TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002



part 4/10



Swamp Stomp: A swamp based adventure where the true antagonist is not who you expect? We had one of those just a couple of issues ago. Not assuaging my fears about being too repetitive and formulaic here guys! The mayor of a small town has concocted a scheme to drain the nearby swamp and make a lot of money in the process. This of course made the lizard men who live there & their water naga protector very angry, so they’re trying to stop this. The mayor is not to be deterred and tells them he’s going to arrange peace talks, then hires adventurers (ie, you) to go in and kill the lot. Will you blindly follow his orders, or will you try and talk before you fight and realise you’ve been set up, and the real bad guy is back there in town engaging in lots of pre-emptive plans for property development and forcing people to pay for the water they used to be able to get for free. So it’s the kind of adventure which has two possible solutions, but it’s pretty obvious which the “good” one is and they drop plenty of hints along the way for the players to pick up on even if they don’t have a druid in the party that would naturally push them to the side of wildlife preservation. The story part is quite short, but there’s lots of detail on the village and it’s surroundings, putting this firmly on the sandbox end of things where the players have the freedom to wander around and do their own thing without the adventure falling apart, possibly coming up with another solution that is not one of the expected two. A familiar formula, but pretty decently done, giving you plenty of room to solve it in a hack & slash way, or almost entirely with roleplaying, this all looks easy to use with a wide variety of groups but not mind-blowing in any way.



Critical Threats: Rather than being just a single creature, this is more of a full encounter, and really should have been labeled a Side Trek instead. Sadie is a Drider sorcerer who’s trying to get back into Lolth’s favor by raising a whole clutch of baby white dragons as her own. They all live together in a large cavern served by several dozen kobold minions. Any PC group that can take care of half a dozen dragons, even baby ones in a single combat would go through them like a lawnmower so they’ll stay well clear from the fight, but at least the writer is thinking about logistics here. Like all the previous three big bads this issue, she won’t fight to the death for her kids, but flee and try to get revenge later if at all possible and the PC’s aren’t set up to spam attacks of opportunity at attempts to disengage from combat. Still, even if they’re sticking firmly to formula in that respect at least this is unusual in not only using dragons, but lots of them at once and packs a decent amount of flavour into it’s small size. Another one that’s decent enough on it’s own merits but not very satisfying when trying to consume this whole issue as a single meal.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002



part 5/10



The Storm Lord's Keep: Last issue they did an adventure designed to take you from 20th level into epic realms. Now they have one to keep those 21st level characters busy for a little longer before the DM has to come up with everything themselves. James Wyatt takes us up to the Sulhaut mountains, where the cloud giants are seeking revenge because another adventuring party slew the Storm Lord’s daughter. The PC’s happen to be in the way when he attacks the village containing the last one, with no concern for collateral damage. Unless they act fast, most of the village will be scry & fried by weather magic before he sends in a team of giants riding rocs to finish off any survivors. (ie, you, since you have far more hp & better saves than all these NPC’s) Despite their overwhelming power, the giants will use decent tactics on top of that so they’re still a significant challenge for a party of that level, particularly if you’re still trying to save other people rather than just thinking about yourselves. Presuming you survive the fight and saved at least one other person, you’ll get to hear the backstory. You’d better go and fight him, or run far far away and protect yourself from scrying, (and deal with the guilt of knowing that he’ll be destroying lots more villages before some other heroes successfully stop him) because more attacks will be along every few hours until you do. Of course, he’s up in his cloud island, so you not only need to expend some magic flying or teleporting up there, but also on shielding from the cold and thin air once you arrive, possibly facing further opposition from flying giants and thunder worms along the way. Once there, you have a large castle to sneak or fight your way through, with plenty of attention paid to both how it’s guarded and day-to-day life there. Of course, the Storm King will be in the very highest and hardest to reach part of it, shielded from scrying, so unless the players are particularly genre savvy, they’ll wind up going through a whole load more challenges before they get a chance to dissuade him from his rampage. If you do simply kill him without engaging in conversation, you find out the hard way that he wasn’t simply doing this out of spite. His daughter’s soul had been trapped in a gem by the surviving adventurer from earlier and he wanted to raise her because they’re part of an ancient bloodline keeping a Chichimec imprisoned. With both of them dead, you have an even more apocalyptic and impossible to reason with threat unleashed upon the world. So like the other big adventure this issue, you have an obvious solution that involves pure violence, but if you think to talk to people and do some research with the magical divination powers you could easily have bought at that level, there’s an easier and less violent alternative ending that you could discover. That puts this well up from last issue’s high level adventure, as it’s considerably less fragile when put up against an over-optimised party and is designed to make for an interesting story however they react to it, with enemies that are proactive and use their powers intelligently. That’s how you make epic levels interesting, not moving them in a straight line when they have so many other ways to get from A to Z.



