TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 140: February 2000



part 2/5



Table Talk: This column has absolutely nothing to do with the decathlons for the first time in ages. Instead, it's an intro by the new local activities co-ordinator, Scott J. Magner, as mentioned last page. Apparently, the introduction of a free membership tier has been a big success, as they’ve rocketed from 7,000 members to 37,000 over the past couple of years. But they do still need enough paying members and volunteers to support all the activities they run, or there’s a distinct risk of things falling apart. You need to balance asking what the RPGA can do for you with what you can do for the RPGA. A problem now shared by many internet games that mix up free to play and subscription tiers, maybe with microtransactions on top. You can be popular with millions yet somehow still making a loss if you structure it wrong. But anyway, the real reason we’re here is to have fun and make friends. If you do that (and make sure you have a way of staying in touch if the organisation falls apart) you’re the real winner here. Fairly typical stuff, although the statistical info is notable, since they don’t deliver that regularly, unlike Dungeon & Dragon.

The only bit of regular style news is a confirmation that the Living Death campaign will indeed be surviving the transition to 3e, with conversion rules arriving at Gen Con. Since 3e has faster advancement, the level tiers are getting stretched out, but currently dual-classed characters may find themselves mildly weakened by the conversion to the new multiclassing system. Let’s hope people find the conversion system they use fair and they don’t lose too many players as a result of these changes.



Member Spotlight: Time to put your hiking boots on, as we're going off to the mountain states to meet their regional co-ordinator, Ken Ritchart. He's been part of the RPGA since the very start, and plays a big role in organising their charity benefit events. Most of his profile is dedicated to this, making it clear that he sees the RPGA as not just a place to play games, but a way to build community and do good in the world. If you can accomplish all of these things at once, that's a win-win situation. If you're in Colorado or the surrounding areas, the more help the merrier. Not going to argue with that, even if it's not a particularly original viewpoint around here, leaving me with not much to comment on either.



LC Judge Guidelines: On the other hand, this isn't just the usual platitudes about being prepared, treating everyone fairly and filling forms out properly afterwards but a detailed 6 page list of their ever accumulating house rules, many of which are new. You can start off with one long duration buff spell active and still have all your slots for the day, but any more need to be cast in play. You can trade items to other characters while still alive, but taking them from dead ones except to pay for their resurrection is still a big no-no. XP is based on party tier rather than just what you managed to kill and a flat story award. You can sell magic items, but many of them are worth different amounts than their Encyclopedia Magica entry says. Don't forget your morale, reaction checks and especially hovering at death's door rules. While there is some repeating of the basics, even this late in the edition, they're still trying to refine the 2e rules rather than devoting all their energy to developing Living Greyhawk, which is very interesting to see. It makes me wonder what the Living City could have become if it was allowed to develop organically for a few decades more without dramatic rules changes imposed from the top of the company. How much of The Vast would it cover now and how would the regions be divided up in the real world.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 140: February 2000



part 3/5



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Last issue's area was relatively stable despite being crime-ridden. Ondeeme, on the other hand is driven purely by cult of personality. He showed up, killed all the people in charge with large amounts of blasty magic, did the same to large chunks of the peasants, renamed the country after himself and started importing new people from surrounding countries to fill the void. For a couple of years, it turned into anarchy everywhere not being directly dominated by him, until he mastered mind-control magic that let him ensure the loyalty of his wizardly secret police force, the Slee. That's stabilised things a little, but also turned it into a terrifying dictatorship where everyone has to live in a state of perpetual paranoia. Definitely the kind of place that would benefit from some more benevolent adventurers coming in and liberating the place. But this is another multi-parter, so we'll have to wait another couple of months to have all the info and give proper judgement on how good it is. His progress just seems to get slower and slower as the years go by, and the editors have ever less ability to keep his writing concise.



