Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9122720" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 146: March 2001part 5/6Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Another very literally named location this time, as Ed takes us to Owlhold, which does indeed have a lot of owls in its wild winding woodlands. Not a huge number of people though, with those there widely spread out in individual homesteads rather than clustering into villages. This means they’re all very self-reliant and many of them are high level, so thinking you can rob a house is a big gamble even if it seems to be deserted. They can melt into the woods and pepper you with arrows from a distance while you blunder around and get thoroughly lost trying to find your way out, and any widespread fires or logging will soon get everyone to gang up on you to protect their lifestyle. The most powerful duo are an archlich and a watchghost who both have very impressive collections of magical items, and can sometimes be convinced to lend a few out to adventurers if asked nicely and it’s for a good cause. There’s a decent amount of other stuff to explore, as this was once the site of a technologically advanced gnome kingdom, until it was swept over by a horde of orcs and abandoned by the few survivors. It may be rusted and overgrown by the trees, but if you look in the right cave or basement who knows what nice little fixer-upper you could find. Seems like a good place for adventurers to settle down and make a home as long as you obey the unwritten social rules and don’t set up too near to any of your neighbours, with plenty of low level challenges just around the corner to ease your kids into gaining their first few levels. Another good example of how no-one writes places that simultaneously seem nice to live but also fun to adventure in like him.Bare Bones: Having done birth last time, this column goes for another big life event. Weddings! We’ve had adventures involving those from several perspectives - making sure they go ahead safely, stopping them, going on a quest to come up with a really good present and even the ultra-cheesy one where one of the PC’s gets to marry the princess at the end. He does manage to come up with some new spins on the idea though. What if the wedding celebrations are actually some kind of occult ritual. The details of the music, the guest placement, the wedding speech, all may seem innocuous on their own, but if not disrupted something eldritch may be summoned and most of the guests might find themselves on the menu. What if the wedding dress is cursed, the wedding is on an inauspicious day or the groom accidentally sees the bride before the wedding? What if the wedding is a sham done for financial or political reasons, and one or both of the people involved rebels against their parents? What if one of them plans to kill the other after the deed is done? I think that’s a decent number of ideas for a compact little column like this to contain, not all of which have been done to death already. You can definitely get some useful inspiration out of this one. Can Ogres Fly?: Ian Richards continues to bring that general gaming magazine feel from across the pond with a preview of the computer game Arcanum. Part of the growing steampunk trend, it sends us to a fantasy world in the middle of an industrial revolution, mixing magic & elves with tesla coils & zeppelins. Like many an RPG, it offers a lengthy selection of benefits & flaws that you can use to make your character unique that give plenty of opportunity for experimentation and figuring out the optimised builds. The plot seemed pretty interesting too from what he saw in the demo, with plenty of people to talk too and hints as to the story. Unfortunately, the version he got was also still pretty buggy, so between the crashes and the time limit he didn’t get much chance to engage with the combat system. So plenty of promise, but wait and see if it delivers in the end. Since it did mildly underperform saleswise, with strong initial ones tailing off fast as people discovered the problems with the interface, I’m guessing the developers didn’t do as much refinement as needed in response to this initial feedback. Oh well. It’s always hard to know when a game is ready, and any more would be just gilding the lily, with both rushing and getting bogged down in development hell both real risks.</blockquote>

Verification