TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 132: October 1998



part 3/5



City Stories: After several years in which the new Raven's Bluff locations focussed almost entirely on temples, they finally go back to covering shops and other establishments players might want to visit. Mother Phelia's Cupboard is an apothecary that provides non-magical healing for people who can't afford or don't trust the temples, plus minor mundane ailments that spells don't cover like headaches, hiccups & hangovers. (and infertility, weirdly enough, considering how many real world "magic spells" are about sex in some way) She seems like a wholesome middle-aged lady, but has a dark side. All this advanced medical knowledge was actually gained by experiments in dissection, starting by poisoning her unfaithful husband and moving onto grave robbery and killing clients she considers immoral. She's still doing more good than evil for the community at the moment, keeping her alignment neutral, but a little more desensitisation, a little more deciding that the ends justify the means, she could escalate to full Harold Shipman levels of murderousness. The kind of place where you could use the obvious services for quite a while before stumbling on the hidden adventure hook. How will your players react, and will they consider her hard-won knowledge worth preserving in a world where clerical magic outclasses mundane medicine so badly? Definitely some interesting debate to be had there, particularly if the characters lived through the Time of Troubles and are aware how easily the magic system could shift on them or simply stop working in some places. A refreshing break from their current formula that I could definitely see myself using in a game.



Crime Doesn't Pay: Along with the removal of the code of conduct making it easier to talk about sex in here, it also means they're freer to talk about the role of law enforcement in your campaign without having to make them the good guys that PC's have to go along with or automatically lose the game. Not that you can't still work with them, as there are plenty of adventure opportunities in games like that, but at least they can talk more openly about why the law wouldn't be able to handle problems themselves. They rarely gain the high levels PC's manage, so after a few levels, the PC's will easily outclass the average patrol on the street. This means they'll have to call in special forces or hire another group of adventurers to deal with troublemakers, giving you a chance to get away. In practice, that means the more powerful PC's get, the more laws become suggestions rather than binding rules. (so just like the real world then) All fairly basic advice, but at least it’s not rehashed, simply because they couldn’t talk honestly about this specific topic before. They won’t be going full ACAB any time soon, but it’s still a change for the better.



All I Really Need to Know I Learned from the AD&D game: A single page, humorous bit of talking about tropes showing once again that WotC are more willing to embrace what the D&D rules are and do well rather than trying to treat it as a generic game to tack all kinds of settings onto. You delve dungeons while carrying improbable amounts of gear, kill things and make your way out carrying even more improbable loads. Danger lurks around every corner and if you can get someone else to bear the brunt of it or come up with rules exploits that make you near invulnerable, all the better. It may still be a couple of years before 3e comes out, but they're already establishing the back to the dungeon mindset that'll be one of the big taglines when they advertise it. Many people never stopped playing like that, and will be very happy to see it return to favor after years of trying to keep up with the White Wolf's.



Audition: Tom Prusa continues to be one of their most prolific adventure writers with this quirky little piece. The PC's are assigned to infiltrate the local thieves guild and take them down from within. (which kinda assumes that they're mostly law-abiding in the first place and the party thief hasn't been a fully paid-up member for ages, given the expected character level) Since they don't trust you, they set some pretty tough challenges for joining. You need to complete a run full of tricks & traps as a group, then each player needs to go into town and do a sneaky solo mission that must be done nonlethally, as like any good thieves guild they want to keep a low profile and not destroy the places they steal from. Then, having won their trust and met the guild leader, they need to figure out a good plan to betray them before they go through the final joining ceremony, at which point they'll be geased and unable to turn against their new companions. (presuming a pretty high magic campaign, but I guess the forgotten realms definitely qualifies as that) While you could in theory do this all tournament style in a single session, it looks like it'd be a bit of a squeeze, particularly trying to handle all 6 player's solo missions in that time without either rushing through them shallowly or boring the other players when it's not their turn. So this definitely earns quite a few points for ambition, trying something different and mixing up various types of encounters, but also loses some for having an extended splitting the party section and a lot of assumptions that mean it wouldn't work with many campaign worlds/groups. Still, at least it's flawed in interesting ways, which keeps it on the usable end of the quality spectrum overall.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 132: October 1998



part 4/5



What do you know?: Nonweapon proficiencies have been standard in all the Living campaigns right from the start, and pretty popular in home campaigns as well. So advising us that you ought to pick your proficiencies based on your character's backstory rather than just pure powergaming is the kind of ultra basic advice we've seen plenty of times before and will probably do so again. Really, it's just an excuse to reprint the list of proficiencies allowed for Living City characters from the august edition of the Trumpeter. Still plenty of people not reading that who need to know about their latest rules revisions and clarifications.