Llurth Dreier - City of Ooze: Eric Boyd is also delving deep into Realmslore, but gets to release it all in one big 8 page package instead of a bunch of 2 page ones. A nice big look at the City of Ooze, one of the few Drow cities ruled by Ghaunadur worshippers rather than Lolth ones. Unsurprisingly, it's a damp, sulphurous place that's pretty offputting to non ooze lovers simply due to the smell. Nine miles below the surface, (reminding us that the Realms does not have realistic temperature gradients or water tables underground) a river runs through it, although the rate has been gradually declining, causing the lake in the middle to get shallower. Long term, this might be a problem, but at the moment the mud flats revealed are perfect breeding grounds for their fungal crops. It also gives aboleth easy access to the city, and they secretly dominate many of the powerful figures and control the council, which is a big obvious plot hook for players with counterpsionics to exploit. Even so, with a lot of powerful monsters with high levels in multiple classes on top, it's not a place you could fight your way through without a whole army behind you. Best to go in disguise (including shields against mind-reading) and cause more subtle problems if you want to live to adventure another day. Another dense and interesting entry from him that reminds us he was the main guy designing high level challenges in the 3e style even before the edition change. You've got to get up pretty early to design characters with a longer laundry list of powers and the will to combine them in effective ways. If nothing in Dungeon cuts the mustard for your group anymore, he's the guy to go too for inspiration on how to keep coming up with challenging adventures for them.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 140: February 2000



part 4/5



Underdark Campaign Journal: Continuing the underdark theme, we talk some more about the outpost Raven’s Bluff was establishing in the metaplot before they ended the Trumpeter. A good 10 days spelunking away from the surface, they managed to capture a large cave previously occupied by Duergar and decided it would be a good place to dig in and fortify. A year later, Raven’s Deep is still alive and growing, comprised of a mix of soldiers, adventurers willingly using it as a staging ground and criminals given the offer of much shorter sentences if they work them off down here. (and survive) They’re still dependent on regular contact with the surface for supplies, but getting better at the fungus farming underdark natives use for their staples. Plenty of stuff is still ruined, and of course there’s plenty of duergar technology they haven’t figured out yet either, (most important being the aqueduct, which everyone is strictly forbidden from touching as long as it keeps working, because if you don’t have a water supply you’re in big trouble pretty quickly. ) Another interesting bit of setting expansion full of useful worldbuilding details, but it’s obvious they’re working in a much more gritty genre than the Drow and Aboleth, where they still have to worry about the logistics of air, water supply, darkness and all the other realistic challenges humans face when exploring caves. So this isn’t as long or spectacular as the previous article, nor is the artwork as good, but it’s one much more accessible to the kind of levels most groups reach and more likely to be used in actual play. The nature of a Living Campaign forces things to remain more grounded in general, even if some of the most hardcore players manage to reach high levels, limiting things so they never become truly world-shaking no matter how high their numbers get.



Internet 101: This column has a mix of stuff fitting the underdark theme and miscellaneous reader-submitted stuff. Yahoo.com is still alive, even if it's been replaced as the default search engine several times over. saudicaves.com is also still alive, albeit looking very dated now, as is cavedive.com. However, www.rpg.host is obviously not the same website it linked to back in the day, and the other 8 are long dead, giving us a hit rate of only 3 or 4 out of 12, depending how you count it. All that elaborate home campaign stuff stored on fortunecity, lost to the ages. As usual, this column mainly winds up filling me with vague sadness for all the things on the early internet that were never preserved. Sure a lot of it was pretty primitive, but it had more character than modern social media sites that all seem to be copying each other's features instead of trying something new.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 140: February 2000



