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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9089137" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron issue 144: October 2000part 5/6The Palace of Passion: It’s been a few issues since they did a feature on a Raven’s Bluff temple, but they’re back and this time they remembered to take the metaplot into account. Followers of Sune played a big part in the battle against the machinations of Glasya, and although they eventually won, the temple was destroyed in the process. Some hard work rebuilding later and here we are. It’s still not one of the official civic religions, because some people are stick in the muds about the hedonism that goes on there, but her portfolio is both popular with the common people and very profitable, and with more worshippers than ever after the very public Baatezu beating, it’s obvious any attempts to ban them on grounds of indecency won’t be gaining traction without at least another generation of subtle manipulation. The temple itself is pretty much what you’d expect, an opulent place with a river on one side and wooded gardens round the back that offer plenty of niches for people who prefer a bit more privacy for their pleasures, although it’s also been built more for defensibility than the previous version as well. The various clergy are also pretty interesting, particularly because they’re still built using the 2e rules when everything else has already been converted over. They also manage to get a humorous dig in at the tendency of Living City players to use Cha & Comeliness (when that was still a thing) as dump stats, which hopefully will be somewhat reduced in 3e since it’s actually significant to the powers of several classes. Overall, this manages to be well above average for an entry in this series in both usefulness and consistency with previously established facts about the city. That’s good whether you’re playing in 2e, 3e or some other system entirely.Bare Bones: They said they’d be incorporating elements from Polyhedron UK when they merged them and here’s the first one. A general roleplaying advice column. The trouble is, unless it’s a serialised one, the advice tends to be pretty basic and repetitive, aimed at people who haven’t been doing this for decades and seen the cycle play out over and over, helpless to stop it. So it proves here. A reminder that you can draw inspiration from anything, you just need to keep your eyes open and maybe mix it with something else you also saw recently to come up with something new? That’s not a new idea at all. The specific example is decent enough, a cyberpunk dystopian Hawaii being used as a backdrop for murder mysteries. Agatha Christie would definitely be a fish out of water there. But overall, this is another article that’s way too low CR for me to gain any XP for defeating.The Polyhedron Review: Another of the attempts to be a more general gaming magazine from the UK side. Well, Dragon stopped doing reviews a couple of years ago, so it’s not as if they’re stepping on their toes anymore. Three Days to Kill is one of the first third-party d20 adventures. A pleasingly gritty little adventure where you have to infiltrate and disrupt a meeting of bandit lords, preferably terminally. The compromises involved may be a bit much for stalwart paladin players, but that just shows how many adventures never made it into Dungeon not because of quality, but because they didn’t have an unambiguously heroic resolution and why the OGL will be a net positive to the diversity of supplements for D&D despite the amount of shovelware. Ork! The Roleplaying Game is basically the same joke as the old GAZ10: Orcs of Thar, only with a stripped down system better suited for a jokey beer & pretzels game that isn’t intended to last more than a session or two. Four attributes, a bunch of humorously named skills and wildly fluctuating difficulty levels facilitate you living fast and dying horribly with plenty of collateral damage along the way. Shouldn’t be too hard to convert the two adventures from Dungeon based on the concept if you’re short of ideas either.The JLA Sourcebook for the DC Universe RPG tries to quantify the ridiculous power levels of Superman, Green Lantern, Plastic Man, et al. This requires a lot of dice! While the art is good, they’re not so keen on the rules. Surely there must be a more elegant way of representing those powers that doesn’t require fistfuls of dice and a ton of counting for each action? Erik is also not a fan of including the irritatingly kiddified Young Justice team either. It’ll still be quite some time before they get a well written cartoon to elevate them with intelligent long-running storylines. Overall, not terrible, but could definitely be improved.Harnmanor takes us to pretty much the opposite end of the realism scale, giving us a detailed system for tracking the development of your manors and the surrounding villages. If you want to know how to cook authentic medieval bread, get deep into the logistics of smithing and exactly how many fighting men a place can support before you don’t have enough to keep the day to day food growing running properly it does an exemplary job and has enough system free historical detail to be useful in any other game set in the same era. Not for every group, but highly recommended if you do want to play a game like that.</blockquote>

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