TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 61: Sep/Oct 1996



part 1/5



80 pages. Tony Diterlizzi! His art style is instantly recognisable, and generally pretty pleasing to see, even if the characters depicted aren't doing anything in particular. Why does this man have stitches across his head, and what's he doing carrying flowers in the middle of the night? Is there some romance involved, or a tragic loss that'd also make for an intriguing story? Let's see if the interior is as distinctive as the cover.



Letters: First letter is from John Baichtal, who once again gives a detailed assessment on both the good and bad aspects of issue 60. Most of it was good, although the dithering on their scanned art was a bit much. They've still not entirely mastered doing everything digitally and sometimes screw-ups happen.

Second is from Uruguay, quite rightly complaining that Dabus rebuses are a lot harder when english isn't your native language. They got there in the end, but it's still a problem.

Third is another one in favor of them printing more small encounters that are just a single trap or interesting NPC. They've been going on about that for over a year now, so why haven't they started appearing in the magazine?

Fourth is just general praise, with some more rumination on how hard it is to be a gamer in a place where you don't know anyone who plays the same thing. Geography and language barriers should not be underestimated as obstacles.

Fifth is irritated by enemies with poison attacks in a place where everything is immune to poison and comedy adventures in general. Where's the logic in either of those?

Sixth is the usual contrasting opinion, who appreciates a bit of light relief now and then. Roleplaying is often about escapism, so you don't want it to be all grim life or death struggles all the time.



Editorial: Tony Diterlizzi isn't just on the cover, he's doing all the illustrations this issue and the editorial too! A testament to both his prolificness and popularity with the public. He's delighted to get a break from Planescape and push his style to fit other D&D settings, showing he's not just some one-trick pony. In the process we get to find out a little more about him, his influences as an artist, (big up Arthur Rackham!) the mediums he uses to create his drawings, (quite different depending on if he's working in B&W or color) and the usual short blurbs about the adventures he's illustrating. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but turns out he's also pretty good at packing in lots of detail into relatively few words as well. This issue is turning out very promising so far.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 61: Sep/Oct 1996



part 2/5



Jigsaw: Our cover story is the first out, and explains itself quite neatly. We're off to gothic earth for a remix of Frankenstein. A young girl showed signs of being extremely smart from a very early age and was encouraged by her father to become the first female physician in Ingolstadt. Unfortunately the forces of conservatism were too strong and she was bullied out of university before she could get her diploma. This did not deter her, so she continued to study on her own, one thing led to another, she started engaging in research on raising the dead to prove her brilliance to the scientific community beyond any doubt, and before you know it, she had a freshly animated flesh golem on her hands. Like Victor before her, she was revolted by her creation, but couldn't bring herself to kill him and abandoned him in the woods before skipping town and trying to repress the whole thing. Unfortunately, her creation retains an undying love for her and mental link, so he can track her anywhere, showing up in her bedroom in the middle of the night and disappearing just as mysteriously. If he can't marry her (holy oedipus complex batman!) he'll kill her and her new boyfriend too! She'll ask the PC's for help. (while not revealing that she's the one responsible for creating the monster in the first place) Can you protect her until the wedding, when he's bound to make a move? Will you stick close by her, or try and track him down proactively, finding about his side of the story in the process?

In actual play, this isn't actually that different from Wedding Day a couple of issues ago, only with horror trappings rather than comedy ones, as you have a timeline of things that'll happen if you don't stop them and pretty free reign to figure out how you go about that. The difference then is that the stakes are rather more serious, but there's also a distinct possibility that you'll realise the woman has been lying to you and develop some sympathies for the golem's position, as like Frankenstein's Monster, he can be pretty eloquent in the right circumstances. Will this end in tragic violence, or can you break free of those genre conventions and find a better solution? This manages the fairly rare feat of having both a very strong backstory and the potential for good storytelling in actual play, without having a fixed idea of exactly what story the PC's ought to be participating in and railroading them into it. If you want to encourage some spirited debate amongst your players about what course of action they should take and the morality of playing god/responsible childcare, this is pretty top tier, and has plenty of ideas on how to extend it into a longer campaign if you don't kill the golem straight away. (and thoroughly destroy his body so he can't come back for a sequel.) If you find yourself on Gothic Earth for whatever reason I thoroughly recommend it.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 61: Sep/Oct 1996