part 5/5



Powers that Be: This column has it’s last entry this time, having failed to find someone who’d consistently advocate for Greyhawk gods the way Eric Boyd did for Toril ones. Fittingly, the final god we get to see is Cyndor, god of time. He’s the kind of god of time who thinks there should be one timeline, and people should proceed linearly down it from birth to death. Your free will is merely an illusion and everything is predetermined. Of course, in the AD&D multiverse, it’s not that simple. Both Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms have featured time travel in the novels, although those kind of powers remain out of reach of most PC’s, even the ultra high level ones. Which means his priests have the complicated job of detecting and suitably punishing any time travellers on Oerth other than them. (and possibly any kender that show up, even those not time travelling at the moment, given what a mess they make of predestination ) To anyone not engaged in time manipulation, they don’t seem to do much, hanging out in universities, distant monasteries or serving as advisors to powerful figures, because if they’re doing their job right, all the crises they stop will have never even happened from the perspective of the prime timeline. So if you like playing time cop and never being properly appreciated for the heroic things you do, with extremely high stakes for failure, they’re the priesthood for you. There’s plenty of media you can use as inspiration for a campaign like that and it’s nice of them to give us the option, even if the D&D ruleset isn’t the best equipped for it. This is a pretty good read, but I can understand why they didn’t pick him as one of the core gods for the next edition. A premise like this tends to dominate over other character’s schticks and make them the star of the show, which is something you want to discourage in game design. Doing solid rules for time travel when it’s not the whole theme of your game is hard work and deserves a nice big supplement devoted to it.



Writer's Guidelines: Time to finish off with some more repeating of basics, because they always need more submissions, and after the edition change they’re going to urgently need them even more. They still haven’t streamlined their procedures from last year though. They want both a printed copy and a floppy disk containing the original file. We’re still a way from the much more capacious and durable USB stick taking over as the primary method of data transfer and no-one’s going to waste burning a whole CD for a file that’s probably measured in the kilobytes. Other details remain pretty much the same too, remember to write coherently, use proper spelling, punctuation and grammar, make sure the maths add up when statting things out, we’re only a little newszine so nothing too long, this is work for hire so we own all the copyrights. The main differences are the listing of this year’s upcoming issue themes, and putting the rate of pay up to 4 cents per word, which is a definite plus, although it does raise the spectre of them requiring more personal info from you than before for tax reasons. That might prevent some teenagers from getting started in here the way they could in the 80’s. Overall, the good and the bad changes balance out, leaving me with no strong opinion.



The survey decides to use monkey metaphors to assess quality with, which is fitting since their sister magazine’s multitude of monkeys did just come up with Shakespeare.



Several very nice bits of game material in the middle, but a whole lot of repeating the basics around the edges. I suppose that adds up to another average issue overall. Still, as long as the amount of useful stuff I know about continues to increase, that's a net positive, particularly for everyone else who can just use the good bits now I've done all the work of sorting through them. Let's what proportion of good bits next issue has.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK 6: March 2000



part 1/5



72 pages. For such a high stress occupation, it's surprising how rarely you see adventurers smoking. I guess part of that is because even though the characters depicted are usually adults, the games are heavily marketed at kids, so you don't want to show them lighting up a fag or puffing a pipe and setting a bad example. (but killing things in the illustrations is just fine) But anyway, we have a particularly grimy pair on the cover this month who look like they aren't averse to partaking in a few unhealthy vices while working. Let's hope that doesn't make them an easy target for monsters that use smell or infravision in the dark to spot enemies.



Network News: Unsurprisingly, the first thing they do is apologise for the 6 month hiatus. The announcement of a new edition meant all sorts of plans had to change, combined with losing their old branch manager at the worst possible time and they let things get on top of them for a while there. Now Ian "Twin" Richards is Managing Editor, Art Director, Designer, Production Manager, Pre-Press, Advertising Sales Manager and probably exhausted from juggling all those hats. Another reminder of how much of a shoestring this place is run on, even compared to the US branch. But they have got plenty of stuff done. Now this magazine covers not just the UK, europe and south africa, but australia and new zealand as well. They've decided which Living Greyhawk region the UK will be partnered with - we're off to Onnwal lads, to fight the Scarlet Brotherhood! Up the blues, down with the reds! WE'RE GONNA SMASH YOUR FOOKIN' FACE IN!!! They're making a new Living Greyhawk Journal periodical, which you'll get on top of Polyhedron at no extra cost. Living City: Sarbreenar is continuing and NOT converting to 3e. (Very skeptical of how long that intention will last) Plus plenty of charity events, schools championships, classic tournaments and all the other parts of the gaming ecosystem. A demonstration that their plans are a constant work in progress, and vulnerable to disruption by overall policy changes from the higher-ups. Going through the periodicals like this is very useful for pinpointing exactly when those changes happened.



