TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 62: August 1991



part 5/5



The Living City 2: The second Raven's Bluff article this issue is somewhat more useful than the first. A half-deaf cranky old mapmaker, who's maps include places not only all across Toril, but a few places from other worlds as well? There's plenty of fun to be had in both short-term roleplaying and long-term plot hooks in that. You can spend money to make your expeditions easier, and make money by mapping places further afield that he hasn't got in his collection yet. It's one of the most important parts of old school gaming, along with tracking encumbrance, and neglecting them is one of the quickest ways to make you feel like you're playing a video game with unlimited hot-swappable inventory space rather than exploring a real world. If you want a campaign to last for years, you need to build up the little details and make them feel like their explorations are meaningful, with definite progress, but not escalating to god mode too quickly. This seems like a clear enough picture to me.



RPGA Network Retail Members: Over the years, a fair number of companies and games shops have signed up to offer discounts for RPGA members, in the hope of driving further traffic. But as it's usually mentioned just once when they start, it might be a bit tricky to keep track of what options you can apply this too. So here's an alphabetical list of all 52 places in the USA you'll get special privileges at if you flash your membership card while making a purchase. Let's hope it doesn't go out of date too quickly.



Paperwork Etiquette: Tim Beach gives us his first communique as a member of staff to tell us what he'd like to improve about the network, and what he wants to see from us. Obviously tardiness in filling out and submitting your tournament scoring sheets is the number one irritant, with other basic errors like not titling your submissions, remembering to put a name or return address, or just sending a computer disk with no indication of what's on it or what brand of computer you use it with close behind. There's also some less objective preferences, like a list of cliches in adventure writing that he's thoroughly sick of, and will reject with great prejudice if you persist in regurgitating them. On a similar note, more non AD&D adventure submissions would be very welcome in general, to keep the variety up for the RPGA staff and give people more choices in what they play when they go to big conventions. In return, he'll do his best to simplify the forms and speed up turnaround on his end of the submissions & approvals process. Good luck. They come in all fresh-faced and optimistic, thinking they can do a better job than their predecessor. Most are wrong, and will be ground down by the system soon enough. We shall see just how much change he can actually implement. At least he's managed to make what could have been just dry bureaucratic lists interesting with a bit of wit and personal asides that help us get to know him as a writer. I look forward to hearing more from him.



Wolff & Byrd are apparently not immune to time loops, which is a real problem when your client is in a Groundhog Day scenario, as they'll have to explain themselves over and over again.



An issue that was oddly high on silliness, particularly considering the time of year. That definitely made it interesting, but also meant it had a fairly low ratio of articles I'd actually want to use in a real campaign. I'd miss it if it went away completely, but this is too much. Curious that they do have so much more of it in general than Dragon or Dungeon. Is that because they get more joke submissions proportionally, or just because they don't have the same quantity in their slush pile to choose from overall? Or is it just because Jean & Skip are more inclined towards making cheesy jokes in general than Roger & Barbara? Given the books and adventures they've written themselves I suspect it might be the latter. Oh well. Their tenure will end eventually, and then I'll be able to test that theory. Let's keep on moving and see what next issue brings us.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 63: September 1991



part 1/5



35 pages. When your neck is thicker than your head, what are you doing with all that bulk. The amount you can eat or breathe is still limited by the size of the openings up the top. Plus those scales look like they seriously hinder flexibility. This kind of thing is why lizards get outcompeted by mammals in many ecological niches. When you can get up earlier, stay up later, and squeeze into smaller spaces, that makes up for the difference in strength and resilience quite effectively. Let's see what plot ideas lie within, and if they're best solved with brute force or brains.



