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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9171631" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 148: October 2001part 6/6The Polyhedron Review: La Guerre des Ombres is our first and probably last french language review. Head to the campaign setting of Archipels for some nautical-based intrigue. The story is quite interesting, but as usual there’s some obvious goofs with the d20 rules, plus a lot of casual sexism. Useful to mine for ideas, but not one the reviewer would use as is. The Book of Eldritch Might has a rather higher pedigree, being produced by official D&D developer Monte Cook. There are some bits that feel like formula churning, creating spells that are similar to existing ones with a different energy types to fill up page count, but there are some genuinely cool ideas in there to give your spellcasters more options, some of which come with interesting implied setting details. Just don’t let your players have access to everything in it straight away.Evil is Alderac’s attempt at a Book of Vile Darkness-alike, beating WotC to the punch by nearly a year. Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot less organised, bouncing between new monsters, feats, prestige classes and roleplaying advice in a stream of consciousness way. Another one where you can definitely spice up your game by including a few of the ideas, but all of them at once would be a mess. Thievery 101 is a pair of short solo adventures for a low level thief by Wyvern’s Claw Design. Since Dungeon have yet to pull their thumbs out and do any of those this edition, these are your best choice if the rest of the party fails to turn up to the session. Web Wanderings: The final instalment of this column looks for floor plans that’ll make it easy for you to run your adventures on a grid. There’s a fair few out there, but most of these are long gone now. One hosted on jsr.com, four on geocities and one on io.com, all lost when the host companies wiped all the personal profiles. Microtactix.com is also gone, but the domain parking in its place thinks there’s high demand for a name like that as it’s asking a truly exorbitant price. The only one still alive is tamerthya.freeservers.com and even that hasn’t been updated since 2003, leaving the floor plans there looking distinctly low-res on a modern monitor. A somewhat below average rating for one of these, but at least it’s not a complete bust. I wouldn’t have objected to seeing it go on a bit longer just to find out if the rate of hits to misses improved as I caught up to the present. On The Trail: On the other hand, I have no great regrets saying goodbye to this column, as it’s been pretty blandly positive lately. Even they seem tired of trying to come up with something witty to say to differentiate one convention from the next, deciding to write fewer words and put more photos in their place. So here’s a bunch of photos from Origins & Gen Con, mostly of gamers sitting around tables, mostly male, mostly of above average rotundity, mostly wearing casual wear with a bit of cosplay thrown in. It was the first time since 1997 that they didn’t break the record for biggest Gen Con ever, but since they aren’t launching anything as significant as last year they’re not too upset by that. Maybe next year, if they even bother to cover it in some form after all the format changes. Like the final Living Greyhawk Journal, this is a quite abrupt and unsatisfying end that makes it clear that this happened for reasons outside their control and they could have produced interesting material in the current format for several years more before it grew stale. Still, it’s all water under the bridge now. Time to look forward to the merger, see how uneasy the two magazines are as bedfellows and how their respective audiences react to the union in the letters page.</blockquote>

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