Fiction - All in a Night's Work by Martin Tideswell & Anthony Davies: It can be just as hard sticking at being an assassin as it is being a paladin. Sure, you won’t technically lose your powers if you have a change of heart, but this very specialised skillset can be tricky to repurpose to more benevolent ends, you’ll still be in trouble if you’re caught for any of your previous murders and if you were trained by some secret organisation they might want to deal with any quitters terminally to keep their secrets safe. So it proves here, as a group of assassins are hired to deal with a rich merchant and all his family with extreme prejudice. Unfortunately, that includes a newborn baby and one of them has a sudden crisis of conscience about the idea of killing innocents. This turns into a spontaneous scuffle that winds up with the rest of them dead and our traitor not sure what to do. In the end he winds up disappearing into the night and using what would have been the payment for the job to set the orphaned baby up for life. (even moreso than just the inheritance from already being the kid of a rich merchant. ) The kind of setup that probably leads to the kid tracking him down several decades later to find out why all this happened in the first place, but that would be a whole other, probably longer story. As usual for Polyhedron, this doesn’t have quite the same level of polish as your average Dragon article, but it’s still a fairly interesting and thought-provoking read that has plenty of relevance to groups of adventurers. You never know when one of the team might decide to flunk out from murderhobo high and start engaging with the NPC’s like they’re real people.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK 6: March 2000



part 2/5



Psionics Revisited: They just can't resist heavily overhauling the psionics system at every iteration, can they? The UK branch gets in on the action with another set of house rules. Rather than dividing powers up into Sciences & Devotions, both of which are accessible from 1st level in varying amounts, they're put into initiate, adept and master tiers, which are only accessible once you reach certain levels. Number of PSPs you have is cut dramatically, but so are activation costs. Psychic combat uses the same power names but works completely differently. Powers work much more like spells in general (and in many cases are simply spells) It all feels like a dry run for the more standardised way they handled psionic powers in 3e, getting rid of mental tangents, tracking maintenance costs and 1st level characters being able to go to the Astral Plane. A character built using this system is much less likely to short-circuit an adventure by using out of context powers. I guess that demonstrates which way the wind is blowing in general design trends - more competent but duller. Still, at least this shows more ambition than the average article. Nice to see them experimenting with bigger rules variants.



Working for the Enemy: Speaking of ambition, there's a fine line between being ambitious and veering into self-indulgence. Ian Richards doesn't just occupy more than half the staff roles, he also fills nearly half the issue with a mammoth 31 page adventure also written by him, because who's going to stop him? Himself?! Anyway, the PC's are high level adventurers teleported away from their normal lives for one last big job by their wizardly mentor. (without all their gear, just to make it trickier. Another reason to play a psionicist or monk, you don't get screwed so much by adventures like this.) Only it turns out it's not your mentor, but his teenage daughter. (specifically noted to now be very hot and just barely legal after the last time you saw her was as a kid :sighs heavily, rubs temples: ) Daddy disappeared days ago without warning and she's very worried. Time for you to find out what happened and rescue him. First, you'll have to buy a new set of basic adventuring equipment, dealing with your stereotypical arabian haggling scenes along the way. Then start asking around the town for more clues. This will rapidly attract the attention of the Zhentarim that captured him one way or another, and they'll send thugs to take you out & capture his daughter as well. This will prompt her to reveal info she should have just told you in the first place, that he was carrying half a map when he disappeared, and she can show you the other half. You can either try and follow what you can see of it's directions, or if you didn't kill all your attackers, (the preferred plot option) get them to reveal the location of the Zhentarim hideout. This is typically guarded & trapped, but at least you get to rescue him at the end of it and a proper set of exposition about the main quest. We're off to the tomb of H'orem H'ebb, an ancient Netherese wizard, to find out it's secrets, preferably before the Zhentarim.