Table Talk: The editorial this time is mostly about putting the spotlight on one of their favourite D20 companies. Necromancer Games have been consistently popular since their first releases, with their slogan of “Third Edition rules, First Edition feel” capturing all the people who never stopped playing old school style and felt alienated by TSR’s direction over the course of the 90’s. Now they’re releasing the Tome of Horrors, a mammoth collection of monsters from previous editions that haven’t got official stats from WotC yet. Good thing they haven’t got strict about asserting the concept of Product Identity for the monsters that don’t have a preexisting mythological basis. So this is a reminder that we’re still a few years away from when the WotC higher-ups would get cold feet about the concept of the OGL and start trying to close the door after the horses were already well and truly out of the stable. There haven’t been any big crashes yet, it’s all one big unruly community with new companies joining all the time, leapfrogging off each other’s advancements in a way that was previously impossible and there’s room for both trying new things and bringing back old ones that fell out of fashion. Before you know it, that’ll be over, it’ll coalesce into a few big companies dominating once again and people will be nostalgic for this era of gaming as well.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002
Table Talk: Necromancer Games

I really liked their Wilderlands of High Fantasy products from Necromancer Games. Many of them were just the original materials with updated 3.0E stats. When Mayfair released their City-State of the Invincible Overlord product in the 90s, they glammed up the place -- it had multiple parks and a spread-out map; the original was a crammed-together, dirty, busy city that felt much more plausible and "realistic." Necromancer Games went more for the plausible, grittier style of location, and it worked.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002



part 6/10



First Watch: This continues to mix previews, the release roundup and spotlights. First up, they answer another question that’s been on my mind. They said there would be 4 example settings in the D20 Modern corebook, but in the end we only got three. Well, here’s the 4th. Genetech, a world where animal hybrids and augmented people are being produced in secret labs and have just become public knowledge. How will the world react and how will the PC’s deal with it, particularly if they’re one of said hybrids trying to gain legal rights, public acceptance, or simply escape from the people that created them? Definitely room for some interesting roleplaying in there, but it could also get rather dark. Exactly when and why they decide to cut it I still don’t know, but hopefully we’ll find out more in the next few issues.

The release roundup is full of familiar names and games. AEG’s Spycraft gets it’s first setting, Shadowforce Archer, pitting psychic superspies against conspiracy weirdness. Sounds pretty similar to WotC’s agents of psi, but then again, we’re seeing lots of competing takes on the same concept lately. On the other hand, Atlas Games doing Nyambe, their take on fantasy Africa, has far fewer competitors than you would think given the size and diversity of the source material. Avalanche Press are also going travelogue with Terror of the Aztecs, which sounds pretty self-explanatory. Citizen games engage in a little affirmative action, hiring an all-female team to do Way of the Witch. Fantasy Flight games are also busy with their series of class-based sourcebooks, with the wizard one out next. Goodman Games are a little more specialist, releasing the Complete Guide to Velociraptors, with plenty of other dinos on the way if this one sells. Green Ronin release the Pocket Grimoires, which collect lots of the best OGL spells from all sorts of sources and put them in an easy to carry format. Malhavoc release Requiem for a God, in which Monte Cook returns to another of the topics he did in 2e and talks about the adventure possibilities in gods dying. Mongoose does so many that they can’t even be bothered to list them all this time, but the most notable is a D20 adaption of the Slaine comic series. Mystic Eye Games takes on one of the topics WotC is a bit too sensible and concerned with game balance to really do justice to anymore, in Wild Spellcraft. Necromancer Games converts Rob Kuntz’s obscure adventure Tower Chaos to 3e so a whole new generation can be baffled and die in true 1e style. Finally, Paradigm Concepts brings back spell decks, another of those relatively obscure 2e supplements that WotC probably couldn’t make a profit on, but a smaller company could do quite nicely with.

Talking of Paradigm Concepts, they’re also the company getting a profile this time. They’ve been doing Living Arcanis with the RPGA for a year now, which has turned out to be a pretty good deal for them in terms of attracting new customers. Like the Living Death adventures, they’re taking care to give their adventures multiple outcomes rather than being pure railroads, so the players can influence the metaplot. They’re also working with Green Ronin to incorporate the Freeport material into their setting, In another instance of the OGL allowing easy cross-pollination. As usual, this is firmly focussed on the positives, but since they’re still going today, they must have been doing something right all these years. Hopefully we’ll see more from them before they cut out the d20 material and go back to being all adventures, all the time.



