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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8942669" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron UK Issue 2: November 1998part 4/5Reviews: Greyhawk, The Adventure Begins gets a review that points out it's very much not the beginning, but the 4th iteration of the longest running D&D setting, moving the timeline forward and building on the many modules that came before. Many people have played there, even more have used elements from it in their own campaign, and now a whole new generation of people have the opportunity to be a part of the legend. It's a bit too centred on Greyhawk City over the rest of the Oerth for their tastes, but a perfectly serviceable introduction to the setting. Anderia is the first expansion for the Dragon Reaches of Marrakush. It continues the general trend of being a solid low-magic medieval setting for your Chivalry & Sorcery, but the illustrations are better than the previous book. If you want lots of detail about languages, politics & ecology there's plenty to mine here.Tales from the Infinite Staircase gets a fairly nit-picky review. Why aren't the adventures listed in order of level? If you tried to play them all with the same group you'd have to do them out of order or the difficulty would be all over the place. There's still plenty of cool ideas in there but you'll have to do some mechanical tweaking or general rearrangement as a DM to get the best out of them. Alternity gets the most detailed review, with a font size considerably smaller than the others to fit it all on the page. It's obviously designed as a generic system to support multiple settings, so it feels like something's missing when they've only released one so far. The main resolution system of throwing a D20 then using a smaller one as a difficulty modifier doesn't feel particularly intuitive to them either but hopefully that just needs a bit more actual play to get used to. They're also pretty skeptical of the circumstances surrounding it's birth, thinking it might well have been cancelled by WotC if it wasn't near complete when they took over. Is it going to get the chance to reach it's full potential? In hindsight, probably not. Who's going to bother fiddling with this engine to make something new when you could use the OGL, make it compatible with the biggest RPG in the world and still release it commercially?The Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game and it's first couple of supplements get a very positive review. It's a cool idea, the rules play fast, are easy to understand and the production values are great. If you want to play superheroes it's well worth a spin. Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog is Saban's new attempt at a fantasy series and tie-in game that isn't based on tokusatsu stock footage. Instead, it's implausibly clean & attractive americans mangling celtic mythology & pronunciation, which the reviewer finds deeply cringy. It's probably no worse than Hercules & Xena really, but of course it's always more personal when it's your culture that's being appropriated by foreigners and re-imagined in their own image. I never even heard of this first time around and I'm definitely tempted to check it out and see just how cheap & cheesy it looks in hindsight. Shadowrun 3e gets a review that starts out negative but ends positive. Is it just a cheap cash grab? No, they've refined the rules without making it completely incompatible with older editions and made the language easier to understand. Less trying to be clever with IC slang and funky formatting means you can get to the playing more easily. Return to the Tomb of Horrors inflates the challenges from a meagre 12 page tournament module to a 160 page monster supply of deathtraps to slaughter even the highest level of adventurers, while also adding some roleplaying context on top. Acererak is back, and this time he's a lot less passive. This reviewer thoroughly approves.</blockquote>

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