TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[RealAlHazred]

Polyhedron Issue 124: October 1996
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.

There were a string of articles (usually published in the April issue) in Dragon and Dungeon poking fun at nerd stereotypes. It's weird reading them now, because after decades I can clearly see where some of them cross the line from gentle ribbing and laughing with gamers, to laughing at gamers. At the time, I just thought some of them weren't funny.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 124: October 1996



part 5/5



The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: They spent well over a year on the war plotline, and it finally reached it's climax at Gen Con. 60,000 enemies attacked and were repelled by the brave actions of the people who attended. Truly, one of the largest scale battles ever to actually be physically represented with minis. Huzzah! The celebrations afterwards were also pretty epic, with lots of alcohol being consumed both IC & OOC. While they're still telling us to keep our guard up IC, I get the impression that they're getting tired of this OOC, and aren't going to drag it out to the length of many real world wars. Unless you're in a setting like Warhammer, where the eternal war is the whole point, that would wind up driving players away long-term, so you need to switch up your metaplot changes to keep them interesting.

Despite the overall happy news, there were still several notable casualties though. An attempted assassination in the Knight's Council made organising a proper response to the hordes at the gates even harder. Meanwhile, magic item traders Zeno & Navarre fell out over a price gouging argument and Zeno bludgeoned Navarre to death, then got arrested himself. They just have no luck with magic marts around here. The majority of players may want them, but the admin people obviously don't, whether for reasons of worldbuilding verisimilitude or just how much time & hassle they are to run at conventions, so they keep on finding new ways to destroy them. Will anyone step up to fill the gap, and if so, what fate will they meet in turn, because I don't see the underlying tension behind this problem going away.



Notes From HQ: They've struggled to implement all the changes they wanted to this year, but it's nowhere near enough. There's a huge list of often conflicting demands from the userbase about how things could be improved. More humour, more people taking the whole thing seriously. More water adventures, fewer water adventures. More tough enemies like fiends, more easy enemies like giant rodents, more weird enemies like rust monsters. More detail to Raven's Bluff, blow it up and start from scratch, keep it going but let players roam farther from it in adventures. No way they can please everyone whatever they do in those areas. Then there are the suggestions which are popular with the players, but they can't or won't do, like bringing back Chemcheaux, implementing downtime rules or bringing management of the knightly orders back in-house. The two they are fairly certain they can do, but just want to double-check before finalising are to completely ban trading IC magic items for real cash, as it's just a bad look all round, and only let people write for the Living City if they've already done at least one generic tournament module with pregens, as they're getting a decent number of LC submissions now and think they can raise quality control while still getting enough new adventures to keep the hardcore players from repeating themselves. Bold move with overall membership declining but I guess the ones that are staying skew towards the experienced & hardcore. I suspect these plans may be derailed or implemented late as events overtake them.



Gen Con is just finished, but they put the preregistration forms for next year in straight away? What kind of game do you want to judge? One of the many AD&D ones, another popular system like Shadowrun, Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu, Their vain attempts to make Dragonlance 5th age happen, or even sign up to run their still unnamed upcoming sci-fi game despite no-one knowing the details of the system or setting yet? Since I already know Alternity doesn't come out until 98, this is another thing that's going to be made inaccurate by future events.



A whole bunch of mediocre and basic generic articles here, while the more specific ones wind up looking very inaccurate in hindsight. Since October issues are usually of above average quality, that make this one stick out particularly harshly in showing how things are slipping around here. Let's struggle onward to the end of the year and the hopefully better times that'll come after they hit rock bottom.

 

[RealAlHazred]

The thing I always hated about the big Organized Play events is how it really didn't matter what the tables did. Every table that played could fail one particular challenge, but the campaign admins would still have something happen anyway, if it was meant to tie in to a novel, or an admin's favorite NPC, or otherwise preserved the status quo. The antithesis of, "Play to Fine Out What Happens."