Bookwyrms: Unsurprisingly given the cover, their promotional article is a Dark Sun one. Get ready for the pleasantly alliterative sounding Prism Pentad. Unlike many of their series, where they have multiple authors trading off the same characters so they can publish the overall story faster, making it much easier for tonal or continuity issues to slip in, this is going to be entirely from the pen of Troy Denning. His Forgotten Realms work has proven popular enough that they're giving him much freer rein to make sweeping, permanent changes to the setting as a whole based on what the characters do in his books. They may wind up regretting this, mainly due to the overall TSR code of conduct mandating happy endings to all their stories, which means they can't help making Athas a less grim & messed up place over time and ruining the original mood. Expanding the map could somewhat mitigate that, but then raised the question of why there were so few sorcerer-kings, all clustered in one tiny part of the world, how they managed to exterminate all their respective species worldwide (or even if they did, or just did a few thousand miles before getting bored), and then decided to just ignore the rest of the world again. Once again this shows the flaw in your worldbuilding consisting mostly of getting Brom to draw a bunch of fukken awesome heavy metal album covers, and then deciding how they fit together into a coherent geography & history afterwards. It's more superficially impressive than the Forgotten Realms, but built on shakier foundations, and that'll catch up with them in a few years. Oh well, it's still a fun read, and there's plenty to be learned from their mistakes. It's good to go through it again from another slightly different perspective.



Notes from HQ: This month's actual play stories are some more decidedly whimsical ones from ConnCon, Connecticut's finest. The featured tournament had the PC's sent on a mission to bake a cake for grandma. (yes, she's all of their grandmother, must have been pretty busy back in the day ) In a fit of insanity, Jean decided to use all three recipes that featured in the module at once to bake a real cake for the writer as thanks. The result …… definitely had a lot of flavour. Fortunately, there were hundreds of attendees, so no-one had to consume enough of it to kill them. Well, this seems like the kind of silliness people will definitely remember, and hopefully come back next year to see more of. Another reminder that they don't cover LARP stuff as much as they could. It is odd in hindsight just how little TSR tapped into that quite lucrative potential market, avoiding it for stupid ideological reasons. They are still trying to improve their coverage on non TSR tabletop RPG's though, with the latest competition being Megatraveller gadgets. Let's hope people submit some suitably inventive things, and not just bigger, badder lasers. Al in all, things seem to be going pretty well here.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 63: September 1991



part 2/5



Letters: The first letter wonders how you can get hold of the old Rod of Seven Parts tournament adventure by Frank Mentzer. Sorry, that was never properly formatted and officially published, and while TSR will release an adventure of the same name in a few years, it'll be completely different in details. (and much longer)

Second is from a newbie wondering where they explain all the scoring and ranking stuff. They did an introductory issue once, but that's a few years out of date. Just go to conventions, participate in official tournaments and have fun. Don't worry about the precise numbers, as they'll update them every year or two anyway.



The Everwinking Eye has an editing fail, reprinting exactly the same article from issue 60. How very baffling. What went wrong with their production process that caused this glitch to get all the way through without being spotted? Or did they just have a shortage of material? Seems unlikely, given it's Ed we're talking about here. Either way, this is pretty disappointing and annoying.



The Circle of Swords: Another single page logic puzzle to amuse and confound. Mayor Oliver O'Kane has to choose from six swords in a dragon's hoard to fight the beast. Each is strong against a different monster, so only one will give him a decent chance of success. Each has a different shape, is made from a different metal, and has a different gemstone set in it's hilt. Can you figure out by process of elimination how to save his life? These continue to be pretty decent time-fillers.



Crisis in the Cragmoors: The adventure this issue is only 4 pages, and so is short and linear even by their tournament adventure standards. Your basic rescue the kidnapped maiden plot. Ok, so she's a sorceress, not a princess this time, but once they're bound, gagged & stripped of any magical items or spell components, all those spells are useless until the edition changes and you can add still or silent spell to your feat list. You need to follow the (thankfully large and obvious) trail of the troll that carried her off and catch up to them within 4 (real and in-game) hours, otherwise she'll be dinner. So you just follow the list of a dozen encounters with various dumbass monsters who attack without provocation from one to the next in order until you reach the end. No significant choices, no accounting for if you use flight or divination to take a more direct route, etc. The kind of thing you could program a computer to do, largely ignoring the roleplaying part of RPG. Thoroughly dull reading and not what I'm looking for in adventures at all, with that nice little cherry of cliched sexism on top. I'll definitely pass on this one.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 63: September 1991



part 3/5



The Living Galaxy: Roger finally finishes the series on spaceship PC's, and goes back to something far more basic and generic. A reminder that it's your flaws that really make a character interesting, not their powers. Be it simply low ability scores in D&D, more complex weaknesses and limitations in systems that handle that, or merely personality flaws that are only roleplayed without any mechanical effects, it's what they can't or won't do that'll really define them in a long-term campaign. Perfection is boring, and while the character might strive towards it IC, you need to have enough detachment from your character to put those flaws in and make their life more challenging and unique. As usual, this basic principle is padded out with lots of examples from various systems, but that's pretty much all it boils down too. It's not bad, but we've seen it plenty of times before, so I can't get particularly worked up about it in either direction.