Of course, this isn't simple either. Not far out, you'll face a quite uncharacteristic rainstorm that washes away all the tracks, then several days of more traditional desert sun & mirages that leave you quite lost & dehydrated until you come across a sacred Bedine oasis. They'll turn up a little later and be extremely rude to you until the spirit of the oasis does a deus ex machina, forces everyone to cool it and points you in the right direction. From there, you still have to face a Laerti ambush, climb a cliff face and deal with some desert zombies before you finally reach the dungeon. Once there, there's also plenty to do. Input the passcode on a 9 digit keypad. Fight or talk down the guardian Crass dragon. (half copper, half brass, all the irritating personality traits of both) Deal with Stone Wolves, Netherese Zombies, a bunch of chaos imps trapped in a magical circle that'll be typically irritating if you're dumb enough to release them, traps aplenty, a Metagolem. If you make it this far, you'll reach the wizard's assistant, a Baelnorn. He'll be very cross with you for breaking all their defences, as that lets the Phaerimm's minions just waltz right in behind you, and geas you to go back and fight them, (with no chance of resisting the spell) then fix everything up and never talk about this again, so you'll never get to talk to the wizard himself, and the only treasure you get to keep is from the other intruders.

So this is a lot longer and more ambitious than the average tournament adventure, and gives you some branching bits where your choices are meaningful, but still revels in a strong degree of railroading and whimsy, as well as using a lot of cliches they mostly avoid in Dungeon. There's also a fair bit of casual sexism & racism on top that could easily have been removed without affecting the overall structure of the adventure, which also demonstrates just how much having a decent editor that has a lot of submissions to pick & choose from contributes to making Dungeon the magazine it is. Not absolutely unusable, but definitely something written and edited entirely by one person without anyone looking over it to say um, maaaaybe these bits were a bad idea and could do with a few revisions before publishing. It could have been so much better.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK 6: March 2000



part 3/5



Reviews: Carnival demonstrates to us that an evil travelling show fits just perfectly into Ravenloft, getting high marks from these reviewers. Better hope that the freaks and geeks are the sort that only bite the heads off of chickens.

The Alternity starter set is suspiciously similar to the current D&D basic set, including the hand-holding fast-play adventure. They're not overly impressed, particularly by the GM screen, which only has one fold, making it too small to cover much and not particularly stable. You really need a full 4 panels to securely hide all your notes on a nice big table. All very formulaic.

A Guide to Hell gets a positive review, somewhat marred by the fact that the reviewer clearly copy/pasted the template from last issue's Scarlet Brotherhood review and forgot to swap out some of the details, so the score doesn't match the description at all. Very sloppy.

The Armourers Companion for Chivalry & Sorcery also gets a pretty positive result. More low fantasy worldbuilding for if you really want to get down to the nitty-gritty of what smiths do and make it important in your game.

Axe of the Dwarvish Lords sees Skip Williams reuse the trick he did with Rod of Seven Parts and build a big adventure around a preexisting artifact from the corebooks. Can you get the dwarf nations to put aside their differences and defeat the goblin hordes by finding the said magical axe? Like Dragon Mountain, this involves a lot of low level monsters making themselves effective against higher level adventurers by good tactics and traps, which some may find frustrating to play, but if you like old school brutality, there are far worse dungeons to put them through.

Return to White Plume Mountain plays even more heavily to the nostalgic crowd. Has Keraptis truly returned, or is something else stepping into his shoes? (answer somewhat spoiled by recent tie-in Dungeon adventure) Have fun finding out in an adventure that as usual is significantly larger than the original.



Sarbreenaar, the Living City: Well, more of a Living Village, but who's counting. The centrefold is a nice full colour map of the place, followed by the character generation rules. The map looks noticeably more like a real organically grown place than the Living City, with a clear direction of elevation for the water to flow down despite several winding rivers and an obvious canal system that serves as both transport system for industry and first line of defence all joining up again at the eastern end. It looks like it's modelled quite specifically on a welsh mining town, which shows the benefits of letting actual british people do the designing rather than americans used to putting everything on a grid system when that only happens in new builds on flat terrain with a strong central planning system. It definitely feels like more research and care went into this than the Raven's Bluff map. 85 of the buildings are numbered & keyed, with many owned by named people that feel like PC's, given the haphazardness of their naming conventions. I'm guessing they got to buy those positions at the big Gen Con UK interactive or some other recent convention. Still plenty of room for more people to buy plots before they even have to build new streets though, not that you'll have much time to enjoy the property ownership with the edition change looming.

