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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8953614" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 133: December 1998part 3/5City Stories: This month, they decide to zoom in on the Raven's Bluff furriers guild, and it's guildmaster, Vivia Stuyvesant. In a world of dungeons and dragons, hunting animals for fur might seem trivial by comparison, but all those gold pieces will do you no good if you have no decent clothes or bags to carry them in and wind up freezing to death. Unsurprisingly, there's pretty decent profits to be had here and equally unsurprisingly, there's a whole bunch of regulations about quotas and what creatures are acceptable targets, which are mainly heeded in the breach by poachers, which means plenty of adventure opportunities for people trying to enforce those laws. There's also very specifically a ban on using regenerative magic to skin the same creature multiple times, which seems like a real box of Omelas issue. Is it more evil to torture a single creature for years, or to kill thousands in that same time period when either method provides the same amount of resources, and using the regenerative method does less harm to the ecosystem? Well, under the D&D alignment and XP system where killing is a morally neutral act while torture is evil that's a pretty unambiguous yes. So this turns out to be a pretty interesting little article full of possibilities as long as you aren't squeamish about the details of being a hunter. As long as magic isn't so ubiquitous and commercialised that the average person can't buy completely cruelty-free conjured rainment you'll need to engage with the business of fur & leather to survive and campaigns to ban the sale of stuff like that have no chance of gaining traction. Are you prepared to work within the system, will you try to change it completely, or will you just try to make a fast buck selling whatever falls into your snares?Stench Cow Recipes: Once you've hunted and skinned an animal, it would be a waste not to eat the meat as well, so let's get cooking! Time for a little recipe that uses a D&D monster, but could just as easily be substituted with regular beef and done in your own kitchen. Since the last time we saw Stench Cows was back in 1984, they update the stats for 2e as well, although there are no significant changes. Short and whimsical, but not completely useless either in game or real life. The kind of thing that used to be more common, particularly in april issues, but we haven't seen that much of lately. Tassinger's - A Restaurant for the 22nd Century: Huh. Looks like it's not just a one-off cooking joke, but a whole cooking themed issue. We're off to Shadowrun to one of the most high-tech restaurants in Seattle. How does Tassinger's manage to deliver such high quality meals with such short waiting times and such a huge variety of dishes to choose from? How do they manage to keep everyone's personal data safe in the computer ordering system and what happened to the last person who tried to hack them? There's no such thing as pure blue marble, so what are those entrance columns really made of? As is often the case with Shadowrun, this feels like an exaggeration of what you can do with tech in the real world, combining in-app ordering with amazon same day delivery. Presumably that means all the workers rights abuses that involves in the real world are also magnified, but since they leave the behind the scenes details mysterious you can decide exactly how weird and unethical they are and whether they're worth foiling in your own campaign. The whole thing is delivered in that amusing but somewhat dated chatroom style with plenty of shadowrun slang that was common in the 2e books. The 3e corebook might have cut back on that, but it still holds a soft spot in the hearts of the fans. Another pretty interesting article that looks quite useful underneath the humorous touches.</blockquote>

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