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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8993480" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron UK Issue 5: June(?) 1999part 2/5Ninja: The USA has long since tired of ninjas, with no ninja turtle series active for the first time in 13 years. The UK is a little behind the trends as usual, plus this magazine is still new so they aren't repeating themselves by doing a big article on how cool ninjas are. As with the one on assassins & thugs, they're trying to stick to the more historical side of things over the fantastic supernatural exaggerations. Still, that leaves over a millennium of japanese history to sort through and try to figure out what really happened. We can be reasonably certain they started as defeated chinese military who fled to japan and turned to sneakiness to compensate for their lack of direct power. These then merged with the native japanese people and became family-based organisations that passed their tricks down the centuries. Stealth, poison, disguise, using bamboo reeds to breathe underwater, dressing appropriately for the weather, they learnt to do a lot on a relatively limited budget and use teamwork to pull off tricks that would be impossible if there was just one person involved. A system-free reminder that there's all kinds of cool things you can do with basic adventuring equipment even before you add magic, especially if you all work together. Those 10 foot poles, caltrops, grappling hooks, tiger claws, smokebombs, etc can really add up when it comes to getting places while misdirecting the people living in them. The kind of article that's decent enough taken in isolation, but not telling me anything new after years of reading other articles that get past the basics and go into more specific details for specific systems, maybe introduce some new items, a class or even a full adventure. The late 80's material still has the edge here.Codes of Behaviour: You ever feel like D&D alignments are too broad and vague? It's been a common complaint since 1975, so you're not alone. Here's another attempt to break it down into lots of little categories so you can decide exactly where you fall on each of them. Trustworthiness, Honesty, willingness to attack unarmed people, (when you're fully armed) regard for innocents, treatment of prisoners, willingness to kill, charitability, ability to work well with others, respect for law & authority, loyalty to friends, regard for freedom, opinion on slavery, opinion on ecology, and how they justify their own morals to themselves. They then try to put them into an overall hierarchy of common moral positions, which turns out looking very similar to Palladium's. A curious selection with some obvious holes, particularly when taken out of a medieval D&D type milieu. Trying to put my own moral decisions into these boxes results in a lot of none of the above results. Nothing I haven't seen before multiple times, and not one of the better implementations of the concept either. There's a reason why the broad categories that let everyone project their own interpretations on them stick while more specific ones like this keep falling by the wayside.Feeder Frenzy: The adventures in here continue to be of wider variety than Dungeon or the US edition. This time, we're off to Batain VI, in the Babylon 5 universe. The PC's are hired by your typical mysterious Mr Johnson to capture a pair of Na'ka'leen feeders and deliver them to a specific warehouse on centauri prime with a deadline of a month from now. This of course involves multiple challenges. First, you'll have to get to the planet they're native too and find some. Then you need to catch them, which is not easy as these are large dangerous predators with minor psionic capabilities on top. Then there's the fact that they're illegal on centauri prime, so you need to figure out a way to smuggle them onto the planet undetected. Then once you do get to the drop point, you find out that your ultimate employer was none other than Londo Mollari (seen only as a prerecorded message so you can't mess up the timeline), who has a grudge against them for something they did or didn't do in the past. An automated trap will release the Feeders, meaning you have to fight them all over again. Then of course, you'll have to get off centauri prime again, possibly with the authorities alerted to your crimes, depending on how sadistic the DM is feeling. (but not Londo's part in them, not that they'll believe you even if you are caught and try to rat him out) So this is the worst kind of Shadowrun style screwed over by the Mr Johnson mission, where the whole thing is a setup to cause the PC's as much grief as possible, only transplanted to a different system. It's not completely linear in that it gives you plenty of leeway in how to solve the challenges in each section, but many decisions will require the DM to make up more details to fill in the sketchiness and of course the ending is the very annoying kind where you encounter a significant NPC without being able to actually do anything to them. They may be covering a wider range of systems in here, but the actual quality of what we're getting remains deeply hit and miss and this is a definite miss as an adventure rather than a story.</blockquote>

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