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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9362936" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 98/157: May 2003part 5/8Winter Fantasy 2003: The look back on this year’s big RPGA meetup is also presented positively but with signs of trouble underneath. All those attempts to convert 2e Living City material obviously became such a headache that the new owners nuked it and started an all-new version called Ruins of Raven’s Bluff where everyone has to start out with new characters. Doing a little googling, this turned out to be a bad idea that was very unpopular and caused them to haemorrhage players, resulting in it being shut down next year. But since both Living Greyhawk and Living Arcanis are going quite nicely it’s hardly as if you’re lacking in opportunities to play D&D. Living Arcanis in particular exceeded expectations, with a massive 6 hour event that sold out easily and had to be expanded to other rooms to fit more people in. Living Force also did pretty well for itself. However, they don’t mention any of the other Living campaigns at all, making it look increasingly likely that they’ve been pruning the smaller ones. WotC really are cutting quite a lot at the moment, and though some might be outsourced to third party companies, their survival isn’t assured there either. Just because you have the name of a formerly big setting, doesn’t mean there’s an audience now, particularly if the first product in the line gets bad reviews.Unusual Suspects: Our first smaller D20 modern article goes to a pretty familiar and popular well. Ninjas! Sneakily engaging in crime and sticking it to the government is adaptable to any era and modern technology opens up a whole new set of opportunities to confuse and distract. So here’s an example of an elite yakuza team, recruited from the most promising young criminals. A team of 6, all 8th level characters, with very generic codenames built to work together effectively as a team. Hand-to-hand muscle, all-rounder, stealth, vehicle expert, shooter and face, all of them are multiclassed and all basic classes apart from Dedicated are represented in their builds, along with martial artist, infiltrator, daredevil and gunslinger advanced classes. Depending on your PC’s group size and competency they could be a challenge even for teams several levels higher when working together, or used individually against weaker groups. Or you could use them as pregens for a one-shot adventure if you can’t be bothered to come up with your own. So this is all pretty useful, being much better put together in terms of making them customisable for various campaigns and used in actual play than the old Rogues Gallery adventuring parties, with the little bits of new crunch being better balanced as well. As the number and variety of settings drops it’s important to appreciate the bits they do handle better now.</blockquote>

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