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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9121406" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 146: March 2001part 4/6Taverns - Gateways to Adventure: Dungeon has worked very hard over the years at making sure you don’t get the majority of your missions from mysterious strangers in taverns. Polyhedron has never had the number of submissions to be so selective and many Living City players have become thoroughly fed up of this. What if my character is teetotal, how do I break into adventuring social circles then? (Not that it was easy to go completely dry in a gritty medieval setting, even the monks became experts at winemaking because it was less dangerous than drinking the untreated water) This article, rather than apologising for the trope, sets out to justify why it became a thing in the first place. It goes all the way back to the fall of the Roman Empire, which removed the bathhouses and feasthalls as social venues, letting privately owned taverns become dominant. When trade picked up again, they were the main place anyone travelling stayed, which meant anyone seeking novelty also gravitated there despite the exhortations of the church against frequenting dens of iniquity. This combination of profitability and lots of foreigners meant big taverns frequently became laws unto themselves, with what happens inside staying inside policed only by the staff. Now there’s something you can’t say about the modern day, with the pub industry being decimated by the pandemic and licensing regulations in general becoming increasingly onerous. This article winds up doing pretty much the opposite of what it intends for me, instead of making me want to go back to the tavern, it illustrates how the way history and fashion went in Europe was not inevitable and there are plenty of other ways our social gatherings could have shaken out if you fiddle with the inputs a little. Adding magic, particularly polytheistic clerics who can reliably conjure their own food & drink definitely counts, so D&D worlds shouldn’t look just like earthly middle ages. Don’t fall into the trap of calling things that are actually very specific to your country generic because that’s all you’ve ever personally known. H. H. Holmes - America's First Serial Killer: Some people accomplish so much in their lives that if you did it in a story they’d say it was unrealistic. Herman Mudgett, aka Henry Howard Holmes, was only 34 when he was caught in 1894, but had managed to go through multiple wives and mistresses, several successful businesses and (probably) murder hundreds of people, although they could only pin 27 of them on him solidly enough to convict. (which was still more than enough to earn the death penalty, so it’s not as if they could punish him any more harshly even if they did find more bodies. ) With his slick wheeling and dealing he first ran a very successful drug store, then used the money to build a spectacularly confusing bit of real estate filled with methods of spying on the tenants and killing without any risk to him (other than the long term danger of all the asbestos) such as filling the rooms with gas or trapdoors with greased chutes leading down to his secret basement lair, filled with torture equipment and various ways of disposing of the bodies. All in all, an excellent example of how psychopathic charm and ruthlessness really helps you get ahead in life, up to the point where it doesn’t because the number of people you screwed over along the way catches up with you. While they do give him and his minions stats, they have the good taste to not make him supernatural in any way, which is very unusual for a Masque of the Red Death article. Sometimes a person is just that nasty without any outside influences and there’s not a lot you can do about it apart from stopping them and making sure they can’t hurt anyone else. An interesting reminder that there have been real world deathtrap dungeons created without any magic and real world villains are rarely cacklingly villainous all the time, with the successful ones very good at putting on a show, being charming and deflecting suspicion. You can definitely use the lessons here for the villains in your own game to make them more realistic, even if it might not seem like it to your players.Teamwork - How to get it and use it: What’s that Lassie? Is Timmy stuck down the well again? No, it’s something that happens even more frequently, a basic bit of advice about how you should build a party that works together. Build your party as a group, making sure they have a decent mix of classes and personality types, but leaving out the Starscreams, brooding loners and the thieves who view their own party as valid targets. Give them a good reason to form a group and work together in the first place. Make sure you build the adventures so all the characters can make a valid contribution. If they still won’t work together properly, don’t let it fester, do something about it IC or kick the worst offender out of the group. Same as it ever was. The rules of the game may change, and the emphasis on co-operation or PvP may change with the setting, but human nature will not without serious genetic engineering, and your odds of getting people to go through with that willingly as a society and also not screwing up the practical side are very slim indeed going by the novels on the subject.</blockquote>

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