The character generation rules are fairly similar to the main LC ones, but there are subtle differences. Ability ranges need to be from 7-18 rather than 6-18. Chaotic Neutral characters are not banned here. (until someone abuses that) Kit & Deity selection is different and slightly more restrictive overall, but also allowing a few not found in Raven's Bluff. Dual-classing uses the mid 90's LC XP rules, not the newer ones. Unarmed combat only uses the DMG rules, not the ones from the complete fighter's handbook. Some of these are so small as to seem pointless, but at least they have the freedom to make them. If this had continued longer, the two would probably have become more divergent over time, and it would have been extra interesting to see how the different pressures from different countries & their cultures made them evolve. As is often the case, I find myself wishing I could travel between alternate timelines and see how those myriad possibilities played out.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK 6: March 2000



part 4/5



Brief Books: The book reviews are barely reviews this time, more just recommendations. Any opinions on Snuff Fiction or Sex & Drugs & Sausage Rolls by Robert Rankin, the Babylon 5 omnibus, Stargate SG1: The price you pay, Star Wars: Tales of the New Republic or Batman: The Long Halloween? That's a lot of big franchise tie-ins. Odd thing to prioritize.



Figure Reviews: Another sign of their ambition to be a general purpose gaming magazine. We haven't had minis reviews in a few years and it seems their popularity is down a bit due to CCG's taking up shelf space and the increasingly strict regulations on what material they can be made of. But there's still more than enough new releases to fill a column like this, although their limited art budget means they don't put up photos of all of them like the old Dragon column. Games Workshop continue to be a reliable source of various kinds of undead, goblinoids and ratmen etc, even if the vampires favour B-movie cheesiness over refinement. Grendel Productions sent some large dragon kits that require a bit of work to put together, but are suitably towering over your regular minis once you do. Reaper minis have finally made it over this side of the pond, and get general praise for both their quality and variety. Finally, Wargames Foundry are the ones to go to if you want a more historical selection of figure like cowboys or pirates. All pretty general and blandly positive so far. They'd need to get more specific and critical to make this column last any length.



Megabyte: Prince of Persia 3D is our only computer game review, and a distinctly negative one. The idea is there, but the implementation is sorely lacking, with speed being either painfully slow or impossible to react to fast if your computer isn't exactly the specs the designers intended. The physics are inconsistent and the level design is poor. All the pretty graphics, music & cut-scenes can't distract from that. But we're still going to give it an overall score of 6, because we're not monsters. I would have been much harsher, and apparently so were many other magazines at the time. At least they learned from their mistakes and put the work in properly next game.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK 6: March 2000



part 5/5



Mailbag: First letter asks how skeletons see without eyes. This short sentence provokes a full page of philosophical pontificating by the editor, running through various options and their logical ramifications. In the end, it's probably easiest to assume they see roughly the same as human eyes do. But if not, make sure the differences are internally consistent so the PC's can exploit them once they know about them.

Second is a much longer one talking about the various option for initiative tiebreakers. What exactly is wrong with the idea of simultaneity? People dramatically managing to critically wound each other at the same time and die together (maybe having one last philosophical conversation where they learn an important life lesson too late) is not uncommon at all in movies. But if you're going by the RAW, the mage wins.

Finally, a bit of poetry in which an orcish warlord shows why he's the one in charge, being the only person in the clan who understands preparation and logistics. You'll need to work a little more on getting a regular meter to your lines if you want it to become a marching chant that they remember and pass down the generations though. Otherwise it's not actually that effective as a teaching method.