part 3/5



Storm Season: We follow on with another heavily literary adventure, this time drawing from recent Forgotten Realms events. The Night Parade are a bunch of otherworldly gribleys that appear in one novel and are never heard from again, probably because the author had just played Palladium's Nightbane (or watched the film Nightbreed which it's derived from) and wanted to put a bit more of that in D&D. Like those, they're derived from human stock, and most can still assume a human facade, but they also have a monstrous form that can be all manner of weird and grotesque, with features & powers determined on a random table very similarly to Hordlings. Of course, since this is TSR, not White Wolf or Palladium, there's no sympathy for the monsters here - their hearts are as grotesque as their bodies so you need to foil their evil schemes. Arabel has suffered non-stop thunderstorms for several days now, and any spellcasters powerful enough to diagnose the cause and do anything about it have been attacked. Can you succeed where they failed, see through their red herrings implicating the Zhentarim for the murders, (or hey, just kill them too because I'm sure they're doing something diabolical as well) and find the Night Parade headquarters before they collect enough lightning charges to open up a gate to their home realm, bringing through hordes more misshapen creatures to take over the whole town? Like the previous adventure, it's very much in the horror genre, but more inspired by your splatterpunk video nastys than the gothic tragedy of previous centuries. It doesn't have the same emotional depth, but is still both flexible and expandable, giving you stats for a new type of monster that could easily fill a campaign arc, or used as a template for PC's if you want to convert Nightbane characters to the D&D system. Another well above average piece of work.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 61: Sep/Oct 1996



part 4/5



To Save A Forest: After two adventures that do something new for the magazine, it's time for an idea that has appeared before, your basic cursed, slowly dying forest. They earned the enmity of a priest of Cyric, who unleashed a powerful malediction on the druids & their charges. Only a highly specific macguffin can lift it, and travelling to where it's found & back on foot would take way too long, leaving the forest dead by the time you got back. You need to find the great treant Silverwood just to find out what that macguffiin is, then you need to find a pegasus to get you there and back in time (and persuade it to co-operate.) In the meantime you have the usual forest mix of natural animals, trickster fae, and increasingly hostile & desperate plant creatures affected by the curse, with a fair bit of randomness in what wandering monsters you get. A fairly linear fetch quest with no great surprises, this neither thrills me or annoys me in any way, leaving it a solid but unexceptional 5/10er, that might have been given a point or two more if I hadn't already seen it's like before repeatedly. It'll fill up a session or two if you're into that sort of thing.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 61: Sep/Oct 1996



part 5/5



Night Swarm: Time for a third mysterious antagonist who operates under cover of darkness. This horror season is producing a large and varied crop of them. This one is a vampire who's alternate form is a swarm of mosquitos, putting the bloodsucker part of his nature front and centre. He's slowly sucking the residents of a small swamp town dry while pretending to be the local doctor, with the help of several human quislings that are aware of his true nature and assisting for their own reasons. This is further complicated by the fact that one of his comatose victims is a little girl with psychic powers, so every time they go to sleep, the PCs'll get shared dreams that are horrifying, but also contain clues to the situation. Will your PC's realise the town's problems aren't just particularly aggressive mundane insects and stick around to unravel the mystery? The shortest adventure this issue, but this still contains a fair bit of spooky atmosphere and could fill up several sessions if treated in a suitably slow burn way. Probably not a good idea to use all these adventures with the same basic formula in quick succession, but at least they all make good reads taken individually.



Dungeon Index issues 49-60: Another couple of years, another 63 adventures added to the list, which is a mild increase on the average per issue as they're doing more side treks these days. A full 9 of them are by Chris Perkins, showing just how dominant he's becoming, appearing more issues than not, while Paul Culotta and Willie Wash add 5 to their collections. It does increasingly feel like the same familiar names showing up repeatedly around here.



One of those issues where the adventures are each good taken in isolation, but there's some definite diminishing returns when they're all put together, and even more when considering all the previous adventures from the last 10 years. All these plot threads left open at the end of many adventures, so few ever picked up on and ran with. I itch for when they'll finally start doing longer, multi-part adventures. Let's finish off the TSR years and see how long WotC takes to use up the buffer and try new things with the magazine.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 124: October 1996



part 1/5



36 pages. Dungeon had lots of intelligent monsters with entirely comprehensible motivations lurking in the dark this halloween. Polyhedron looks like it's going a little weirder, with a typically baffling Call of Cthulhu creature unsettling the investigators. Will their guns be of any use, or will we be facing both bodily and mental harm in the process of getting through this issue? Let's see if this is the one that reduces my SAN to 0 and sends me gibbering off into the night.



your 1nitiative: First letter thinks that they overdo the Forgotten Realms in here, maybe they should move at least one of the regular columns to another world. For that matter, system free adventures that are easily used with any game rather than nearly all D&D ones would be nice too. They're pleased to report that they were already planning on giving Greyhawk deities the same treatment as the FR ones, so you have that to look forward to next year.