With Great Power: While Roger only had one idea and spun it out over several pages, Dale jumps from one short topic to another in quick succession. First, talking about a few problem powers. The always annoying superspeed, plus the slightly more situationally plot breaking invisibility and insubstantiality, and the sometimes powerful, sometimes useless ability to control highly specific things like Magneto. Then some ideas that are common in D&D, but not covered by FASERIP, surprise rolls & initiative modifiers. Some more minor errata on magic and karma rules. And oddest of all, recommending a bunch of superhero books by other companies that cover things they don't, like building your own superheroic campaign that doesn't use the established Marvel characters. It's interesting precisely because it is so scattershot, just a bunch of ideas that happened to be passing through his brain recently. It shows that the system has been going long enough now that it really needs a new edition to put all the lessons they've learned in the past 7 years in, although I hope they'd be incorporated in a better edited form. Otherwise keeping track of all the optional and altered rules in supplements and errata will definitely slow things down.



Naming Military Units: Greg Detwiler has been contributing to Dragon and many other RPG products since 1985, but only made his first appearance in here last issue. But like Ed, now he's got his claws into Polyhedron, you can expect to see him again more frequently. Such as this amusing little bit of generic advice, talking about naming conventions of military units throughout history. You need something short enough to shout out in a fraught scenario, but preferably also memorable and badass sounding that'll strike fear into the heart of your enemies. Animal name & colour seems to be a very common combination that shows up over and over again, but there's a fair amount of variation in what different colours imply in different cultures, and obviously also what animals are commonly known in the area. (Which doesn't necessarily mean common, as the frequency of lions on european heraldry demonstrates) Current or famous ex-leaders, the town they come from, or something related to their fighting specialty are also fairly frequent choices. With an A to Z of common elements for you to combine, this looks like a pretty decent time-saver for when you need to creates several of these in short succession. No objection to seeing some more material from him over the next few years.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 63: September 1991



part 4/5



Into The Dark: This column is shorter than usual due to a VCR malfunction at James's. As a result he also hasn't had time to think of a clever theme, and gone back to your basic swords & sorcery flicks. Has he managed to find any he can unreservedly recommend this time?

The Princess Bride gets the full 5 stars for it's metatextual humor, excellent casting, writing and plot twists. Now there's one that's definitely stood the test of time, with many of it's best lines still being regularly used memes to this day. Let's keep on using those words, even if they do not mean what they thought they meant in the original context.

Fire and Ice sees Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta team up for another heavily rotoscoped bit of fantasy animation, full of overmuscled heroes, scantily clad women and grotesque monsters. It's all very formulaic and regressive, even at the time, and probably looks even worse to modern eyes. I'm not hugely tempted to hunt it down and test that theory.

The Barbarians isn't particularly great, but James does give it credit for being the movie most like an actual D&D session he's seen, with monsters that show up for no reason other than to fight the main characters, and dialogue that's anachronistically pop cultural in exactly the way a bunch of nerds sitting around the table playing a pair of badass but dumb barbarians would be. There are even better depictions of gaming based media now, but it was the 80's, you had to take what you could get, and this is at least tolerable in a cliched kinda way.