On The Trail: The convention column is entirely insider trading, as regular writer Wiggy (not to be confused with 60's model Twiggy, who is not a gamer as far as I'm aware) talks about his very own WigCon. Admittedly his timekeeping isn't the best, so many events started later than their listed start time, but once they got going everyone had plenty of fun, with D&D being much less dominant than the big conventions. MERP, GURPS Technomancer & Traveller, Feng Shui, Call of Cthulhu and a particularly variant Storyteller system Aztecs vs Conquistadors game all got run, although the Chivalry & Sorcery tournament failed to get enough players to actually go ahead. They did still have several Living City and Classic D&D tournaments though, plus rounds of the Judge Dredd CCG and Battletech. Apart from a bit of weirdness with the heating, it all went pretty well and they look forward to running it again next year, which is reassuring but not particularly dramatic. Not a particularly interesting entry overall then.



Live Long, and Play Often: Straight from one CCG to another, as they talk about the Star Trek one. This isn't just some promotional shilling of a brand new release, it's been around since 1994 and getting regular expansion packs every year since. The rules are starting to show their age a bit, and the sheer number of card options means there's some exploitable combos, but it's still a fun game where you can do all the horrible things to the main characters you always wanted to but the shows are too nice to go through with. (shut up Wesley) Looking ahead, it'll continue to get new expansions right up to 2007 and have tournaments run for it even until 2019, (at which point it's probably stopped more by the pandemic than declining popularity) which you can definitely call a long-term success. Another of those interesting little bits of diversity that they don't do in the american magazines any more. Anyone have any fond memories of playing this one?



As usual, the level of polish on the articles isn't quite up to the level of the magazines with a larger circulation, but the articles are pretty diverse and interesting despite their flaws. This is one that feels well worth reading after getting through it. Let's see if i can say the same about the next one, and how quickly it'll arrive with their erratic schedule.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon issue 79: Mar/Apr 2000



part 1/5



92 pages. The number of underwater adventures has been up in general recently and it looks like that trend is continuing this time, if the cover is anything to go by. Will they stick to the shallows like most adventures, or will we finally get to see some of the darkest depths the ocean trenches have to offer?



Editorial: You don’t have to have a good villain to have a good adventure, but it definitely helps! It’s time for another familiar editorial topic once again. If your bad guy is just an unnamed evil wizard, defined solely by his class, level & alignment, the odds of your adventure being accepted are much lower than if they have a distinct personality, history and motivations. (but don’t go too overboard in that direction either, because they only have so much page count and will prune the waffle mercilessly) To illustrate that, Chris has no hesitation in spoiling the villains of all this issue’s adventures and some upcoming ones as well, some of which sound very high level. Lolth’s daughter trying to usurp her mother? Not often they give you that much opportunity to influence the fate of the multiverse. If you still need help after this, both he and I can wholeheartedly recommend the Complete book of Villains, one of the 2e products that has held up and remains useful whatever system you’re playing under. That should give you more than enough advice to put something together step by step to terrorise your players with effectively.



Letters: First letter is generally complementary about issue 77, but particularly about Ex Keraptis Cum Amore. This is a pretty common opinion. People want their high level deathtraps and this magazine hasn’t done nearly enough of those lately.

Second gives their top ten of adventures from all along the run of the magazine. These are pretty varied, and they’re also worried about the idea of the 3e adventures being core only all the time, as that would get pretty boring after a few years. Chris sticks to the company line. They may change their mind in the future, but for now they want to make a clean break from the vast amounts of 2e supplements.

Third is from Andy Miller, who tells us how many rejections it took before his first adventure was accepted. Persist, adapt, try something new. Hopefully that’ll get you past sending in the same old cliches they’ve seen hundreds of times before.

Fourth praises their recent artwork improvements, and they way they used them to get the players into the adventure. Showing not telling and letting them figure it out themselves is better than just infodumping this session’s plot in their lap.

Finally, another list of favourite adventures. They tend to be either spooky or whimsical, reminding us that emotional engagement makes an adventure more memorable than hundreds of rooms filled with monsters.