Bolt and Quiver are captured by zombie security guards and condescended to by the Xorn secretary.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002



part 7/10



News from the Top: They lose another long-running staff members this time. Sean Connor has got himself another (probably better paid) day job outside the RPGA. He’s still going to volunteer where possible, but someone else will have to take up the slack. Thankfully Tom Ko has been brought back after being lost during the last round of cost-cutting so they won’t need to start training someone new from scratch. Sometimes it can feel like running in place. They do have more positive news though. After many years of irritation, they’ve finally managed to bring their databases into compliance with both USA and european law, letting them merge the two, which makes a lot of admin easier. Now they just have to hope the politicians don’t pass more laws that don’t understand how computers or the internet work, resulting in more annoying rigamarole trying to maintain compliance and slowing the whole internet down with GDPR popups. Gee, what are the odds. :sighs heavily:



Improved Initiative: Prestige classes continue to be one of the most popular new things for 3e designers to add, with an increasing number of variants. There’s the slightly less prestigious Advanced classes, which are mostly designed so you can start them at 4th level. Now they’re also adding Legendary classes, which might or might not have higher mechanical prerequisites than regular ones, but also have story-based ones that force you to actually engage with the setting and complete specific quests to join. In return you’re supposed to make them more powerful in general, but you also can’t gain levels in any other classes until you’ve maxed them out. In practice this may not work out, since the powers they gain don’t scale with your level the way core ones do, which means they may become trivial at higher levels. This is particularly the case for the Witch-Queen, an example one that’s obviously supposed to be a primary spellcaster, yet doesn’t advance your spellcasting progression at all, and offers special abilities that are just plain worse than the 8th & 9th level spells you’re sacrificing. This all feels like a return to the bad kind of kits in 2e, trying to balance mechanical bonuses with story penalties that in practice aren’t penalties at all, merely more opportunities for roleplaying. Not everyone who’s eagerly converted to 3e and started writing for it really understands the math that underpins it, and when they get it wrong, it’s much more of a problem than when everyone was working in completely different ad hoc ways. Another sign that there’s still a lot of experimentation going on in 3e design, not all of which is successful. Good thing we have the charop boards to rip the bad ones apart and warn regular players to steer clear of them.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002



part 8/10



Thunderball Rally: After last issue made Spelljammer sensible, it’s pleasing to see that they do still have some wacky left in them. Wacky races to be precise, as this is a throwback to the action-racing mayhem of the 1970’s. Do you have what it takes to win at the hottest illegal cross-country racing events where any dirty trick goes? Not a genre that would work as well today, now the police don’t even need to worry about chasing you, they can just catch you on the speed cameras and send you the fines in the post. You’d need a hacking section to disable all that along the route in advance, which takes the spontaneity out of it even if it would be another interesting adventure for the crew involved. But one step at a time. Let’s see if they can make the driving mini-game fun before worrying about beating Shadowrun at the futuristic subsystems.



Race Crew Generation: This is based off the D20 Modern chassis and shows how their development process is proceeding. Core classes are now firmly 10 levels long. The bonus feat & skill points for being human are precalculated for you in the base stats, since this is set on earth without any supernatural elements. Action points are given in slightly more generous quantities, but still randomly rolled and not as many as the final version. Vitality & Wound points have been replaced by hit points, but this was obviously done last minute, as one of the classes still has a feature (a single bonus hp every 3 levels) that only make sense if it was originally written using the VP/WP division. Multiclassing has no restrictions. There’s only three new classes detailed here though, so you won’t be able to differentiate your characters that much unless you also use classes from other sources. (which they encourage you to do.) The three new classes are the Ace, the Navigator and the Bodyguard, which mostly gain 1 special power from a small list or bonus feat per level, like other D20 modern core classes. Plenty of interesting stuff to analyse here, and it’s good to see them accepting that they can’t cram in everything to make a standalone game every time. So far, decent enough, even if they still need a little bit of tweaking to make them fit with the final version of D20 Modern.

 

[RealAlHazred]

This is another mini-game I kind of wanted to try, but to be fair, I was never that into the cross-country race movies as a youth so this probably wasn't written for me. But the idea looked really cool, and I liked the idea of being able to mix-and-match elements. I vaguely remember having the idea to mix this with Shadow*Chasers, where maybe some of the "humans" are actually supernatural creatures in disguise. Maybe the sinister race crew manager is secretly a mind flayer or something. But the idea refused to gel, probably because I wasn't into the source material.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002



part 9/10



Skills: This is the lightest skill list yet, stripping things down to 25, 3 of which are new. Demolitions, Repair and Treat Injury get described again just in case you didn’t get issue 150, unchanged apart from a minor tweak to the demolitions DC’s and the switch from VP/WP to HP. Falling damage is worse than normal if you’re travelling at high speed and get knocked from your vehicle, but you can mitigate that with a good jump or tumble roll. As usual, there’s a different list of knowledge categories to reflect the time and place. Not a great amount to comment on here then. As long as they do their job without causing undue hassle they can stay in the background where they belong.