The Game of Masks: More Ed Greenwood material here, this time an excerpt from the new Raven's Bluff sourcebook. Like his column last issue, it's one of those demonstrations of how they keep adventurers busy when there's no real threats to fight. The Game of Masks is basically IC LARPing for Forgotten Realms characters. You pay the subscription fee and get to participate in the staged adventures. The prize each month is more than enough to recoup a decade's worth of fees. Given the density of weird stuff around Raven's Bluff, people often wind up stumbling onto real adventures in the course of their escapades, while others use them as cover for illegal activities or simply an excuse to hook up. This serves as another reminder that they're no longer bound by the code of conduct, as he can go into considerable amounts of salacious detail about some of the more saucy escapades. So this is much more like the Realms as he plays it at home than has ever been allowed in the tournament adventures. (what you get up to in odd corners of the interactives, on the other hand, is your own business) Once again it shows how much effort it takes to maintain a world with this high a proportion of adventurers and have it make sense both IC and OOC. Without powerful people creating graded challenges as testing grounds, a lot more of them would wind up dying in the first few levels (there's a good reason Oerth has a population density several orders of magnitude lower than Toril) or giving up because there aren't enough problems to go around. Just a shame so few campaigns will ever get to the point where you're the ones orchestrating these things rather than just participating.



Brethren of the Coast: Last issue they talked about Run out the Guns, the new Rolemaster setting in the age of piracy. Now it’s time for the various rules changes they’re imposing on tournament play. Unlike their previous Living settings, this is all delivered in a no-nonsense 4 page package rather than spending a big chunk of the issue engaging in system-free foreplay to create the right vibe. Some backgrounds are only going to be allowed at some future point in the metaplot, while other are allowed now, but will become unavailable to new characters when they no longer make sense. You have 100 pieces of eight to buy equipment with, plus you can choose 1 signature flavour item not on the price lists. No silly names, keep track of your ship, cargos, mess members, etc. Like any Living setting, disruptive characters aren’t allowed, so take the pirate’s code seriously or you’ll be banninated. Wham bam thank you maam. It looks increasingly unlikely that they’ll be devoting much attention to this setting in the newszine. Whether it’ll still attract a small but loyal group of players despite that remains to be seen. (after all, they haven’t actually cancelled any settings yet despite juggling 6 now and 2 more on the way.) Still plenty of little details I didn’t suspect to find out on this journey through history.



RPGA Tournament Request Policies: After a bunch of new rules, it's time to repeat ones they established in previous issues. You can only request 4 tournaments per day of a convention, and only 2 from any particular Living setting. You need to do so at least a month in advance, or 6 if you're submitting new adventures that haven't been sanctioned yet that you intend to run then. We're only going to approve 20 adventures per month so don't be surprised if they get rejected for quality reasons or pushed back until there's a lull in submissions. Fill in your scoring sheets properly and on time afterwards and you'll be suitably credited. If you do a charity benefit we need a copy of the cheque to check that it's a real cheque going to a real charity. Tiresome but necessary. They still can't put the rules exclusively on the internet and update them piecemeal as needed, as many members don't have it yet, although given how hard they're pushing it with a regular column it won't be because they don't know it exists. Give it a few more years, then the number of holdouts will be small enough that you can ignore them.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 132: October 1998



