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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9106474" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1part 5/6The Polyhedron Review: The Sword & Sorcery Creature Collection gets unsurprisingly compared to the Fiend Folio. Do you favour careful design with concern for game balance, or a bunch of weird ideas which might be cool in the right setting, but with CR’s that don’t fit the stats and stats that might not fully line up with the official creature types? Hopefully at least a few will become classics in turn, but most will definitely be forgotten like so many other things in supplements.Sketch! is a lighthearted little game where your stats are derived from your drawing skill and the votes of the other players. It’s designed so you can play entirely without a GM, creating characters quickly and pitting them against one-another. Just the thing for introducing young kids with short attention spans to gaming, or filling a session where not enough people show up to run the regular campaign. All Flesh Must Be Eaten also seems very suited to one-shots, since only facing one type of monster in a campaign could get boring quickly. It’ll take a while for people to realise the full potential of long-form zombie based storytelling, with the aid of plenty of supplements and several TV shows. Definitely one where it’s interesting to look back and see how our perspectives have changed.NeMoren’s Vault is another early d20 adventure from Firey Dragon Productions. While it is a 32 pager aimed at starting level characters that doesn’t use any particularly unusual monsters, the rules are noticeably more solid than ones rushed out before all the corebooks arrived and the story and production values are pretty decent as well. If you want to play something in the Gygaxian style you could do a lot worse. The Horror Beneath from Nightshift Games, on the other hand, completely fails at d20 rules, with both the combats and the skill checks miscalibrated or using nonexistent stats, and the writing a stream of consciousness mess that leaves out important details if you don’t do exactly what the writer would have in that situation. Definitely one to avoid if you see it in the shops.Web Wanderings: Our internet links this time take us out to look at animals both real and fantastical. The real world stuff mostly links to university pages, which have long since changed their internal structure even if the institution and top domain level have survived. No cool pics of incredibly deadly australian spiders for you this time. The cryptozoological creatures are similarly lacking in live links, either linking to nothing or a blank site that gives me an insecure warning. Only herper.com has survived, and even that doesn’t have the ebooks they talk about here anymore. A pretty disappointing entry given the potential of the topic.</blockquote>

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