Chemcheaux: What would normally be the Living City column doesn't get the usual branding, and with good reason too, as while it mentions Raven's Bluff, it's not the primary focus. Slade, who if you remember your RPG history is responsible for cataloguing the entirety of TSR's magical item output in a few years time, foreshadows this with the complex system of magical item shops in his own campaign world. They do have a branch in Raven's Bluff, but as it's all rather higher magic than the default FR setting, and being able to buy any magical item you want upsets game and economic balance, they're nobbled by local regulations severely restricting who they can sell too and at what prices, so they don't undercut the locals with their ability to mass produce things. (with a full two pages devoted just to these laws and legal wranglings.) Another four are devoted to the ridiculously powerful founder, Prismal, (Wizard 35/Priest 35/Monk 14, evidently they never suffered from the 2e Monk & Assassin purges that swept Oerth & Toril) how he founded the franchise & rose to power, and some of the struggles he's faced in his multi-century lifespan. A story involving a fair bit of plane-hopping, some complex scheming, and the invention of multiple custom spells & magical items, it's all much more gonzo than the usual Raven's Bluff fare, as well as quite a bit longer than the average article. It's definitely an interesting read, but the kind that you incorporate into your own campaign with caution, because once you've opened the Pandora's box of easy plane-hopping and magic marts, it's very hard to close without hitting the reset button and starting a new game from scratch. It demonstrates the tensions between wanting to have Speljammer & Planescape stuff that crosses over with their other settings, but not have it advance the overall state of technology in those worlds and destroy the themes for regular fantasy dungeoncrawlers, so any otherworldly visitors remain rare or secretive, keeping things in a state of artificial stasis. All a bit frustrating really. That's the problem with running a shared world. You have to be extra careful about these sorts of things if you want to maintain consistency and playability.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 63: September 1991



part 5/5



Extra Enchantments: After a long and involved article that would be quite game-changing if incorporated, we go back to the disconnected collections of spells that you can easily introduce to a game individually, collectively, or not at all as you choose. Let's see how powerful and useful these are.

Stairway lets your group ascend or descend safely at anywhere between a 30 and 60 degree angle, which is probably more useful for accessing awkward spots than levitate. Unglamorous, but you never know when you'll need it in a big, awkward dungeon.

Guardian is way less useful for an adventuring party than a good fireball, but for a wizard running a dungeon, sometimes you want a fighter of magical energy to block a corridor or doorway. Unfortunately, it doesn't scale with level, so it'll become mostly useless against any determined invaders that are a threat to you.

Serrel's Minor & Major Enchantments are another way to create those basic AC & save boosts that are then made permanent on magical items. We had one of those just 3 issues ago, so this is another case of editorial laziness. If it's that popular an idea it should be in a book, not getting several different variants in their periodicals.

Serrel's Confining Sphere is basically wall of force, but spherical. If spells were more flexible, you'd be able to do both with one memorisation and choose freely, but that's what you get for living in a D&D universe and not Mage: the Ascension or Ars Magica.

Incendiary Entrapment is basically delayed blast fireball, but with slightly reduced damage, and greatly increased delay, so you can cast it on a thing, and it'll go off months or years later when interfered with. Another generally handy one when you're building your own dungeons, but PC's probably won't be in a position to get the most use out of. Meh.



Wolff & Byrd have to deal with illegal aliens coming to our planet, taking our jobs, and sleeping with our men like the shameless green-skinned hussies they are. We need to build a dome to keep them out!



A second issue in a row where the ratio of hits to misses is relatively low, between the editing snafus and the general degree of goofiness. It makes Polyhedron feel like the goofy id of hardcore gamers, publishing things Dragon & Dungeon would decline because they have higher standards. It once again makes me glad I'm interleaving these things, to remind me just how differently the various departments of the same company are run. Better hop over and see how the other side is doing as we slide into horror season.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 31: Sep/Oct 1991



part 1/5



80 pages. How do you fight flying weapons? Sure you can whack them away with your own when they fly at you, but if you can't do any serious damage, some of them are going to get through your defences pretty quickly, especially when there's lots of them. It's not the kind of problem a paladin's powerset is equipped to deal with. This is why alive adventurers travel in parties. Let's see if these are adventures we want to get involved in, and if so, how easy it is to get out alive and financially better off.



Editorial: This is another of our irregular reminders how much hassle overland hiking really is, as Barbara gets a taste of the wilderness. Having plenty of armchair adventuring experience, she made sure she was well prepared with all the equipment she could think of. Then got promptly reminded about tracking encumbrance. Turns out more than half of what she thought she needed she didn't, and the one thing she really did need was tougher shoes. See, this is the big difference between 1st and 2nd level. Rope, 10 foot poles, holy water and wolfsbane are all good in specific situations, but skimp on the coat and shoes and you'll regret it every step of the way. As soon as you get your first big treasure haul and get it home you're going to fix that mistake ASAP. Course, when you're in the double digits you'll hopefully have bags of holding, flight, teleportation and other labor saving magics, so you can have the best of both worlds. Good luck getting there and keeping the campaign going long enough that you really get to enjoy the fruits of your labors.



