Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9037721" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 140: February 2000part 5/5Powers that Be: This column has it’s last entry this time, having failed to find someone who’d consistently advocate for Greyhawk gods the way Eric Boyd did for Toril ones. Fittingly, the final god we get to see is Cyndor, god of time. He’s the kind of god of time who thinks there should be one timeline, and people should proceed linearly down it from birth to death. Your free will is merely an illusion and everything is predetermined. Of course, in the AD&D multiverse, it’s not that simple. Both Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms have featured time travel in the novels, although those kind of powers remain out of reach of most PC’s, even the ultra high level ones. Which means his priests have the complicated job of detecting and suitably punishing any time travellers on Oerth other than them. (and possibly any kender that show up, even those not time travelling at the moment, given what a mess they make of predestination <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) To anyone not engaged in time manipulation, they don’t seem to do much, hanging out in universities, distant monasteries or serving as advisors to powerful figures, because if they’re doing their job right, all the crises they stop will have never even happened from the perspective of the prime timeline. So if you like playing time cop and never being properly appreciated for the heroic things you do, with extremely high stakes for failure, they’re the priesthood for you. There’s plenty of media you can use as inspiration for a campaign like that and it’s nice of them to give us the option, even if the D&D ruleset isn’t the best equipped for it. This is a pretty good read, but I can understand why they didn’t pick him as one of the core gods for the next edition. A premise like this tends to dominate over other character’s schticks and make them the star of the show, which is something you want to discourage in game design. Doing solid rules for time travel when it’s not the whole theme of your game is hard work and deserves a nice big supplement devoted to it.Writer's Guidelines: Time to finish off with some more repeating of basics, because they always need more submissions, and after the edition change they’re going to urgently need them even more. They still haven’t streamlined their procedures from last year though. They want both a printed copy and a floppy disk containing the original file. We’re still a way from the much more capacious and durable USB stick taking over as the primary method of data transfer and no-one’s going to waste burning a whole CD for a file that’s probably measured in the kilobytes. Other details remain pretty much the same too, remember to write coherently, use proper spelling, punctuation and grammar, make sure the maths add up when statting things out, we’re only a little newszine so nothing too long, this is work for hire so we own all the copyrights. The main differences are the listing of this year’s upcoming issue themes, and putting the rate of pay up to 4 cents per word, which is a definite plus, although it does raise the spectre of them requiring more personal info from you than before for tax reasons. That might prevent some teenagers from getting started in here the way they could in the 80’s. Overall, the good and the bad changes balance out, leaving me with no strong opinion.The survey decides to use monkey metaphors to assess quality with, which is fitting since their sister magazine’s multitude of monkeys did just come up with Shakespeare.Several very nice bits of game material in the middle, but a whole lot of repeating the basics around the edges. I suppose that adds up to another average issue overall. Still, as long as the amount of useful stuff I know about continues to increase, that's a net positive, particularly for everyone else who can just use the good bits now I've done all the work of sorting through them. Let's what proportion of good bits next issue has.</blockquote>

Verification