Second letter is a nonconventiongoer who wants to start, but wants to know what you bring to not mess it up? It's not rocket science. Dice, character sheet, (if it's not one with pregens anyway) corebook for game you're playing, presto!

Third, a much longer one worrying about if there are too many RPG's around, most either obscure and hard to find, or long-running with tons of supplements that are hard to keep track of. Doesn't this hurt the accessibility of gaming as a whole? You may have a point. One of the reasons TSR fell apart was having too many settings active at once only selling to a small fraction of their base each. It got easier once the internet had wikis and whatnot listing everything in an easily searchable way, but modern games still tend to be much lighter on the big supplement treadmills.

Fourth is another person who thinks that the Living campaign format discourages roleplaying, as you go from one scenario to another with no continuity of companions or plot, with the main difference the items you accumulate along the way. It's hard to really get in depth with your personality & life goals under these conditions and the other players aren't much help.

Fifth points out that on top of the 5 Living campaigns the RPGA officially supports, some clubs run games using other systems & settings. If you network with them they could join things up and build them into another shared world. A little initiative goes a long way.

Sixth also wants more stuff sent in by readers and regionally specific material in particular. It'd be very nice if the european branch had more freedom to produce their own setting material, maybe even a full newszine of their own instead of having to wait for often months late american stuff that has obvious inaccuracies when it tries to cover other cultures.



NEWScene: This column seems like it's struggling to get the submissions to sustain it, with only two bits of external news. First is the club formerly known as O.R.E. deciding to call themselves Dead Last, which will be amusing if they do wind up in that position in tournaments, and even moreso if they manage to win, plus many of the other jokey options they considered along the way. The other one is more serious, concerning the Ohio branch's attempts to raise money for muscular dystrophy. The charity module had a quite successful turnout, and might appear in here or Dungeon in the future. (narrator: it did not, so so much for their hopes of making a little actual profit from writing it) Then to fill out the page, they list some of the winners of various events at Gen Con. Along with the expected Living events, they also have specific awards for WEG & FASA games, reminding us that those are the companies that seem to get along well with TSR and have articles in here relatively frequently. Will those friendships survive TSR's takeover and move to the west coast?

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 124: October 1996



part 2/5



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed skips back to your regular alphabetical schedule to cover Hawkgarth. Once a monster-infested wood, it's now a well-pacified pastoral place due to the hard work of it's eponymous founder, the dense thickets replaced by winding lanes and delicious fruity orchards. The most interesting danger zone is a floating mansion inhabited by an unusually chatty demilich. You don't even need to kill him & take his stuff to profit from a visit, just sit in his magical throne and keep him talking for at least an hour and you'll get a full accounting of all your magical item's powers & how to activate them, plus probably a whole load of other ancient lore on top. Of course, if you do enrage him he's as deadly & near indestructible as any demilich, so it's still not a sure bet by any means. If you want to overthrow the current system of government and take over, you'll need to go through a married pair of weredragons who are also highly skilled wizards on top of that, which also seems like a pretty stiff challenge. For lower level characters, there's still a fair few brigands lurking by the roads on a watch for people who have fortunes they could be parted from, so it's best not to look like an easy target. A place that looks pleasant then, but is neither safe nor dull for visitors, giving adventurers plenty of opportunity to test their mettle and maybe even come out better off financially. Just take care not to bruise the fruit in your fights, as that'll spoil things for all the neighbours as well.



A Few Of Our Favorite Things: Monte Cook gives us his advice this month, which is noticeably less irritating than Skip's. Remember the effects manipulating the real world environment can have in establishing in-game atmosphere. If they're getting too savvy to your tricks, don't be afraid to change your plans mid-session to keep them on their toes. Continuity is what really makes a campaign feel like a real world, so don't be afraid to reuse places, people and antagonists. Once again the single page format means this is pretty basic stuff. We'll see all of these ideas again in much greater detail when he takes over the Dungeoncraft column in the early 2000's. It's not that he doesn't have the depth, they just don't have the room for it yet.



