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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8958595" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 134: January 1999part 4/5Intrigue In Raam: The adventure is also in theme, as we're off to Athas to try and make it a better place long-term. Raam's Sorcerer-Queen was killed in the latest big metaplot event. Can you help install some decent rulers, or will it descend into years of anarchy and civil war, resulting in terrible living conditions and massive casualties for everyone involved before another naughty word dictator winds up on top? Since the line gets cancelled around this point, the timeline never progresses further and there's no canon answer to that question, leaving Raam perpetually on the brink of falling apart, open to being taken in whichever direction you please without it being contradicted in future supplements. Anyway, you're supposed to side with the Veiled Alliance against the Templars and try to gather information, with the ultimate goal of getting the various factions to agree on freeing all the slaves. Seems like a pretty tall order, particularly in a single session, but they're still going to stick to that 4 hour, 6 encounter tournament format anyway. You could just go linearly from one scene to the next, but there's a lot of gaps between them that you could fill out if you want to make it feel less disjointed and more of a long-term project. Only two of the encounters are combat ones by default, so it does at least feel like the talky parts are significant and not just cutscenes to be skipped over. A decent enough concept, but it feels incomplete or heavily hacked down, which means it really needs a good deal of expansion to reach it's full potential as part of an ongoing campaign. Given how Dark Sun specific the details are, it's probably not one that's going to be used very often. Marybelle - Tales from the Verge: Our Living Alternity setting isn’t quite ready to be played yet, but they’re going to build anticipation with some fiction like they’ve done several times before. It’s basically the same info we got last year, but presented in more detail as an IC newscast advertising the newly terraformed planet of Marybelle to potential settlers. It’s a bit wetter than they’d anticipated, but since they’ve built domed underwater cities that’s hardly a deal-breaker. The legal system is pretty rough and ready, with plenty of room to avoid charges for killing people if you can prove it was done in self-defence. (got to have our quota of combats per tournament adventure) There’s plenty of valuable raw materials to be harvested, the start of an interesting nightlife scene and an informal group of heroes that your PC’s might want to throw their lot in with called the Outriders. All the ingredients needed for some western style frontier action with none of the guilt about displaced natives. Yee-haw. A bit formulaic, but you’ve got to be to cram lots of adventurers into a small space and have it still make sense as a world. Vote Right pt 3: After looking at scoring the Judge and players, this concludes by talking about scoring the scenario itself. This is probably the trickiest bit to do impartially, as you have to figure out which bits were good or bad because of the writing, which were because of the way your judge implemented them and which were improv'd wholesale because you did something the writer didn't expect. Even the best adventure can be ruined if it's run by someone who didn't read ahead or doesn't know the rules of the system, or messed up if you wind up with a bunch of kill-happy idiots who try to hack their way through the roleplaying and puzzle-solving segments. Anyway, try your best to impartially score it how fun it was to play, whether the difficulty was too low, about right or too hard, and overall quality of writing & design. Once again they frame it with a bit of humorous 4th wall breaking fiction, but there's a serious point underneath. A bit repetitive, but as we've seen before, it takes a lot of repeating before things penetrate the skulls of the majority of members and there's always going to be new ones coming in so you still have to do a refresher every year or two for them.</blockquote>

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