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 125: November 1996



part 1/5



32 pages. Making a magazine is very much like operating a sausage machine, as you put a little bit of everything through the mincer, including things no-one would eat on their own and serve it up in little bite size packages. Somehow I don't think mixing in a full set of platemail is going to pass health & safety regulations though, no matter how many horses and princesses you cut it with. A particularly amusing bit of metacommentary on their own existence on the cover this issue. Self-aware doesn't always mean good of course, so let's find out how tasty the morsels inside are.



your 1nitiative: First letter defends the Living City, and those people who do manage to develop their character's personality and engage in fun roleplaying under it's constraints. They could still change the rules to encourage more roleplaying & less powergaming, but it's definitely not impossible as things stand.

Second isn't that keen on all the convention stuff, and thought the new online conventions would be a cool way to get the gaming in without all the annoying aspects of travelling for hours to get there & back. They were then rather irked to find out that the official TSR website only works if you're on AOL. They need to get a properly world wide website working pronto!



NEWScene: This column breathes it's last this month, obviously failing to get the external submissions to make it sustainable. Most of it is devoted to the Decathlon results so far, which when compared to last year shows the same slight decline in number of participants as the number of regional co-ordinators and various other metrics. PGCO has the lead, but it's not by a particularly large margin, so there's still plenty of room to come up from behind by blitzing those service categories. Did anyone really have much enthusiasm for this decathlon stuff apart from the staff themselves?

The only actual submission is from ohio, and turns out to be your basic "Let us tell you about our characters" one. They had an interesting career where sometimes the dice let them massacre strong opponents, and other times weak ones kicked their asses. They managed to make it to name level before retiring, at which point their low level replacements got slaughtered the week afterwards. When you're used to playing high level, you can forget the degree of sharpness needed to survive through 1st.



A Few of Our Favorite Things: This column also runs out of steam here, using up the last of the notes from Gen Con and not getting any reader contributions to keep it going. This time it's editor Keith Strohm, who's definitely less famous than the other two, who's giving us his advice. Establish expectations for the game explicitly rather than just going in blind. This goes double for house rules, don't just spring them on players mid-game and upend their knowledge of how the game works. Once you've established the rules, enforce them consistently. If people persistently refuse to stick to the rules after they've been clearly informed of them, remove them from the game rather than punishing them IC and make sure they know exactly what they did wrong. Sounds like he falls on the more simulationist end of the spectrum, which i have no objection to at all, even if he once again doesn't really get enough room to go into any depth on these opinions.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 125: November 1996



part 2/5



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed's tour through the Border Kingdoms becomes increasingly glacial in pace, as we start a multi-parter on High Emmerock. High enough to naturally be meadows rather than forests, it's still a fertile place that makes excellent grazing ground, which means it's filled with cattle, sheep, horses, deer and other ungulates. Once owned by giants, it took many years of hard war for humanity to become dominant there, and even once they did, it's not as if they're going to stop fighting amongst themselves for control and status. Recent history includes patricide, fratricide, exiles and mysterious disappearances. It only stabilised when a group of 7 adventurers decided none of them needed to be king and assumed collective control as Lords, which removed the obvious point of weakness at the top as each of them supported the others in governing the place. To take over you'd have to be a similarly cohesive high level party with a decent army underneath you and a plan. So there's plenty of interesting storytelling going on here, but it's relatively low on present day plot hooks for PC's to engage with. It may well turn out to be more a place to stay between adventures than have them. I guess we'll have to wait until next time to find out for sure.



Being PC: So their Living events have a roleplaying problem. Too many people barely get in character at all, or treat the roleplaying scenes as completely silo'd from the combat, puzzle-solving and exploration parts of the adventure. That's not the way to do it! You can express your character's personality at any point in the game, and it can come through in both the actions you choose and the way you describe them. Even if you're playing a pregen with only a short writeup, there's often additional clues in the spell and equipment choices on how you should be roleplaying them so read between the lines and get into character. As with the GM'ing advice, this is really basic stuff, so it's irritating that they even have to say it, but I guess they do. Constantly putting people together in groups with other people they've never met before means it's more likely you'll have to deal with troublemakers, or just people with wildly different playstyles to your own. You'll get a better idea of just what level the average gamer is at, which can be pretty disappointing. Even in a relatively exclusive club like the RPGA, these struggles are never-ending.