part 5/5



The Powers That Be: Gods of thieves are always a fun one to worship. You get to combine two normally opposing roles and leave out all the preachiness, as a good thief needs to keep their nature a secret, at least when on the job. This is particularly true of Kurell, who is primarily the god of jealousy, and all his thievery springs from that place of wanting something someone else has even if he has no use for it and won't gain any real emotional satisfaction if he does succeed in taking it. His few worshippers are also obnoxiously jealous and full of rivalries even amongst themselves, which limits their expansion and keeps him a lesser power. If you want to play a whiny entitled edgelord who steals from and stirs up strife amongst the rest of the party his specialty priests have a perfect skillset for that. So whether playing one is fun for your group will depend heavily on if you're the kind of group that considers Lester Smith's advice on weaselling an excellent example to emulate, or disruptive crap that gets in the way of working together efficiently as a team for optimal killing things & taking of stuff. Either way, using one as an antagonist could create a villain your group loves to hate pretty easily. This is definitely a well above entry in both entertainment value as a read and usability in game. Envy may be a deadly sin, but that makes it an excellent driver for plots where temperance and fortitude fail to get things moving.



Living Death Rules of Etiquette: People in the 1890's did not talk like those today. If you wanted to be accepted into the upper classes, rules were particularly strict on how you should address people, especially where introductions to members of the opposite sex are concerned. So here's one of those basic single page introductions to a thing that can (and has) filled entire books, both primary sources and historical recountings. In this case, it's probably best to go straight to the primary sources, as the 1800's is recent enough that there are plenty of books from then still available, which you can freely download from archive.org as the copyright has expired, and while language & social mores may have changed, it's not by so much as to make them incomprehensible to casual readers like the works of Chaucer. Not useless, but they could definitely have cited their sources better here to make it easier for people to build on.



Internet 101: We're far enough into the rise of the internet that many government departments have websites. So this month's basic web advice is all about links to how the law works, what laws exist, what punishments you get for breaking them and who's currently on the most wanted list for committing particularly heinous crimes. Then you can copy the format and use it to create your own custom most wanted posters for villains in your campaign. All very USA-centric then, and most of the specific links are dead now, but the basic idea of using the internet to find out more about the details of something remains not only valid, but taken for granted in the age of wikis for everything. If only more websites still allowed you to see where you are in the link hierarchy and go up a level by deleting part of the URL instead of working on dynamic loading of feeds.



Vote Right!: One complaint that's turned up several times in the letters page is inconsistent voting when rating your tournament experiences. Some people are overly nice, some are overly strict and some are just arbitrary and petty, giving you scores that have nothing to do with your performance because of prejudice or because they want to have sex with you. Obviously only in-person security can stop the more egregious kinds of creepiness, but If they could standardise people's scoring standards a bit that would be nice. So they go through what actions should get what score in each of the categories. All seems pretty common sense to me, but I guess the world demonstrates there are plenty of people without that, particularly if you work in tech or customer support. More basic procedural filler.



Reader Response survey: We've already seen a survey on what to do with the next big edition change of D&D recently. Now we have a shorter and simpler one asking us to rate each of the articles in this issue from 1-5 so they can know which are most/least popular. That way they can keep the ones people like and drop the ones they don't. Easy enough to do, but TSR didn't do them often enough and WotC don't want to repeat that mistake. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long to find out the results.



Quite a lot of basic repetitive articles in this one, but there are still some interesting bits of long-term progress as well. It does feel like they’re slowing down though, after the burst of manic energy immediately after the takeover. Time to find out if next issue brings any changes worth getting excited about.

 

[(un)reason]

The Raven's Buff Trumpeter 2-10: October 1998



8 pages. We haven't actually heard much about the Harpers in Raven's Bluff. As long as the main evils in the region were mostly temporal they thought it best to do good in secrecy. But the problems with fiends have gone on long enough that they've decided to act a little more openly. If you're in need of their particular brand of heroism, get in contact with Ehrandil and he'll pass on your info to whoever's available and the right level for the challenge. Of course, there's a reason they act in secrecy, as all this do-gooding not only makes them a lot of enemies among the evil organisations of the Realms, but also Lawful Good ones who disagree with their methods. The temple of Tyr, already recently censured by the city for their overzealousness, have decided not to reflect on what led to their embarrassment and change their ways, but double down on the lawful dickishness and stymie the Harpers wherever possible. This gives you plenty of interesting roleplaying opportunities if you favor one of these or the other in upcoming adventures. Evil PC's may still be banned around here, but maybe we can let a little more PvP tension in without breaking the game.

