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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9010530" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Gen Con Special: August 1999part 3/3Food Fight!: Another food related article? How curious. Well, we've seen several comedy adventures that degenerate into brawls in the cafeteria in here, so it's not completely out of character. However, on closer reading it turns out that this isn't a comedy article at all, but a serious look at the complexities of making bread and the economics surrounding it in a realistic medieval setting. Only a few people can afford ovens, so everyone else is dependent on them to turn their flour into edible food, with a heavy tax rate. There's no nationally agreed set of standards or OSHA equivalent to enforce them, so people cutting corners to increase profits are widespread. Just another of those irritations like lack of running water & toiletries, widespread literacy, mass production in general. But you can't go full murderhobo and slaughter the baker & all their assistants every time you get a substandard loaf, as that'll just reduce supply, drive up prices and lower standards in the future even if you avoid arrest. On top of that there's a complicated hierarchy of what kinds of bread are acceptable for different social classes, with serving substandard bread an easy way to alienate your guests and fail to get that favour you really wanted. All of this turns out to be just a small part of a full book on the complexities of medieval food, another example of just how obsessively people can study their fields of interest. If you want your campaign to be on the gritty medieval end, including the grit in your cheap bread accelerating tooth damage and all the nightmares of primitive dentistry that follow from that, this definitely points the way.Bestiary: Rusalka are another of those folklore monsters that somehow slipped through the net so far, probably because nereids and kelpies occupy a very similar niche. But there's enough room for goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, norkers, bugbears, goblyns, kobolds, jermalaine, etc to coexist, so why not have another monster that appears to be an attractive woman and lures you into the water to drown? At least these ones are undead so clerics can turn them. They'll appear again much quicker next edition, in Dragon 290, showing that once people know about a thing it's more likely to appear again. Another pretty decent pair of decathlon entries that shows the advantages of having lots of different people submitting stuff. The final page prints the full RPGA tournament schedule for the weekend, which we've also seen before. The articles were actually pretty decent in this one, and they even managed a bit of a theme, but it was over extremely quickly, reminding us that they have become less efficient with their use of page counts since the early years when 16 pages was the standard for the newsletter. As such, this feels more like a punctuation mark than a full issue. Let's hope it did it's job and brought more people in so they can make future ones bigger and with higher production values.</blockquote>

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