Tournament Adventures - How To Write 'Em: Another year has gone by, time once again to do an issue full of basic advice on how to write for the newszine in an attempt to boost engagement. If writing a non-Living tournament adventure, coming up with good pregens that are the right power level for the adventure and have plot hooks embedded into their descriptions that encourage interesting roleplaying with other PC's & reactions to events is half the job. Remember that they have to finish everything within 3+1/2 hours, so getting through about half a dozen encounters is the right number, (although you can write more if it's a nonlinear one where they probably won't be seeing everything) approximately half of which should be combat ones. Careful with the puzzles, as a bad one that doesn't engage with the rules of the game can break immersion. Careful balancing of treasure is irrelevant in one-shots, but very important in Living adventures. Don't write too many bits of railroading boxed text that the PC's can't react too until it's over, or that presumes their actions entirely and breaks the adventure if they interrupt it. But all these bits of good advice are secondary to just sitting down and writing until it's finished. Don't get hung up on producing perfection first time, get a first draft out, then playtest it & revise it until it works as intended. All fairly familiar stuff, but at least they're aware of the current big criticisms of their output and encouraging people to try and put more nonlinearity & roleplaying into new adventures. Will it have any effect though? Pushing against years of inertia is a struggle.



Creating the Nightmare: Straight after the generic advice on adventure writing, we have the same thing only for horror games. Have a clear idea of what you're doing, get it down, then get other people to test it and catch any obvious things you might have missed. Make sure the pregens fit the scenario, and have details that encourage them to interact with each other in interesting ways. Don't overdo the boxed text without giving PC's a chance to react to the bad guy's monologues. All pretty similar, only here there's even less emphasis on combat, with it being quite plausible that you'll only have one full length stand-up fight near the end and the rest all investigation, roleplaying & jump-scares. This does mean that you may have to break the rules of the game behind the scenes to keep smart players from short circuiting the whole thing, but even here, that should be done sparingly and never in the final encounter. (which they should win unless they're really dumb or the dice turn completely against them. ) I guess that even in this genre, they've really reduced the number of meatgrinders that are expected to wipe out whole groups. All pretty familiar really. Looks like this is going to be another repetitive issue.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 125: November 1996



part 3/5



Despite the anaemic response to the Decathlon, they're not giving up on the concept. In fact, next year they're bumping up the prizes, doubling the value of 2nd & 3rd place, while first gets a 50% boost to $300 worth of gaming products. The usual mix of writing events, tournament play and service events, with this year's categories including best villain lair, sea monster, tech item and sidekick. Will they get enough entries to make it a decent competition this time, or will things dry up completely when the newszine stops being delivered to people's doors each month? Will it survive WotC's more ruthless cutting of the unprofitable parts of their acquisition or will '98 see a new resurgence? Another little thing to look out for after the hiatus.



The Obelisks of Tuthmosis: Still, at least a few good things are coming from the decathlons, as here's the winner of the competition for a Living Death adventure site. Another excellent example why stealing ancient artifacts is a risky business. If the monsters and traps don't get you, the curses on the items themselves might. These pillars have been moved around the world, with one currently in each of London, New York, Rome & Constantinople. This hasn't gone well for anyone, although some curses are more brutal than others. All of them screw up most magic near them and are protected by undead guardians that only appear during the new moon. (good thing most museums are closed at night) If you know the right incantations you might be able to get something useful out of them, but for the average person nearby they'll be the cause of mysterious disappearances and tragic accidents. Just the kind of thing a bunch of heroically inclined investigators might want to solve. A decent enough plot hook overall, reminding us that magic is much less understood & reliable here than most D&D worlds. You'll have to really think when your spells splutter or backfire.



Living Jungle Spells: Some competitions are still disappearing without a trace, but submissions of new spells, magic items & monsters remain consistent deliveries. Here's some more mostly nature flavoured ones for you to consider putting in your campaign.