It's a good month in general for people who want intrafaith conflict in their roleplaying. The temple of Lathander was in full on civil war for reasons yet unknown. Somewhat less mysterious is the realisation that they haven't been properly tracking name level druids and their challenges. All 11th level+ druids need to to make themselves known to the admins so they can fight and establish a proper pecking order. One high up druid has already been killed (he got better afterwards), so the competition could get pretty vicious. Are you ready to fight as red in tooth & claw as you need too to keep those high levels, or will you stay at 11 & dual class to skip the stress?

The delving of the underdark continues slowly. Still haven't found the orb of protection, but the supply chain is holding and they've settled an outpost. Another IC wedding took place attended by their various adventuring companions, somewhat delayed by the bride having being turned into a unicorn in a recent adventure. Nothing too surprising in either of those. There is still one bit of very weird news that needs following up on. A man in a silver mask has been touching people, at which point they get turned into silver mist and absorbed into his body. He must have some pretty powerful magic to paralyse everyone in the vicinity and do this in public without being stopped. Why those specific people, and who else is on his absorb list? Very worrying.



Living City Q&A: Are Silverstar’s bonuses to moon hand maces cumulative with their plusses? (yes)

Does a staff of slinging have unlimited uses? (maybe, but it can’t create boulders from nothing, so it’s situationally dependent.)

How does a holy sword's magic resistance work? (resistance works whenever it's drawn & held, dispelling requires a conscious action. )

Do you add your dex bonus to AC when flying? (only if you're maneuverability class B or better)

Can Levitate push an object down? (it can hold you on the ground, but it can't do any damage in the process.)

Can a ranger be a berserker (yes, but watch you don't do anything too evil while berserking & lose your ranger status)

How many charges does a bracelet of minor wishes have (4)

Does immunity to fear protect you from Phantasmal Killers? (no)

Will I at least get a bonus? (no)

Can small creatures use a sunblade one-handed (no)

Can restoration restore drained attribute points (yes, but it'll still cost ya in other ways.)

Can you save proficiency slots for later? (not at 1st level)

Do joydancers get an extra weapon proficiency at 6th level (yes)

Can we clarify what a druid can turn into? (yes. You can't get around the size limits by turning into a baby version of an animal, nor can you turn into an animal of the opposite sex. Crossgender bestiality pregnancy shenanigans are right out! )

If I get a better magic item in an adventure, can I give the old one to someone else? (only if they're present at the table)

Does a magical longbow automatically give your full strength bonus as well? (no, the bonuses are independent.)

Is Ice Storm cold or impact damage? (50/50. You need immunity to both for complete protection)

What level is Lightning Reflection (more recent books trump older ones, so 5th.)

What happens when loremasters specialise in wrestling? (they can modify their chart positions by 2)

Do wizards abandon kits in the same way as other classes? (yes)

Does wizardly reincarnation work the same way as priestly. (yes, apart from the creature selection. This includes losing class levels if they'd be illegal for your new race.)

Can I be a specialty priest of Rillifane Rallathil? (no. He's not in the book, even though he was supposed to be. No apocrypha in our Living City, it's hard enough keeping track of all the lore as it is.)

Do monks get extra attacks at higher level (no in this edition. Oh, but the next one…)

Can I sub in ranger for fighter in multiclass options? (no, only the specific combinations in the PHB are allowed.)

Can I wield a crossbow & dagger at the same time? (yes, but you can't reload once you've shot it)

Can I keep nonmagical items from adventures that don't have certificates (only if they're listed in the PHB)

Can I hold multiple touch spells at once and unleash them all on one hit (no)

Can I activate a ring of shocking grasp & attack in the same round (no, it specifically says it works differently from the spell)

Do all your items merge into you if you're shapeshanged into another humanoid (yes. Hope you prepared fitting ones to deal with your nudity.)

