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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9103661" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1part 3/6Illicit Wages at Blade's Point: Brigands, Pirates, Thugs, Corsairs, all staples on the old random wilderness encounter tables. But why did they decide to take up such a risky profession instead of staying at home working a job with a regular paycheck? Did they want to be adventurers but couldn’t hack the dungeoncrawling, so they settled for preying on their fellow man? Were they soldiers or mercenaries who found they couldn’t adapt to the peacetime life once war ended and went independent to carry on doing the only job they know. Are they a small group that evades the authorities by stealth and staying on the move or big enough to be a political force unto themselves, with places controlled by them and camp followers who aren’t directly involved in the fighting? A fairly typical bit of advice to put a bit more thought into your worldbuilding, as answering these questions can lead to further questions that help you build a more coherent history and economy for your world. As is often the case, they include a couple of examples, the sneaky Robin Hood style Men of the Fox and the more urbane crime syndicate the Guild of Blades, complete with statblocks that show us how even low level characters can have much more interesting builds under the new edition. A few multiclass rogue/sorcerers or mixing up fighter, ranger and barbarian levels and you can pull some very interesting tactics that’ll make the players think twice even if they’re individually higher level. The concept may not be new, but the implementation is nicely fresh, making this a very useful article for people still getting to grips with building their own adversaries in the new edition.You Rogues Want Some More?: A very quick follow-up to issue 141’s collection of mostly nonmagical tricks you can use to even the odds with a little prep work. Flour bombs to detect invisible things. Mixing fire seeds with mundane lamp oil for greater damage. Using hot wax as a preservative for any poisoned needles you find in traps so you can use them in your blowdarts later. Brown Mold bombs. (these do need some magical protection to harvest safely in the first place) Hypodermic projectiles. Your basic timed explosive controlled by candlewick. Oil of slipperiness on discarded items as a decoy. Coins that can be bent into caltrops. Leaving behind cryptic symbols on the walls that mean nothing, but will delay anyone else exploring the place trying to figure them out, or distract them from another trap. More stuff that’s usable but not particularly groundbreaking, particularly so soon after the last article with the same theme. Convention Hitchiking: We’ve had plenty of articles on both the success stories and failures of running a convention over the years. It can be pretty tough starting one from scratch, finding a town hall that’ll take you, promoting it, trying to get enough players and judges to run a decent number of games, then figuring out how to get a bigger venue when you outgrow the existing one. Here’s a handy cheat they’ve discovered in recent years. Instead of starting one yourself, find a an already existing convention that doesn’t have gaming, but is a compatible topic like your sci-fi or anime conventions, ren faires, wargaming, etc and ask the people running it if they’re interested in adding a few tables of RPG tournaments to the schedule. This was particularly effective for them in the Pacific northwest states, allowing them to go from virtually nothing to something nearly every weekend in the busy season in just a couple of years. So this is essentially a primer on effective proselytising, (going knocking door to door doesn’t work very well for religion and it would probably be even less effective for gaming) finding an audience that’s already likely to be receptive and demonstrating your value to them, having anticipated many of the potential pitfalls and come up with answers to them. A pretty interesting idea that demonstrates WotC’s willingness to try new methods to grow the hobby and could easily be applied to other areas of life as well, I definitely approve of this. It’s often much easier to solve an intractable problem by coming at it from a different angle and this is sufficiently different from all the other times they’ve done this topic.</blockquote>

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