D20 Polyhedron Minigame Fan Expansions

[RealAlHazred]

This is a long-shot, but it's worth asking. I remember back in the days when Dragon and Dungeon were published print periodicals, Paizo acquired the Polyhedron magazine, long the periodical for the RPGa. Instead of publishing it as its own magazine, they folded it into a special "Polyhedron" section of Dungeon magazine, in much the same way TSR bundled SPI's Ares magazine into Dragon. At some point, Polyhedron started publishing a d20 minigame in every other issue; these were stripped-down implementations of the d20 rules to fit oddball genres, things that (I guess) Paizo and Wizards didn't think would sell a whole game. The list is actually pretty impressive:

#	Minigame
#149	Pulp Heroes — pulp adventure in the 20s and 30s; d20 Modern conversion in #161
#150	Shadow Chasers — pre-cursor to the Shadow Chasers material in the d20 Modern core book
#151	Spelljammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon — by Andy Collins; swashbuckling space fantasy
#152	Thunderball Rally — by Rich Redman; muscle car racing adventures across America; additional material in #153
#153	Omega World — by Jonathan Tweet; Gamma World mini-game
#154	Mecha Crusade — by David Noonan; walking, talking, high-tech giant robot sci-fi
#155	Gene Tech — by Rich Redman; Biopunk gene-enhanced espionage
#156	V for Victory — by Chris Pramas; World War II combat
#158	Hijinx — by Jeff Quick; a rock 'n' roll lollapalooza inspired by the fun-loving musical cartoons of our youth
#159	Knights of the Lich-Queen — by James Wyatt; Githyanki warriors campaign—basically an add-on for the Incursion! scenario event
#160	Iron Lords of Jupiter — by Ian "Lizard" Harac; Sword & Planet sci-fi; additional material in #161
#164	Deathnet — by Keith Baker; modern rpg of being trapped in a computer game
#167	Dark•Matter: Shades of Grey — by Andy Collins; modern conspiracy game

Anyway, the d20 minigames were actually really good. Maybe due to the limitations of space, only the most important mechanics were defined, and only a subset of stat blocks and background material was provided — that actually meant you had a lot of freedom to define what you wanted in your campaign. (Sure, you can ignore or redo anything from any game, but then some printed material will contradict your rulings; here, there wasn't much to contradict!) I still remember Iron Lords of Jupiter, Omega World, and Hijinx fondly.

There used to be a lot of fan material online for these minigames — there were enough holes in the material for fans to fill in! But a lot of it is gone, now. I remember there being some great add-ons fans made for Hijinx that I'd love to find (to run my wife through a solo campaign while we're watching out two-month-old) but apparently a lot of it was on a Yahoo! Group called Definitive_D20, which is now defunct with the rest of Yahoo! Groups. Does anyone know where I can locate the d20 minigame fan material, or if there's an archive of Definitive_D20 which I haven't found?

 

[rgard]

I tried the wayback machine and it doesn't look like they have an archive of the group.

I found this thread:

Polyhedron d20 Mini-Game List? | Tabletop Roleplaying Open

Many thanks. I needed this because I'm gonna go place an order soon.

forum.rpg.net

A guy named Amberjack73 there said he was the mod of that group above. Maybe he has the stuff if you can contact him. He was last active there in 2016. He could be here on enworld too.

 

[RealAlHazred]

A guy named Amberjack73 there said he was the mod of that group above. Maybe he has the stuff if you can contact him. He was last active there in 2016. He could be here on enworld too.

I tracked Amberjack73 down and it was most enlightening! Sadly, he only kept the material he worked on, but that's a start. Thanks for the head's up!

I also found a couple of projects that tried to archive as much of Y! Groups as possible, and will need to sift through the archived material to see if /Definitive_D20 is in there. Going to be somewhat labor-intensive!

 

[VelvetViolet]

I'd love to hear if you could find anything! I loved Polyhedron back in the day and I had no idea that it had a Yahoo Group. I archived my groups back in 2019 when I heard about the purge. I wish I had known about this because I would've backed it up too.

However, I have some bad news for you before you get your hopes up. Unless the group was public, then none of the messages will be archived. The files would've required membership regardless, so those wouldn't be archived either. Since these groups were very old, early 2000s old, then in all likelihood the members all moved on and didn't save anything for posterity. Which is sad, but it's the way these things go due to stupid copyright law preventing fans from preserving the stuff that corpos aren't interested in.

You can still buy PDFs of the magazines on Paizo's store, however. These are made from the original printing proofs so all the content is Original Electronic Format. The only one missing is "Thunderball Rally" due to lacking the rights for some reason.

My advice? If you really like these premises, then it's probably best to make new IPs recycling the idea. Most of these are obvious genre pastiches (GeneTech is an uncredited ripoff of the Moreau novels), so there's not a lot of unique stuff you'd be losing by inventing a spiritual successor. Release them into public domain if you want them to be preserved regardless of what happens to you personally.

You're not going to attract much gamer interest because the tabletop hobby is a stagnant mess of first mover advantage, but if you invest in board games, video games, prose fiction, comics, etc then you'll probably achieve modest success.

 

[RealAlHazred]

I'd love to hear if you could find anything!

John Simcoe's Hijinx stuff is still on the web, on his site. So far, that's all I've found on legitimate sites.

You can still buy PDFs of the magazines on Paizo's store, however. These are made from the original printing proofs so all the content is Original Electronic Format. The only one missing is "Thunderball Rally" due to lacking the rights for some reason.

This is how I acquired my copies -- buying the PDFs. When I received my downloads, the articles were separated out so I was able to store my d20 minigames in a separate folder. The magazine with the Thunderball Rally game isn't available because it was in the last year of the publication of Dungeon magazine -- Paizo don't have rights to resell those, those rights are with Wizards of the Coast, per their agreement.