Do I get ogre strength when I polymorph into an ogre (enough to move normally, but not enough to gain all the combat bonuses)

Does a scarab of protection let you save against illusions when you wouldn't normally? (nope, as the spell isn't being cast on you, just nearby)

Can I be an elven druid in Living City? (No. More stuff from supplements we have no interest in adding)

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 2: November 1998



part 1/5



60 pages. Tiger-headed humanoids appear plenty of times in multiple game systems. Are we dealing with the basic physical threat of a weretiger, the multitudinous magical tricks of a rakshasa, or something even stranger? Is that wakizashi really necessary on top of the metal claw gauntlets and wouldn't they impede manual dexterity anyway? Time to find out what the british perspective on these little mechanical quandaries is.



Editorial: This is slightly more substantial than last issue, but still pretty small, mainly listing the things they'd still like to improve. Listings of clubs, a place to trade things, enough reader opinions to have a forum column. All those things that require reader engagement. That's the lifeblood of any magazine that isn't a promotional organ mainly kept alive by adverts. Knowing how short the run of this is, I doubt they'll achieve it to their satisfaction.



History of the Order of Assassins: Killing people for profit is like prostitution. It turns up in every society ever since we started trading for things rather than just grabbing whatever we can take and hold by force. But it's not proper assassination unless it comes from the Alamut region of Iran, otherwise it's just sparkling organised murder. Like any religion, Islam has a whole load of schismatic groups competing for dominance over the centuries. A particularly notable one was Hassan-I Sabbah, who managed to punch well above his weight politically by training sneaky killers who were willing to not only die in the course of duty, but actively sacrifice themselves to make a point, believing they'd be rewarded with paradise in the afterlife for doing so. The order he founded lasted for several centuries before being destroyed from within by a mongol collaborator. (or were they?! dun dun dun!) Your basic system free overview of historical events that have lots of useful inspiration for games, even if the average assassin in a D&D world has drifted pretty far from the source material. They then follow up with the history of thugs, where the common usage of the word has drifted even farther from it's origin as ritual stranglers serving Kali and only killing when the omens are right. Real world history can be more convoluted than even the longest and most elaborate fictional series, because it's not being contributed to by a consistent group of people. A good reminder that going on about cultural appropriation is stupid when cultures have always taken words and concepts from other ones and used them to do unexpected things when combined with other ones. Doing so is a big part of how technology and culture as a whole advances and segregating everything in the name of purity just leads to stagnation. If you take real world elements and use them in your campaign, it's more fun to mix & match them as well instead of making everything an obvious analog of a particular country in a particular historical era.



RPGA UK Tournament Writing Competition: This is pretty similar to it's USA counterparts. Write a tournament adventure for them and you could win a trip to next year's Gen Con. They don't force it to be precisely 6 encounters of fixed types, but it still needs to fit into a single tournament slot, have pregens that are the right level and equipment for it to be a fair challenge and be consistent with the rules & setting of whatever game it is. Fingers crossed we'll get to find out the results in a future issue.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 2: November 1998



part 2/5



Crawley & Son - A model relationship: Another issue, another profile of ordinary (well, as ordinary as gamers get) members of the RPGA. Ken & Keith Crawley are a father & son team who produce some pretty large custom minis projects and take them to conventions. Ken does most of the construction part, while Keith specialises in the painting, which is a nicely complementary skillset. Their current piece de resistance is an enormous model of a star destroyer from star wars. You have to do some improvising with various household objects, plus guesswork about what the backs of things that you only ever see on the screen from one angle look like. Be prepared for plenty of mess involving glue and silver spray paint before you add on the finer details by hand. All seems like a pretty fun hobby, much more productive than reviewing every single issue in a magazine's multi-decade run. A reminder that they haven't really done much minis coverage in polyhedron. Will the UK side have any more of that?



