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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9059700" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 142: June 2000part 3/5Putting life back into the Undead: After a highly specific article that opened me up to a whole new area of study I knew nothing about before, it’s time for that repetitive old canard about making monsters scary by emphasising description over numbers, with a particular focus on the undead. A bit of a letdown, but they have to repeat it every few years for the newbies. It does seem a bit odd to have multiple horror themed articles in a row this time of year though. I guess they’ll be so busy with edition change stuff come October that they decided to move it forward this year. Still, this is three pages of boring filler that tells me nothing new. I do wish they’d put something a little less obvious and overdone in it’s place.Without a Trace: The generally horrifying theme continues with a new monster for Dark Conspiracy. Keyhole Stranglers are basically Victor Tooms from the X-Files, human-shaped monsters with rubbery flesh capable of squeezing through the smallest gap and a fondness for killing via strangulation. They’re not that dangerous for a fully armed and ready to fight group, but of course they’ll never fight fair if they can get away with it and they’re very difficult to corner if they want to retreat and strike again later with surprise. Best thing to do is chase them into a pipe that’s blocked at the other end then apply large amounts of fire, poison or electricity. You can definitely run a good murder mystery adventure using one of these as the villain.Men of the Basilisk: Ed is absent this month, but Eric Boyd has another bumper-sized bit of realmslore to give us, filling a full 8 pages with info on another of the many secret societies that compete for dominance of the Realms. The Men of the Basilisk are definitely more on the Zhentarim end of the spectrum than the Cult of the Dragon one, as they don’t have any particular ideology beyond working together to get richer, which means they’re pretty much all on the neutral or evil end of the alignment spectrum. Once just a single adventuring party, they now have more than 150 members plus their various minions, mostly found around the inner sea region, secretly colluding to maximise profits and not averse to the odd assassination when someone is getting in the way of that. They could be responsible for a lot of obstacles in PC’s way without you ever finding out about their existence, or just as likely to be mysterious employers sending you on missions that’ll pay well. (but be even more profitable to them long term) We get stats for 6 of the more powerful members, mostly hovering around the upper single digits and low teens in terms of levels. So they’re fairly flexible in how you use them, but eventually you’ll outlevel them in a long term campaign and be able to take over or destroy them, unlike larger organisations like the Red Wizards who have a whole country backing them up. A pretty solid entry, but not one that’s going to dramatically change the world whether you include it or leave it out. (if it was, they probably would have put it in a book rather than here)</blockquote>

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