Grassdart turns nearby stalks of grass into handy weapons for the duration of a combat. The kind of spell that's very situationally dependent, but hey, grass is a lot easier to find than corpses, so why is this so much more obscure than Animate Dead?

Water Window is your basic talk to nature spell, like speak with animals or plants, showing you what happened in the vicinity recently. Might well solve a mystery, but probably not completely rewrite history.

Lizard Limbs is a verbal component only spell that lets you shed and regrow your extremities to escape a sticky situation. Good thinking on the part of the designer because having to faff around with somatic & material ones in this situation would severely undercut it's usefulness.

Quick Vine lets you get your Tarzan on even if there's no suitable vegetation to hand. Like spiderman, he really doesn't work as well outside a highly specific environment.

Ancestral Spirit is not so well designed because it mixes up situations where plus and minus are good and bad, making the spell work stupidly. Roll on 3e, where you know higher is always better.

Hippo Walk helps you hold your breath and wade through mud, mud, glorious mud at full speed, not getting stuck. The duration isn't that long though, so don't be an ignoramus and hang out on the bottom for extended periods of time.

Vampiric Plants is a particularly nasty AoE spell that can be set as a trap and continues to drain HP for multiple rounds after being triggered. It makes the plants in the area grow massively while animals suffer, so it has interesting potential utility effects as well depending on what specific plants it's cast on. If it got to Athas I can see it being particularly valued by defilers who want to spread the ecological harm around and quickly replace their stocks of plant life for drawing upon.

Quicksand is pretty self-explanatory and as handy as ever at just completely short-circuiting the fight against unprepared opponents. Of course, as a level 5 spell, it's not as if anyone is even close to being able to cast it in the actual Living Jungle tournaments, presuming they'll even put this stuff on the approved list.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 125: November 1996



part 4/5



Formats and Other Pesky Details of Tournament Submission: After two articles on the creative aspects of writing adventures, they once again have to remind you of the technical ones. These have gradually become stricter than ever. You need to send in both physical and electronic copies, and the digital ones must be compatible with microsoft word. I thought the advantage of the internet was cutting down on paper use and mailing costs, not increasing them. It also means they can be even stricter about what fonts and sizes you're meant to use. You also still need your SASE and the ethics guidelines seem ever more anachronistic as well. It shows once again that they weren't adapting with the times anything like as well as their rivals and were ripe for being knocked over.



Forces to Reckon With: Eric Boyd has finished talking about deities, but he still has plenty of passion for taking ideas casually tossed off by Ed and fleshing them out further. Tulrun's Tracer first appeared in Dragon 69, in one of his many Pages from the Mages. Now we get a full couple of pages on the man behind the spell. Not your typical wimpy mage living at the top of a tower, he's a savage weretiger who's pretty buff even in his human form and lives in the far north with just a tent (albeit a pretty swanky tent) to protect him from the elements. Over 700 years old now and still going strong, he's had an eventful life that includes decades at a time spent in the outer planes, finding the true love of his life, losing her to demons, going mad with grief and becoming little more than a beast for several more decades, being healed, developing a centuries long enmity with Arauthator, the white dragon detailed in issue 230's Wyrms of the North, before eventually coming to an uneasy peace and probably lots of other things they don't have room to fit in here. The kind of article that's written specifically to reward people like me who've been reading realmslore for years, and like to see things introduced years apart in obscure places connect up and have more details added. He definitely seems like an interesting character who could interact with your PC's in a friendly or antagonistic way, depending on how they encounter him, and have a distinct perspective on how to unravel mysteries or solve big problems threatening the Realms. I could easily see a few years of this kind of thing being a pleasing read.