Just Deserts pt 2: The second part of this adventure continues the linearity and goes full trap based screwage dungeon. All the walls, floors & ceilings are completely magic-proof, so you have to go through each of the puzzles in order, there's multiple doors with every route but one just leading to more traps and no way of knowing which is which except trying them, some vaguely written bits that leave it unclear what the author intended (what does yellow mold order you to do do with it's mind-controlling powers if you fail the save?) and the final encounter is pretty much only solvable through deus ex machina. Very much a throwback to ultra-old school, between the brutality, the vague writing forcing you to houserule it for some bits to function at all and the frequency of 4th wall breaking bits of humour like finding a laserdisc of Rocky XXVI in the treasure. The kind of adventure that's amusing to read, but I'd hate to run through as a player, particularly if it was put into an ongoing campaign rather than it's original tournament context. A lot of unfair and irritating ways to lose your characters.



Vampire Weekend: :quirky indie intensifies: The UK side of the RPGA continues to be much more friendly with their edgier rivals. The Isle of Wight in february is home of one of the largest LARP events in the country, with a fair amount of tabletop stuff and various other fun stuff like Roborally and a M:tG tournament as well. One of the few occasions holding a convention in winter fits better, as the vampire stuff only gets going after it gets dark, so picking a date with long nights means less fudging about the IC time or staying inside. While vampires do not drink … wine, they're very open about how freely available alcohol will be and fully expect many attendees will get absolutely hammered. That continues to be an obvious difference between the UK & USA cultures. Those 3 years between the legal drinking ages really do make a difference in how much it's taken for granted. So this is basically just an advert, but still manages to have lots of interesting little bits of info to analyse when compared to similar pieces in the USA edition & Dragon. That keeps it from descending to the worst kind of low content promotional articles.



Fiction - Down and out on DB-24: The longest article this issue is this 9 page Star Wars story. Rex is a talented but troublemaking Corellian pilot working with the Alliance. This means he's not popular with the high-ups, but he's too useful to just fire, so he gets the most exciting and risky missions, which is just the way he likes it. Your basic chaotic good hotshot protagonist then. He's sent to DB-24 to investigate a crashed alien spaceship of unknown origins, find out if it has any similarly unknown tech to salvage, preferably before the empire outpost in the area. Unsurprisingly, things don't go to plan, the landing is pretty rough and there turn out to be hostile bug aliens down there, which forces the imperial & rebel sides to work together uneasily. What will they find and who will betray who first? Find out in the next thrilling instalment! A pretty typical bit of pulp action then, sticking to a familiar formula, but as we’ve seen what the fanbase does when Star Wars tries to go too far from formula that’s probably for the best. You could probably convert this scenario to the RPG and use it easily enough as well, which is an extra plus. Not as good as the average standard of Dragon fiction, but a welcome change of pace in the current run, which hasn’t had very much of that.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 2: November 1998



part 3/5



Letter from America: Earlier this issue, they created a competition that'll win you a free trip to Gen Con UK. Evidently they did something very similar last year, as the 1997 winner of the open tournament won a trip to the USA to see the real thing, which is still a good 10 times the size of it's spin-off. So Andrew Glenn headed off to the USA and sent this little write-up back. The usual grumbling at the linearity & lack of roleplaying in the tournament modules aside, (the UK ones are at least slightly less standardised and formulaic) he had a very interesting time, getting to meet Frank Mentzer, Gary Gygax, Tracey Hickman, R. A Salvatore, Jeff Easley and Ed Greenwood, most of which signed his PHB in appropriate places. I wonder if that'll make it a collector's item now? As with the coverage in Polydedron 132, it looks like they've found their feet again pretty quickly after last year's struggles.



On The Trail: A few people from the UK may have made it over to Indiana, but they're still giving the lion's share of the coverage to the home team, with 4 pages of photos and three more of different people giving their perspectives on Gen Con UK. Peter Adkison flew over and auctioned the shirt off his back for charity, which added several thousand £ to the pot for looking after kids with cancer. Everyone is very positive - although the scottish correspondent complains about the length of the journey, even his havering about the tournaments and people he meets is pretty braw. Not all the characters survived, but then you don't expect that in tournament modules and at least they died in entertaining ways. Just like the USA Gen Con, they were the biggest they've ever been, but hopefully they'll break that record next year. Despite TSR's financial troubles, the state of roleplaying as a whole is still a good one, with a fertile audience for the big changes WotC will bring. I can be fairly confident next year's coverage will be more of the same both sides of the pond.



