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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9039331" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron UK 6: March 2000part 3/5Reviews: Carnival demonstrates to us that an evil travelling show fits just perfectly into Ravenloft, getting high marks from these reviewers. Better hope that the freaks and geeks are the sort that only bite the heads off of chickens. The Alternity starter set is suspiciously similar to the current D&D basic set, including the hand-holding fast-play adventure. They're not overly impressed, particularly by the GM screen, which only has one fold, making it too small to cover much and not particularly stable. You really need a full 4 panels to securely hide all your notes on a nice big table. All very formulaic.A Guide to Hell gets a positive review, somewhat marred by the fact that the reviewer clearly copy/pasted the template from last issue's Scarlet Brotherhood review and forgot to swap out some of the details, so the score doesn't match the description at all. Very sloppy.The Armourers Companion for Chivalry & Sorcery also gets a pretty positive result. More low fantasy worldbuilding for if you really want to get down to the nitty-gritty of what smiths do and make it important in your game. Axe of the Dwarvish Lords sees Skip Williams reuse the trick he did with Rod of Seven Parts and build a big adventure around a preexisting artifact from the corebooks. Can you get the dwarf nations to put aside their differences and defeat the goblin hordes by finding the said magical axe? Like Dragon Mountain, this involves a lot of low level monsters making themselves effective against higher level adventurers by good tactics and traps, which some may find frustrating to play, but if you like old school brutality, there are far worse dungeons to put them through.Return to White Plume Mountain plays even more heavily to the nostalgic crowd. Has Keraptis truly returned, or is something else stepping into his shoes? (answer somewhat spoiled by recent tie-in Dungeon adventure) Have fun finding out in an adventure that as usual is significantly larger than the original.Sarbreenaar, the Living City: Well, more of a Living Village, but who's counting. The centrefold is a nice full colour map of the place, followed by the character generation rules. The map looks noticeably more like a real organically grown place than the Living City, with a clear direction of elevation for the water to flow down despite several winding rivers and an obvious canal system that serves as both transport system for industry and first line of defence all joining up again at the eastern end. It looks like it's modelled quite specifically on a welsh mining town, which shows the benefits of letting actual british people do the designing rather than americans used to putting everything on a grid system when that only happens in new builds on flat terrain with a strong central planning system. It definitely feels like more research and care went into this than the Raven's Bluff map. 85 of the buildings are numbered & keyed, with many owned by named people that feel like PC's, given the haphazardness of their naming conventions. I'm guessing they got to buy those positions at the big Gen Con UK interactive or some other recent convention. Still plenty of room for more people to buy plots before they even have to build new streets though, not that you'll have much time to enjoy the property ownership with the edition change looming. The character generation rules are fairly similar to the main LC ones, but there are subtle differences. Ability ranges need to be from 7-18 rather than 6-18. Chaotic Neutral characters are not banned here. (until someone abuses that) Kit & Deity selection is different and slightly more restrictive overall, but also allowing a few not found in Raven's Bluff. Dual-classing uses the mid 90's LC XP rules, not the newer ones. Unarmed combat only uses the DMG rules, not the ones from the complete fighter's handbook. Some of these are so small as to seem pointless, but at least they have the freedom to make them. If this had continued longer, the two would probably have become more divergent over time, and it would have been extra interesting to see how the different pressures from different countries & their cultures made them evolve.  As is often the case, I find myself wishing I could travel between alternate timelines and see how those myriad possibilities played out.</blockquote>

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