A World of Your Own: Roger is also delving into Forgotten Realms esoterica this month, as his thoughts on islands take us to the Tears of Selune. A cluster of asteroids following behind Toril's moon, many of them still have atmospheres and life because spelljammer gravity doesn't work remotely like real life. Since surface area increases as the square of the radius even one several miles across can support hundreds of miles of terrain to explore and a population of tens of thousands if the land is fertile. If it's also dug through with dungeons this can be multiplied further, giving even a tiny island the potential for years of exploration. If you have a suitable spelljammer you can travel anywhere in the Tears in a matter of minutes, but if you don't, you're stuck where you are until someone comes along. (and it's very unlikely you'll be able to dig up the raw materials to build your own, giving DM fiat control as to whether you can get on or off at any particular time) A fairly interesting variant on a theme, even if the references are all to TSR books that didn't sell very well and it feels like he's trying to promote them to shift remaining stock. Even within the Realms, some areas are massively more popular and detailed than others, such as the cities which have computer games named after them. If you head off to Maztica or up to Realmspace you have a lot more freedom than if you hang around in Neverwinter. Might as well take advantage of that as a DM.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 125: November 1996



part 5/5



The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: The newspaper is yet another thing that comes to an end this issue, with the still raging war plotline cut off abruptly over the hiatus. There still seem to be plenty of goblinoids outside the walls making a nuisance of themselves and we finally know who's behind the attacks - warlord Myrkyssa Jelan, but there's still a lot of questions about why this started, precisely what happened and how they ran out of steam or were finally beaten for good. Maybe the novels have a little more information, as apparently she turns up again in the future, even after the hundred year timeskip between 3 & 4e when she ought to have died of old age. (but like nearly all the important NPC's, didn't, because that particular bit of metaplot was a mess even by FR standards because so many writers couldn't let go of their old favourites.) In the meantime we have another mysterious murder of a city official and talk of potential romances between PC's which will probably also never get followed up on because it's easy to lose momentum when you only meet up a few times a year and your avenues of communication suddenly go down. Another reminder that the news is a shallow summing up of much more complex and messy events in the real world, much of which is never recorded so no-one ever knows all the details. In a game world without reliable mass recording media (although a few wizards have magic items suspiciously similar to modern technology) that would be even more the case.



Notes From HQ: Since Jeff took over, it's been obvious that he's not entirely happy with the amount of focus polyhedron has on conventions. The letters are filled with people who want to keep it, because Living play is the big thing that distinguishes them from Dragon, but looking at the math a little closer, they're actually only a fraction of the membership. More than half never go to conventions at all, whether because they have no interest, or because they live in more far-flung parts of the world where there are few to attend in the first place. Not saying he's going to cut coverage entirely, but he definitely wants to reduce it and focus slightly more on material for home or online games. As with the decathlon stuff, this is another instance of a loud fanatical minority vs a quiet majority, and a question of how you juggle catering to the two as a publisher. Do you go the easy route, or keep on trying to make your pet projects happen even if most of the potential audience is indifferent? If a financial crisis hits, you may find the question is taken out of your hands. So this is a snapshot of where his head is at just before the WotC takeover. We shall find out soon enough if he gets a chance to implement that, or it'll be time for an abrupt change in leadership and direction in an attempt to make things more profitable.



Another frustrating issue full of repeated basics in quick succession, showing them struggling to get their audience to do what they want and play the game in the right way. They have to reach a balance between trying to get everyone following basic rules to not ruin Living play and not over-proscribing exactly what playstyle everyone should be using and they're not doing a great job of it at the moment. I find myself very impatient to get through TSR's last gasps a second time and see what the WotC years look like from this perspective.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 62: Nov/Dec 1996



part 1/5



80 pages. That's just a photograph of a mini! An attempt to show how terrifyingly huge dragons are backfires, as everything looks completely plastic and the dragon's hand way smaller than a human's if the mini is standard 25mm scale. Not a particularly successful format experiment. Time to see if another issue's contents will be formulaic or experimental.



Letters: First letter loved Challenge of Champions, but thinks Umbra was a waste of half the magazine. The debate about generic vs specific settings looks like it will consume most of the letters pages for some time to come.

Second liked Bloodsilver in particular, but is in favor of more setting-heavy adventures in general. Even if you can't use them as is, you can still often extract parts from them.