Making The Terror Live: Last issue this column focussed on the player's side. Now quite logically it gives some more GM centric advice for running horror games. Prepare music, lighting, etc to properly support the mood, as Monte also said just a page ago. Remember that the tension building is just as important as the combat, so vary things between subtle spookiness and things going wrong in more obvious ways. Expect the players to do unorthodox things to try and beat the enemies and be ready to roll with it. At the same time, if they do something that's a bad idea, don't be afraid to make them suffer for it. In fact, even if they do play it smart, you shouldn't be afraid to kill or permanently harm at least some of them, particularly in a one-shot. Just make sure you do it in a way that doesn't spoil the OOC relationship, because that will stop the game being fun pretty quickly. Once again, no new lessons in here for me.



Modern Minions of Cthulhu: Finally, something a little more specific. Some CoC monsters based on things from the annals of the Fortean Times, your regular monthly catalog of unexplained weirdness. (at least, until the internet, and ubiquitous cameraphones in particular made their business model much less sustainable and the conspiracysphere refocussed more on secret government stuff than bigfoot and alien abductions. ) There's plenty of potential in there for gaming material, with entire other RPG's based around it, so I think we can add some of this without diluting the overall theme of the game.

Mannegishi are your typical faeish tricksters, only crossed with gray aliens. Since this is Call of Cthulhu, these tricks may well turn fatal, and even if they don't you'll still lose at least one SAN point just from seeing them. They'll have no problem summoning more dangerous creatures if they feel threatened so best to try and take their pranks in good humour no matter how scary they are.

Mothmen bypass the questions of how such a large creature can fly under wing power by having telekinetic abilities, which are powerful enough to do things like mysteriously collapse bridges. Good thing they're not usually inclined to use them that way, but still makes tangling with one a dicey proposition.

The Jersey Devil is just a lesser Shantak that somehow crossed over from the dreamlands. You can make it discorporate with electrical attacks, but it won't finish it off for good. If you have the right kind of magical skill you can summon one to use as a mount.

Tri-Pouncers are our cover stars, although their origin remains just as mysterious even after we have their stats. Are they the product of a mad scientist, or from a parallel universe where trilateral symmetry is the norm? Either way, those legs are quite effective disemboweling weapons if you retain enough sanity after seeing it to try and fight it, so don't think you're getting off easy just because it looks goofy.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 124: October 1996



part 3/5



Vecna Lives! In Ravenloft: Ah yes, time for this bit of metaplot again, in which Vecna & Kas get sucked into Ravenloft and given their own domains for a few years, only to break free in Die Vecna Die, in the process ascending to a full god & vestige respectively and transforming the universe from 2e to 3e rules. Bet the Dark Powers weren't expecting that when they started this. As usual for Ravenloft, even though the domains are brand new, they act like they've been around for centuries, with a full complement of oppressed peoples with stuff that makes no sense if they've always lived in this little two-domain island in the mists. Vecna lives in Cavitus, a volcanic wasteland where there's no night or day due to the omnipresent ashy glow, while Kas rules Tovag, a mildly more pleasant hilly land then made worse again by his endless futile wars on Vecna throwing people into the meatgrinder and everyone ageing at double normal rate so he can replace them faster. (not that that makes sense either if the domain has only just been created) Despite the new corebook trying to make Ravenloft a place where people live and you can run a whole campaign with the natives, there are still some domains that make no sense save as a highly specific prison custom designed to reflect but also torment their darklords. Even if you can spot the plot holes as an outsider, that won't make the danger you face in these places any less real. It's all a bit of a timey-wimey headache, but I think you can probably get a good adventure out of these places, particularly if your PC's are from Oerth and have reason to know the legends about what Vecna & Kas got up to centuries ago, maybe even their recent defeat back in 1990. Just not the actual published adventures as written, which are railroady even by mid-90's TSR standards.



Victorian Knights: To keep up the october horrorfest, it's time for a few more Masque of the Red Death kits. Will they get any powers that make the scares seem trivial, or will they remain as weak as the ones in the boxed set?

Cowboys get access to three proficiency groups, but have a reaction penalty when first meeting anyone not in the trade due to their rough & ready mannerisms. If you can get past that, they can definitely be loyal and useful companions when vampire-hunting.

Servants are trained to be politely unflappable in the face of obvious danger, getting a save against fear checks, but this repression makes them vulnerable to the more subtle long-term psychological damage caused by horror checks. Useful in a one-shot, but balances out over the course of a campaign.

Gnostics are technically wizards, but subscribe to a certain ancient religion anyway. This limits the sources they can learn spells from, but lets them cast the ones they do know at a level higher than normal. The kind of thing that's as much of a hindrance in actual play as the DM makes it.

