters. You pay the subscription fee and get to participate in the staged adventures. The prize each month is more than enough to recoup a decade's worth of fees. Given the density of weird stuff around Raven's Bluff, people often wind up stumbling onto real adventures in the course of their escapades, while others use them as cover for illegal activities or simply an excuse to hook up. This serves as another reminder that they're no longer bound by the code of conduct, as he can go into considerable amounts of salacious detail about some of the more saucy escapades. So this is much more like the Realms as he plays it at home than has ever been allowed in the tournament adventures. (what you get up to in odd corners of the interactives, on the other hand, is your own business) Once again it shows how much effort it takes to maintain a world with this high a proportion of adventurers and have it make sense both IC and OOC. Without powerful people creating graded challenges as testing grounds, a lot more of them would wind up dying in the first few levels (there's a good reason Oerth has a population density several orders of magnitude lower than Toril) or giving up because there aren't enough problems to go around. Just a shame so few campaigns will ever get to the point where you're the ones orchestrating these things rather than just participating.Brethren of the Coast: Last issue they talked about Run out the Guns, the new Rolemaster setting in the age of piracy. Now it’s time for the various rules changes they’re imposing on tournament play. Unlike their previous Living settings, this is all delivered in a no-nonsense 4 page package rather than spending a big chunk of the issue engaging in system-free foreplay to create the right vibe. Some backgrounds are only going to be allowed at some future point in the metaplot, while other are allowed now, but will become unavailable to new characters when they no longer make sense. You have 100 pieces of eight to buy equipment with, plus you can choose 1 signature flavour item not on the price lists. No silly names, keep track of your ship, cargos, mess members, etc. Like any Living setting, disruptive characters aren’t allowed, so take the pirate’s code seriously or you’ll be banninated. Wham bam thank you maam. It looks increasingly unlikely that they’ll be devoting much attention to this setting in the newszine. Whether it’ll still attract a small but loyal group of players despite that remains to be seen. (after all, they haven’t actually cancelled any settings yet despite juggling 6 now and 2 more on the way.) Still plenty of little details I didn’t suspect to find out on this journey through history.RPGA Tournament Request Policies: After a bunch of new rules, it's time to repeat ones they established in previous issues. You can only request 4 tournaments per day of a convention, and only 2 from any particular Living setting. You need to do so at least a month in advance, or 6 if you're submitting new adventures that haven't been sanctioned yet that you intend to run then. We're only going to approve 20 adventures per month so don't be surprised if they get rejected for quality reasons or pushed back until there's a lull in submissions. Fill in your scoring sheets properly and on time afterwards and you'll be suitably credited. If you do a charity benefit we need a copy of the cheque to check that it's a real cheque going to a real charity. Tiresome but necessary. They still can't put the rules exclusively on the internet and update them piecemeal as needed, as many members don't have it yet, although given how hard they're pushing it with a regular column it won't be because they don't know it exists. Give it a few more years, then the number of holdouts will be small enough that you can ignore them.</blockquote>

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