Feats: This is a little larger and more interesting, although there’s still a lot of repeated stuff from the previous issues. Discarding the inevitable +2 to two skills ones and basic proficiency bits, new ones worth commenting on include Back Seat Driver, so you can spend action points to boost vehicle rolls even when you’re not driving, Clipping, making you better at sideswiping other vehicles without damaging your own, Dirt Track Demon, for the off-road specialists, Drive-By, for whacking people without disrupting your driving, Vehicle Combat, which gives you an extra chance to avoid vehicle damage, and Window Dive, which obviously isn’t meant to be taken literally in every vehicle but reduces the time to hit the ignition and get driving from a full-round action to a move one. Fame and Infamy are renamed Circuit Hero & Heel. Heroic Surge is as useful as ever in a setting without magical Hasting. You shouldn’t have to worry about running out of things to buy over 10 levels. They do still have the trap feat of Extra Action Points though, evidently the long-term badness of taking that hasn’t been pointed out yet. While the overall amount of options you have is going up and they are tweaking things to fit each setting, it’s becoming obvious that there will be a lot of repeated material going through all these minigames in quick succession. As if I haven’t been complaining about the repetitiveness in the Dungeon side as well lately.



Weapons & Combat: There’s also a fair amount of repetition in here, as they explain how modern equipment interacts with the 3e action economy, then list a whole bunch of new weapons. To their credit, these aren’t just a direct copy-paste from the Shadow Chasers ones, but a list more suited to the 70’s road warrior milieu, including nunchuks, machetes and tire irons. Most of them are pretty cheap as well, you’ll have no problem outfitting your guys unless you pour every penny into your souped up ride. (which will admittedly be a temptation) Another bit that does the job, but doesn’t leave me much to say about it, because it’s not the main focus of the game.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002



part 10/10



Start Your Engines: There are some similarities here with the ship-to-ship combat rules last issue, but also a fair number of differences too. They actually have to worry about speeds being somewhat realistic when compared to human movement rates on a grid, since people have a lot more experience with cars than spaceships. This may well involve using a different scale battlemat for your cars to your humans if you don’t want them to go off the table in a couple of turns. If you have Matchbox or Hot Wheels models those will serve nicely. There are a decent number of stunts listed that you can try, but also a decent number of consequences beyond just straight-out destruction that you can suffer for failing at them. If you can’t be bothered to fully stat out the NPC crews, they have a simplified system for that, which definitely makes sense if you just want to get to the action. The number of vehicles and ways you can customise them is also decent but not comprehensive, but unlike last issue, erring on the side of lighter play is a good thing and it doesn’t feel like this is screaming out for a larger page count to fill in obviously missing details. I’d still have to test it out to see how well the rules handle in actual play, but I feel a little more enthusiastic about doing so than the previous three mini-games, where I already have a similar property to compare it to and in many cases find it wanting.



Hitting the Streets: We finish things off with 6 pages of bibliography and roleplaying advice to get you in the spirit of ’76. World events, sports, scientific breakthroughs, popular books, music and movies of the year. The movies are probably the most important bit, with things like Vanishing Point or Death Race 2000 instantly showing you how the game is supposed to be played. You start slightly before the race, so you can get in a bit of roleplaying with the other competitors. You have to deal with rough terrain, fights with the other drivers, traps and if you’re not careful, attracting the attention of the law. Many of the competitors will crash or spin out during the course of the race, sometimes fatally, sometimes able to patch things up with a quick pit stop and get back in the game. Despite all the shenanigans, the final stretch of the race will probably be close-fought by the remaining cars. Then once you win, you blow the cash on partying and upgrades and do it all over again. Definitely sounds like fun once, but can it sustain an extended campaign? Or would it be best to use it as a one-off in a larger modern game? Anyone actually try this and how did it turn out?



The adventures in this one are quite samey, but at least it’s in good ways, encouraging recurring antagonists and solving problems without resorting to violence every time. On the other hand, the minigame is the most interesting yet, picking a distinctive topic and covering it in a way that doesn’t overstay its welcome, although there are still a few easily spotted design flaws. They might not have the same level of polish as the official D&D books, but I’m definitely interested to see just how many other niche topics they’ll manage to cover before the format changes again. Onto the next issue, which is apparently going to be brought to us by the letter O.

 

[(un)reason]

Thunderball Rally recruitment thread is up.