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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8990200" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 136: June 1999part 3/5City Stories: Selune is a pretty popular god for PC clerics, so it's mildly surprising it's taken them this long to cover her temple in Raven's Bluff. It's a pretty big place too, with different wings devoted to each phase of the moon (except gibbous for some reason, because that's the most boring phase) and observatories that let you get a good look at the sky while also being protected from bad weather. To underscore their popularity, each of these is headed by a PC priest, showing that they're making more prestigious positions available on top of the knighthoods and council elections. Curiously, these don't get fully statted up, probably because if they're being played regularly their stats would be inaccurate anyway by the time it got to print. They do give full stats to 5 NPC clerics though, all of which are very young for people so high up in the hierarchy. I guess we have just had a big war that killed lots of people, so that's got to open up some top slots, but a clergy entirely comprised of under 40's does feel a bit odd. (no demihumans, either) Fairly interesting reading, but with several structural oddities that leave me a little puzzled. I suppose it is a chaotic religion so I shouldn't expect consistency in the first place. Bestiary: Scorched Ones are undead created when people die slowly in the desert. Unsurprisingly, their attacks inflict both heat and dehydration damage, making them very dangerous if you're already low on supplies, but also relatively easy to become completely immune to if you have the right magic items. They can only be permanently destroyed by total immersion in water, which does seem pretty tricky unless you have some conjuration spells handy or lure them out of their home terrain. They're intelligent, but like many undead, their irrational hatred for the living overwhelms them, so their intelligence is used purely to come up with more cunning ways to inflict a slow horrible death on anyone who crosses into their domain. A formulaic but mechanically well implemented entry, these look like a good mid-level challenge for your game if you're in the right kind of area. Another pretty decent creation coming to us courtesy of the decathlon competitions.Rockroost Hunters & Gatherers: There’s all kinds of plot opportunities in competing businesses. But interestingly enough, Raven’s Bluff has been pretty low on publishing multiple of the same kind of thing in quick succession. (apart from that one year where they overdid the dancing bears) Here’s one though. The Rockroost family are adventurers who's main income comes from selling the body parts of things they hunt. This puts them in conflict with both the merchant's guild in general, because they class themselves as a service rather than a business and refuse to pay dues and also the furriers guild from issue 133 due to hunting on the same turf. One thing they share with the furrier's guild though, is refusing to hunt for the body parts of non-evil sentient beings. So they face plenty of challenges in both the physical and social arenas, as not only do they have to kill things and get their stuff back to sell it, they also have a bunch of rivals that are eager to sabotage them or shut them down if they're caught violating regulations in the city. Still, all this stress is definitely good for the XP, so all of the core team are pretty high level. This definitely looks like a setup you could build an interesting campaign around, signing the PC's up, sending them on missions, then slowly giving them more responsibility to choose how they run things as they move up in levels and the IC hierarchy. This gets my approval both as something that fits neatly into the Living City and as an idea to use in your home campaigns.</blockquote>

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