Bare Bones: Another round of basic advice that'll hopefully break your mental deadlock when you're devoid of ideas. The 5 W's, who, what, where, when and why. (oh, and how, which breaks the pattern and is better replaced with with) Taking random words and trying to form a pattern. Starting from the big climax and working backwards to com up with a plausible sequence of events to get there. Flow-charting your adventures rather than creating a solid map. All ones I've seen before, but at least they're packing a decent density of ideas into a couple of pages. It'd be useful for newer players.



Death of Dolphins: A second adventure in the same issue? Well, i guess they do have more room. This one is for Call of Cthulhu, showing that's another series with plenty of international penetration. Several dolphins have indeed turned up with some very strange mutilations on their bodies. Then the crew that discovered this also disappeared, which will hopefully draw in the PC's to investigate. If they do, they'll find the bodies of the previous investigators, mutilated in a similar way. They'll have several encounters with Lord Belvedere, who'll be superficially helpful, but obstacles and accidents will follow in his wake, trying to impede their investigations. Anyone who's watched a bit of Scooby-doo will soon figure out that the only recurring character in the scenario is also the villain and investigate his mansion. Turns out he is indeed insane and has been summoning things man should not wot of, with the book of forbidden knowledge easy to find in his bedside cabinet. If you retain enough sanity to function after reading it, it's easy enough to banish the monster (which you never even see), although if you haven't already killed or captured Lord Belvedere you'll have to deal with him trying to stop the ritual. Short, but not particularly railroady, this seems like a decent enough way to fill a session, even if it is indeed very scooby-dooish in pacing. (only the horror is entirely real even if you never get to meet it, and the main adversary is the person responsible for summoning it.) Good to see them covering other systems, even if it could do with some expansion to really build up the atmosphere and cover more of the player's potential choices.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 2: November 1998



part 4/5



Reviews: Greyhawk, The Adventure Begins gets a review that points out it's very much not the beginning, but the 4th iteration of the longest running D&D setting, moving the timeline forward and building on the many modules that came before. Many people have played there, even more have used elements from it in their own campaign, and now a whole new generation of people have the opportunity to be a part of the legend. It's a bit too centred on Greyhawk City over the rest of the Oerth for their tastes, but a perfectly serviceable introduction to the setting.

Anderia is the first expansion for the Dragon Reaches of Marrakush. It continues the general trend of being a solid low-magic medieval setting for your Chivalry & Sorcery, but the illustrations are better than the previous book. If you want lots of detail about languages, politics & ecology there's plenty to mine here.

Tales from the Infinite Staircase gets a fairly nit-picky review. Why aren't the adventures listed in order of level? If you tried to play them all with the same group you'd have to do them out of order or the difficulty would be all over the place. There's still plenty of cool ideas in there but you'll have to do some mechanical tweaking or general rearrangement as a DM to get the best out of them.

Alternity gets the most detailed review, with a font size considerably smaller than the others to fit it all on the page. It's obviously designed as a generic system to support multiple settings, so it feels like something's missing when they've only released one so far. The main resolution system of throwing a D20 then using a smaller one as a difficulty modifier doesn't feel particularly intuitive to them either but hopefully that just needs a bit more actual play to get used to. They're also pretty skeptical of the circumstances surrounding it's birth, thinking it might well have been cancelled by WotC if it wasn't near complete when they took over. Is it going to get the chance to reach it's full potential? In hindsight, probably not. Who's going to bother fiddling with this engine to make something new when you could use the OGL, make it compatible with the biggest RPG in the world and still release it commercially?

The Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game and it's first couple of supplements get a very positive review. It's a cool idea, the rules play fast, are easy to understand and the production values are great. If you want to play superheroes it's well worth a spin.

Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog is Saban's new attempt at a fantasy series and tie-in game that isn't based on tokusatsu stock footage. Instead, it's implausibly clean & attractive americans mangling celtic mythology & pronunciation, which the reviewer finds deeply cringy. It's probably no worse than Hercules & Xena really, but of course it's always more personal when it's your culture that's being appropriated by foreigners and re-imagined in their own image. I never even heard of this first time around and I'm definitely tempted to check it out and see just how cheap & cheesy it looks in hindsight.

