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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8952758" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 133: December 1998part 2/5Table Talk Editorial: This bounces between looking forward and back in a somewhat haphazard way. The problem with Living City games becoming increasingly dominant. Whether a convention runs them or not can make a big difference to the turnout and this can hurt smaller ones. You can't just organise and promote your own convention anymore, you have to keep up with a morass of constantly shifting regulations or lose all your Living content. Everything feels a lot more complicated. On the other hand, he's fully in favor of the idea of certificates as a reward for your in-game actions. Whether used as in-game dice modifiers or money-off vouchers for buying new books, they're pretty small change and there's no way one person could accumulate enough to offset all the money they'd otherwise contribute to WotC. So what's the overall takeaway from this? If you don't like how the RPGA is changing, don't just quietly quit and let your membership expire, do your best to push it in a direction you like. There's still a ton of volunteer positions that need filling and one person can make a real difference. It's funny how people consistently seem to think long-running organisations are bigger and more monolithic than they actually are. Table Talk: Two little stories in here. First is the History of the Company of Framed Adventurers. Your typical tale of derring-do, they wound up being hunted across the Forgotten Realms for crimes they did not commit. After a couple of years of home campaign fun, they decided to enter the AD&D team competition and to their great surprise won first time. This left them highly motivated to prove it wasn't just luck and repeat that feat, which they've managed for another two years running. Does anyone have what it takes to unseat them next year? Maybe if the number of groups entering goes up, which is that the Mid-American Gaming Convention Consortium has been founded to do. Will you sign up so everyone can co-ordinate promotion, pay standardised prices and make sure no-one's stepping on anyone else's toes by running on the same weekend? Exactly the kind of thing they were grumbling about just a page ago, how all this extra bureaucracy makes life more complicated. I guess there's always going to be tension about how much bureaucracy makes things better and how much is just self-sustaining parasitism that just gets in the way. Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed's meanderings take us to Manywaters, which unsurprisingly is completely literally named, having both a river nearby and hot springs, which like many hot springs are famed for their healing properties. It's not a free lunch though. You need to bring magic items in with you, which are drained to power the healing effect, and the waters lose their special properties when taken away from the spring, so it's been (so far) impossible to replicate elsewhere. For regular hp damage it's probably cheaper to pay the nearby church of Ilmater for a few cure spells, but I guess if you're loaded down with buffing effects but cash poor it might work out better, and if you have crippling plot device injuries not covered by the D&D rules coming here might be the only solution. (or dying and getting a whole new body with Reincarnation, but who knows what species that might be) One of those reminders that Ed plays pretty fast & loose with the rules in his home games and novels, with more than a few deus ex machinas along the way. As usual, along with the big macguffin are plenty of interesting little details on the town itself and it's inhabitants that make it easy to play out should your players take a trip there. Mildly subpar by Ed's standards but still a decent enough bit of worldbuilding.</blockquote>

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