NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8971044" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron UK Issue 4: March 1999part 2/5The best of the rest: The UK branch continues to talk more about the wider world of gaming, as this little article on various other RPG magazines demonstrates. Dragon & Dungeon are glossy, high quality products with plenty of useful articles, but at this point they're very much house organs covering WotC games only. White Dwarf is in a similar boat, useful if you like Games Workshop minis, but not if you want to experiment with wargames from other companies. If you want a more objective view on the gaming scene, they recommend Games Gazette or Valkyrie magazine. The production values might not be as good, or the delivery of new issues as regular, but you'll get a wider variety of articles and more freedom to say when a product sucks. Good luck finding copies of either of these now (apart from issues 26 & 27, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17630/Valkyrie-Quarterly-26" target="_blank">which are up on DTRPG</a> oddly enough), given the size of their print runs. If anyone has read either of these and can shed more light on what they were like I'd be very interested to hear it. Reviews: The Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume 4 shows that even 25 years in, people continue to come up with inventive new monsters frequently enough to publish a full-sized book of them every year. Some of them might not entirely make sense outside the original setting/adventure scenario but an inventive DM can always think of new ways to use them. Happy hunting, whether you're playing the predator or the prey.The Illithiad trilogy of adventures definitely has plenty of darkness and interesting challenges in it. However, since even the start of the adventure is fairly high level, they're skeptical about how many groups will actually use it in a campaign. If you create new high level characters just for this, you won't have the proper attachment to them. You think getting to use this one is hard, think of the master & immortal modules. They haven't even tried to do adventures for above 20th level in a long time. Demihuman Deities sees Eric L Boyd continue to do what he does best, give a bit more depth to already existing gods. This means fewer covered than the old Monster Mythology but lots of info useful to players for each, particularly if you want to play a priest. The Lost Shrine of Bundushatur gets a distinctly negative reaction. Your typical tournament module with a skimpy backstory and a bunch of brutal high level challenges strung together without making much sense. Why they decided to publish it to a wider market is very questionable.The Crypt of Lyzandred the Mad is somewhat better written, but still firmly in the nonsensical meatgrinder mould, as Lyzandred the lich is indeed very insane. That's Greyhawk's unique selling point in this revival and they're going to go hard on it. Whether you'll enjoy it or not depends on your feelings about that kind of adventure.Record of Lodoss War gets reviewed in here despite not being an RPG book, because it's so obviously based on D&D. It's spawned a manga, an anime, a computer game and a soundtrack CD. It starts out a bit messily in media res, but stick with it and it makes for a pretty decent story. They're somewhat less positive about the soundtrack, which mixes ultra cheesy pop with derivative orchestral pieces, but it's still listenable at least. That's just how they like their theme songs in japan, even if the events of the show turn out to be ultra-dark. You've just got to get used to it.  The Inner Planes sourcebook is another one where they like the ideas, but actually using it in play seems a little challenging. These are environments you have to be well prepared to step into and survive, let alone come back with treasure. Have fun writing an adventure that'll fully exploit these concepts.</blockquote>

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