Shadowrun 3e gets a review that starts out negative but ends positive. Is it just a cheap cash grab? No, they've refined the rules without making it completely incompatible with older editions and made the language easier to understand. Less trying to be clever with IC slang and funky formatting means you can get to the playing more easily.

Return to the Tomb of Horrors inflates the challenges from a meagre 12 page tournament module to a 160 page monster supply of deathtraps to slaughter even the highest level of adventurers, while also adding some roleplaying context on top. Acererak is back, and this time he's a lot less passive. This reviewer thoroughly approves.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 2: November 1998



part 5/5



MEGAbyte: 101 Airbourne gets a moderately negative review. It needed a somewhat more powerful computer than the manufacturers recommended to run at a decent speed, there were several annoying glitches that ruined missions even when it did start working and it's overly detailed approach to WWII history grew boring to the reviewer. Could probably have spent more time in debugging and playtesting.

Ultima Online raises questions of if massively multiplayer RPG's will replace tabletop. Since the big ones like World of Warcraft outsell D&D by many orders of magnitude and UO itself is still going several edition changes later, I'm going to go with a qualified yes. There's still several itches that you can't scratch in an environment like that when it comes to freedom of choice and feeling that your actions can have a significant effect on the world, plus despite massive increases in bandwidth since then, lag and dropouts are still persistent problems that can really ruin a game, particularly when the main server is on another continent. (although at least they've got smarter about instances.) So this is one where it's particularly interesting to see their impressions then and how they contrast with the way things actually turned out.



Another fairly interesting change of pace from the american magazines, although the proportion of crunchy stuff is pretty low, making it more inspiration for any system than things to be used directly. At least that makes it flexible, and they’re covering different games to the USA side as well. I can still see myself gleaning some more bits of data about how gaming differs around the world from future issues. Let’s see how long they can keep this schedule up.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 71: Nov/Dec 1998



part 1/5



74 pages. Tony Diterlizzi once again takes the cover with some gnomes that are very nasally well-endowed even by gnomish standards. Will they have female gnomes beating down their door, or will they be driving everyone away by being irritating and causing explosions? Time to see how much wonder & whimsy another set of adventures contains.



Editorial: Dave Gross guest editorials this month, delivering a humorous bit about the assistant editors protecting Chris from the worst and most repetitive types of submission. This of course neatly segues into telling us what those most repetitive things are, so you can avoid making the same mistakes. After all, if you send them to sleep, that pretty much guarantees your adventure is going on the reject pile. Monsters kidnaping princesses, meeting mysterious strangers in inns who give you missions, adventures that are just lengthy strings of combat encounters with no opportunity for roleplaying or puzzles, these are a few of their least favourite things. They’re a magazine, brevity in particular is the soul of wit, yet so few people seem to understand that. Some send adventures longer than a whole issue, heaven knows what they expect us to do with them. Another reminder that it takes a lot of filtering to keep the magazine as good as it is and we’ve seen how bad the alternative can get. If only the submissions came pre-filtered so it was slightly less work for them.



Letters: First letter is from someone who's noticed that Chris Perkins does most of their adventures for brand new settings/systems, and suspects insider trading. You've got cause & effect the wrong way around. He got the job because he kept on submitting those. Now he's become a full-time editor, he's hoping someone else will take on that role.

Second is another person who wants more Dark Sun adventures. Unfortunately, they don't have a single submission to even consider. If only someone would do something about that, hint hint.

Third wants them to go monthly and do more experimental adventures that might need altering to fit into your campaign. A net cast a little wider expands the type of games you can run overall.

4th wants more Al-Qadim adventures. The RPGA just did a new one, so sign up to them. :teeth ting:

5th is another grognard who's unhappy with them doing Alternity adventures in here. Give it it's own magazine if you want to do things like that.

Finally, praise for Map of Mystery, and the general idea of including more short adventure ideas as well as longer fully fleshed out scenarios. Sometimes, all you need is that first spark of inspiration to get going.