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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9123843" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 146: March 2001part 6/6The Polyhedron Review: Thieves in the Forest is a short 1st level adventure from Atlas Games, at a mere 24 pages smaller than most actual old school modules. The rules editing has improved since their last offering, but the story is nothing to write home about. Wander about the forest a bit and kill some thieves. That’s about it. Nothing you haven’t seen multiple times before, better written if you have a subscription to Dungeon. The Hills Rise Wild is a comedic skirmish game of lovecraftian horror, with the players taking the role of multiple families of feuding hillbillies delving into forbidden lore and inflicting it on their rivals. This frequently backfires, making for a frantic and unpredictable experience where luck is as important as skill in winning. You can’t take going insane and dying horribly too seriously, otherwise you’d really go mad in real life. The Last Days of Constantinople is another early d20 boom adventure that really screws up the rules. Skills that are listed like 2e proficiencies, challenge ratings all over the shop, absurdly charismatic NPC’s. The premise is interesting and it covers a historical period TSR never got around too, but it’s a little too puerile, and revelling in it’s freedom to include whores and gruesomely described deaths to really satisfy Erik. Just because there’s no morality clause in the OGL doesn’t mean you have to go full X rated straight away. The Spear of the Loghin annoys our reviewers less, but it’s all a bit scooby-doo and the maps just look cheap and bad. It does have some good ideas like multiple scaled difficulty encounters and the general organisation is decent, but they can still spot lots of little errors in the implementation of the d20 rules. Probably not worth it in hindsight.Web Wanderings: This column lacks a theme this time, and goes back to some very basic suggestions indeed. You probably have an email address by now, but given that they’re free and easy to make, have you considered making ones for your characters as well? Well, it definitely makes things easier if you’re running multiple characters in a PbM game. The recommended ones are somewhat dated, but still around, although you have to intentionally create a hotmail account rather than an outlook one and most of the good ones are already taken. The next suggestion is also still alive and very usable. <a href="http://www.earthcam.com" target="_blank">www.earthcam.com</a> lets you check in on any of thousands of webcams live around the world or link your own one up to the site, which has multitudes of information gathering possibilities, even if separating signal from noise may be a challenge with so much to choose from. The final two are less consequential and not around any more. An alignment test quiz? The link may be dead, but there’s plenty more of these to be found with a casual search. Similarly, there’s plenty more zener card psychic tests to be found even if the linked one has been replaced by a food shop, of all things. Some are even apps rather than websites. Nothing hugely consequential or mind-blowing then, but more little data points of what has and hasn’t changed in the intervening decades.Clubline: I’ve been quite cynical over the years about how tiny the turnouts of the decathlons are, but at least they are going in the right direction, with last year’s the biggest yet. This column is basically just 4 pages listing all the events over the year and who got those big scoring 1st & 2nd places in them, so it’s all transparent and fair. The overall winners were the Naughty Weasels, coming in and pushing last year’s winners the PM Players down to 2nd place. Will things be even more fiercely fought next year? I guess I’ll probably hear about it whether I want to or not, going by previous years.On the Trail: There’s not many conventions this time of year, so they can devote all their attention to the RPGA’s spiritual home, Winter Fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the Living games took up the majority of the time, between the swarms of people trying to get 3e certificates for their Living City characters, the epic introduction of the Living Force and the second wave of Living Greyhawk adventures, but there were a decent number of Classic tournaments for all sorts of systems as well. While Jack Ravenwild had the honor of sealing Myrkyssa Jelan away in the official novels, your party got to play out her defeat in Amber’s Story, another multi-round adventure all the long term players who went through the war can really get emotionally invested in. Finally, we have another reminder how often future writers came up through the RPGA, with Jason Buhlman (sic, obviously they don’t know him that well yet) being singled out as easily their best overall scorer over many tournaments. Let’s hope they get that h in the right place next time, as I know we’ll be seeing him again along the course of this journey. A decent number of significant historical footnotes here then, putting this entry at above average interest for this column.The signs that we’re reaching the last days of the magazine continue to grow, but the density of useful content per issue has also rarely been higher, even if some of it is a bit basic and repetitive as usual. So it’s looking like their demise might not have been directly their own fault after all, but the consequences of larger forces of history acting upon them. At least if they go out on a high they’re more likely to be positively remembered. Let’s see if there’s any odd deviations in the final arc of their trajectory.</blockquote>

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