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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8940451" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron UK Issue 2: November 1998part 1/560 pages. Tiger-headed humanoids appear plenty of times in multiple game systems. Are we dealing with the basic physical threat of a weretiger, the multitudinous magical tricks of a rakshasa, or something even stranger? Is that wakizashi really necessary on top of the metal claw gauntlets and wouldn't they impede manual dexterity anyway? Time to find out what the british perspective on these little mechanical quandaries is. Editorial: This is slightly more substantial than last issue, but still pretty small, mainly listing the things they'd still like to improve. Listings of clubs, a place to trade things, enough reader opinions to have a forum column. All those things that require reader engagement. That's the lifeblood of any magazine that isn't a promotional organ mainly kept alive by adverts. Knowing how short the run of this is, I doubt they'll achieve it to their satisfaction.History of the Order of Assassins: Killing people for profit is like prostitution. It turns up in every society ever since we started trading for things rather than just grabbing whatever we can take and hold by force. But it's not proper assassination unless it comes from the Alamut region of Iran, otherwise it's just sparkling organised murder. Like any religion, Islam has a whole load of schismatic groups competing for dominance over the centuries. A particularly notable one was Hassan-I Sabbah, who managed to punch well above his weight politically by training sneaky killers who were willing to not only die in the course of duty, but actively sacrifice themselves to make a point, believing they'd be rewarded with paradise in the afterlife for doing so. The order he founded lasted for several centuries before being destroyed from within by a mongol collaborator. (or were they?! dun dun dun!) Your basic system free overview of historical events that have lots of useful inspiration for games, even if the average assassin in a D&D world has drifted pretty far from the source material. They then follow up with the history of thugs, where the common usage of the word has drifted even farther from it's origin as ritual stranglers serving Kali and only killing when the omens are right. Real world history can be more convoluted than even the longest and most elaborate fictional series, because it's not being contributed to by a consistent group of people. A good reminder that going on about cultural appropriation is stupid when cultures have always taken words and concepts from other ones and used them to do unexpected things when combined with other ones. Doing so is a big part of how technology and culture as a whole advances and segregating everything in the name of purity just leads to stagnation. If you take real world elements and use them in your campaign, it's more fun to mix & match them as well instead of making everything an obvious analog of a particular country in a particular historical era. RPGA UK Tournament Writing Competition: This is pretty similar to it's USA counterparts. Write a tournament adventure for them and you could win a trip to next year's Gen Con. They don't force it to be precisely 6 encounters of fixed types, but it still needs to fit into a single tournament slot, have pregens that are the right level and equipment for it to be a fair challenge and be consistent with the rules & setting of whatever game it is. Fingers crossed we'll get to find out the results in a future issue.</blockquote>

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