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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8938503" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 132: October 1998part 5/5The Powers That Be: Gods of thieves are always a fun one to worship. You get to combine two normally opposing roles and leave out all the preachiness, as a good thief needs to keep their nature a secret, at least when on the job. This is particularly true of Kurell, who is primarily the god of jealousy, and all his thievery springs from that place of wanting something someone else has even if he has no use for it and won't gain any real emotional satisfaction if he does succeed in taking it. His few worshippers are also obnoxiously jealous and full of rivalries even amongst themselves, which limits their expansion and keeps him a lesser power. If you want to play a whiny entitled edgelord who steals from and stirs up strife amongst the rest of the party his specialty priests have a perfect skillset for that. So whether playing one is fun for your group will depend heavily on if you're the kind of group that considers Lester Smith's advice on weaselling an excellent example to emulate, or disruptive crap that gets in the way of working together efficiently as a team for optimal killing things & taking of stuff. Either way, using one as an antagonist could create a villain your group loves to hate pretty easily. This is definitely a well above entry in both entertainment value as a read and usability in game. Envy may be a deadly sin, but that makes it an excellent driver for plots where temperance and fortitude fail to get things moving.Living Death Rules of Etiquette: People in the 1890's did not talk like those today. If you wanted to be accepted into the upper classes, rules were particularly strict on how you should address people, especially where introductions to members of the opposite sex are concerned. So here's one of those basic single page introductions to a thing that can (and has) filled entire books, both primary sources and historical recountings. In this case, it's probably best to go straight to the primary sources, as the 1800's is recent enough that there are plenty of books from then still available, which you can freely download from archive.org as the copyright has expired, and while language & social mores may have changed, it's not by so much as to make them incomprehensible to casual readers like the works of Chaucer. Not useless, but they could definitely have cited their sources better here to make it easier for people to build on.Internet 101: We're far enough into the rise of the internet that many government departments have websites. So this month's basic web advice is all about links to how the law works, what laws exist, what punishments you get for breaking them and who's currently on the most wanted list for committing particularly heinous crimes. Then you can copy the format and use it to create your own custom most wanted posters for villains in your campaign. All very USA-centric then, and most of the specific links are dead now, but the basic idea of using the internet to find out more about the details of something remains not only valid, but taken for granted in the age of wikis for everything. If only more websites still allowed you to see where you are in the link hierarchy and go up a level by deleting part of the URL instead of working on dynamic loading of feeds. Vote Right!: One complaint that's turned up several times in the letters page is inconsistent voting when rating your tournament experiences. Some people are overly nice, some are overly strict and some are just arbitrary and petty, giving you scores that have nothing to do with your performance because of prejudice or because they want to have sex with you. Obviously only in-person security can stop the more egregious kinds of creepiness, but If they could standardise people's scoring standards a bit that would be nice. So they go through what actions should get what score in each of the categories. All seems pretty common sense to me, but I guess the world demonstrates there are plenty of people without that, particularly if you work in tech or customer support. More basic procedural filler.  Reader Response survey: We've already seen a survey on what to do with the next big edition change of D&D recently. Now we have a shorter and simpler one asking us to rate each of the articles in this issue from 1-5 so they can know which are most/least popular. That way they can keep the ones people like and drop the ones they don't. Easy enough to do, but TSR didn't do them often enough and WotC don't want to repeat that mistake. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long to find out the results.Quite a lot of basic repetitive articles in this one, but there are still some interesting bits of long-term progress as well. It does feel like they’re slowing down though, after the burst of manic energy immediately after the takeover. Time to find out if next issue brings any changes worth getting excited about.</blockquote>

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