Dilettantes are the cleric kit, and gain access to twice as many spheres at usual, at the cost of requiring slightly more XP to gain each level. That's still a pretty substantial benefit overall, presuming you don't pick lots of spells that require powers checks and wind up screwing yourself over. They're easily the best of these, even if they're still at a disadvantage compared to regular clerics from other campaigns until they hit double digit levels.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Fourth is another person who thinks that the Living campaign format discourages roleplaying, as you go from one scenario to another with no continuity of companions or plot, with the main difference the items you accumulate along the way. It's hard to really get in depth with your personality & life goals under these conditions and the other players aren't much help.

I ran tables for various Organized Play campaigns for years, and organized them for the 5E era up until the lockdown. They're great in certain circumstances. For instance, I ran the first season AL scenarios for a regular group of players for several months prior to GenCon so they could play at the Epic; that worked great -- you have continuity of characters, they could build relationships with NPCs, it was great.

Another to benefit from the OP format is the guy who can only play every six months or so because he's got a busy job, or family stuff, or whatever, eating up most of his free time. The Living Campaign format means he's not forced to play a new character every time he plays the game -- he can do some character development and have a little bit of continuity. For him, it's a nice change from the one-shot.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 124: October 1996



part 4/5



The Halls of the Morning Light: Last issue, we saw a cleric of Lathander take the job of Chief Prelate of Raven's Bluff. Following that up with his stats and details on the temple seems a pretty logical development. Relarn Dayspring (another good example of nominative determinism) adventured his way up to 13th level, (which tells us he wasn't an elected PC character, since no-ones managed that yet) lost a hand to the Zhentarim, decided that even if they have regeneration spells available back at the temple it might still be time to slow down a bit and took the desk job. This does still mean he gives pretty good advice to troubled adventurers, which might save them from coming back in dire need of healing. As Lathander is the Morninglord, a big part of his tenets is proactively starting new projects and getting things done before they become a crisis, which usually winds up cheaper and easier in the long run, but most adventurers are pretty bad at, so they'll really appreciate the ones that do think to seek out problems and ask for help in dealing with them rather than sitting in a bar waiting for plot hooks. They have a very nice 3D map of the temple and a decent amount of detail on the people inhabiting it, but not quite so much on the larger-scale tenets of the faith and what they do day-to-day as the previous entries in this series. Still a decent bit of material that could well be handy in actual play, but not the best they've done.



A World of Your Own: Roger's talk of island campaigns moves to the more esoteric ones of demiplanes floating in the ethereal sea. There are quite a few of them, from the very well known demiplane of dread, to obscure ones only mentioned in a single adventure in Dungeon. Some are easy to get in and out of, while others work on idiosyncratic rules or are just really hard to find. You have near total freedom to alter the laws of physics, make them as big or small as you want without worrying about what effect this has on the neighbours. If anything, the tricky part is narrowing down what you want to do with the place. Another one that might be handy for less experienced gamers, giving them plenty of things to check out, but tells me nothing new, since obsessive study of the planes is one of my specialties.



Convention Follies: The conventions never stop coming, but they're particularly dense during the summer holidays for obvious reasons. For equally obvious reasons, the RPGA staff attend a lot of them, mixing business & pleasure as much as they can. There's actually less RPG talk in here than I was expecting, but somewhat more CCG and computer game stuff, showing how both of those are muscling in on the same demographic & disposable income, contributing to TSR's financial struggles even as the staff are seduced and play them too. The real focus is getting to meet all those big game designers and fanatical RPGA players in person, talk about the cool stuff they've done and maybe even get to play a tournament round with them. If anything, they're a little too keen on the name-dropping and showing they're right in the middle of all the action. When you're used to being the nerdy one in school, it's easy to overcompensate when you do get a social network that does share the same interests.



Freakonomicon: Following directly on from the last article is your typical highly stereotyped and more than a little sexist list of common varieties of person to show up at conventions, their common behaviours, true nature & mating habits. Your basic unwashed nerd, irritating kids, goths, (Vampire is their biggest rival now, after all) klingon cosplayers, chain mail bikini babes, annoyingly loud exhibitors, and a weirdly specific & pointed jab at William Shatner in particular for being a horribly entitled celebrity guest coasting on accomplishments from decades past. They obviously had a run-in with him at some point over the summer that really stuck with them. Not saying some of the people involved don't deserve it, but this is all a bit mean-spirited as a joke.