Third hated Jigsaw for being too backstory heavy and completely unusable in a regular AD&D campaign without heavy changes. Keep your fantasy strictly pre 1453! Oddly specific year. What happened then that's so important technologically?

Fourth thinks Chris Perkins has done plenty of nitpicking others, so he's fair game in response, pointing out three basic lore mistakes he made in Nemesis. Don't mix up the Bleak Cabal & Xaositects! You can't make your own gates in or out of Sigil! Tieflings aren't immune to the river styx! Tighten up that editing!



Editorial: Have we managed to misplace yet another editor this year? Dear oh dear. So long Anthony Bryant, we barely knew ye. Instead we have Michelle Vuckovich introducing herself and telling us how she got into gaming. A typical tale of sibling cruelty, she looked up to her older brother, who bullied her and only let her play with him & his friends grudgingly if at all, because who wants an annoying kid sister around when you're trying to hack & slash goblins? But she persisted, got into not only RPG's but wargaming & paintballing as well and managed to win his respect in a particularly brutal paintball battle by stealthily splatting many of the opposing team. Now she's the one working in the roleplaying industry and where is he? (probably getting paid more in whatever other field ) All in all, an excellent demonstration of why lots of girls wind up not getting into roleplaying even if they were initially interested. Having to get through that much bullying to get to the good parts is hard work and it's easy to see why they'd get discouraged. That's the kind of thing the RPGA should be working on solving if it ever wants to grow beyond a tiny niche of an already niche hobby.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 62: Nov/Dec 1996



part 2/5



Dragon's Delve: Chris Perkins continues to appear more issues than not with our cover story. A young crystal dragon has been captured by the things lurking within an abandoned dwarven fortress. The parents are too big to go in all guns blazing, so they ask the neighbouring dwarves for help, who pass the buck to you because they don't want to risk a frontal assault either. Can you get in and out, rescue the dragon and any enslaved dwarves without it turning into an all-out bloodbath? Will you realise in time that most of the "monsters" inside are also mind-controlled & polymorphed dwarves and adjust your tactics accordingly, or treat this like a traditional dungeoncrawl where you kill everyone and take everything your encumbrance limit will allow? So there's both a dungeon & a dragon (not actually that common these days, last issue didn't have any of either!) in this adventure, but the way you're expected to deal with them is unusual in a very 2eish style, emphasising roleplaying, sneakiness and subduing enemies over killing. The big bad on the other end is similarly sneaky, making extensive use of it's own illusion & mind-affecting powers to appear more dangerous and further muddy the waters. A pretty interesting adventure in it's own right, but it does highlight how so many writers almost seem to be ashamed of playing Dungeons & Dragons, trying to push things as far away from that as the ruleset will permit. It can't be good for a product when the people behind it don't play it, don't really want to be working on it, and only continue to do so to support their more experimental ideas that don't sell. That's one benefit of having second-generation ascended fans working on things, they're more likely to love it unironically and try to make the thing more like it's platonic self, rather than just the amalgamation of it's influences.



Side Treks - Blood on the Plow: It can be a hard life running a small family farm. One accident at the wrong time of year and you don't have enough hands to get the harvest in, risking losing tons of money or even not having enough food to get through the next winter. Two is really stretching it, particularly if you don't have any kids to take up the slack. Three or more and you might start to get suspicious that you're cursed or someone has a vendetta against you. While passing over some farmland in late summer, the PC's do indeed get asked for help by a family who've been laid up, and urgently need the wheat brought in before it spoils. After several days of backbreaking labor when you're probably fatigued and away from your armor & weapons, you find out the cause was an evil scarecrow, as it gets fed up of the subtle troublemaking and just attacks. The kind of scenario that's built on screwing over the players and saying if they don't specifically say they have their equipment ready and rememorise their spells every day, they haven't done it. I hate that kind of nitpicky crap. As a horror one it's not particularly great either, with much less spooky buildup than it could have fit in the wordcount. Irritating and distinctly subpar, this is one I'm left with no desire to use, which is particularly unusual for a side trek.