Letters: The first letter nitpicks the details of regeneration. They only don't regenerate the amount of HP caused by their weakness. Yes, this does complicate tracking somewhat. It's no worse than brawling vs weapon damage for regular characters.

Second wants more puzzle and mystery based adventures that challenge the player's brains rather than their characters statistics. That's where the real roleplaying potential lies.

Third reminds people they can use their packaging efficiently as protective storage for their magazines. If you want to sell mint copies decades later at a profit, you need to plan ahead.

Finally, more generalised praise from someone who's used lots of their adventures over the years. Keep it up.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 31: Sep/Oct 1991



part 2/5



Beyond the Glittering Veil: We've had a couple of adventures designed to introduce spelljamming to regular parties, hopefully making it a properly integrated part of the campaign long term. Now we have one designed to do the same for psionics, gently lifting the veil on the powers of the mind that have probably been there all along, just unnoticed compared to more flashy spellcasters and monsters. As such, it only uses a fairly limited subset of the powers in the Complete Psionics Handbook, and a fair chunk of it's page count is devoted to explaining them so it can be functional even if you don't have it. Ancient mystics created a psionic gate between worlds. Unfortunately, the design was flawed, and in a very Pullmanesque twist Shadows from the void between worlds come through it and start spawn cascading the locals. The PC's just happen to be the only people in town with magic weapons that can hurt them, so they save the day, and then get volunteered for the much more epic quest of going the other way through the gate, finding out what's there and figuring out how to end the threat for good. In the process, they gain psionic wild talents if they didn't have them already, (with the option of them being temporary or permanent depending on if the DM wants to make psionics a long-term part of their campaign) and wind up on a dead world of eternal night, where they get to explore the mystic's ruined city and the few monsters that still live there. It's all both ambitious and packed with atmosphere, with the psionic elements used to freshen up familiar monsters and magic items in interesting ways. Seems like a pretty decent way to kick your campaign up a gear, and one much easier to keep it going afterwards than giving the PC's a spaceship. Definitely one to keep in mind if your game is starting to feel a bit stale with the same old dungeoncrawls and wilderness treks.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 31: Sep/Oct 1991



part 3/5



Telar in Norbia: Willie Walsh is back yet again, this time to take us on a camel ride to an arabian nights influenced story. The neighbouring cities of Telar and Sepron mutually annihilated each other in a brutal war several centuries ago, leaving behind the kind of ruins that are rich pickings for adventurers. If that wasn't enough to lure the PC's to the area, there's a whole load of political stuff going on between the nomads that currently roam the area, as they try to get enough water to survive without escalating to another full-blown war. This is escalated by the minions of Set being dicks and kidnapping the chief's daughter just as she's about to engage in a political marriage to secure peace between them. There's a lot of plot threads packed into what could have been a much simpler dungeon crawl here, giving you plenty of scope for both puzzle-solving and roleplaying, as well as extending the harsh overland travel and political manoeuvring bits. Even if you manage to kill the monsters and take their stuff, which is not an easy feat for spoilerific reasons, there's no neat happy ending either, unless you're equipped with some pretty impressive out of context powers. So while as interesting as usual from him, this is also pleasingly devoid of his usual tweeness, and will take real effort on the player's part to deal with both the short and long term ramifications of the adventure. This definitely looks like lots of fun with the right group and a DM that can deal with the open ended complexities.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 31: Sep/Oct 1991



part 4/5



A Local Legend: Even the short filler adventure this issue is heavy on atmosphere. Every 9 years, three people disappear mysteriously from the small town of Trellmont over the course of the winter. The PC's happen to pass through just as the cycle starts again. The locals are ignorant and superstitious, and will attempt to warn the PC's against getting involved. (which hopefully won't deter them) If they do take the mission, it's fairly short and easy, although the monster does have a trick that'll allow it to seem to die but actually survive and continue the cycle if they don't properly search the area and clean everything out, which will make them a recurring antagonist and come back to bite the PC's on the ass in the future. So this isn't too impressive if you treat it like a straightforward hack and slash encounter, but is pretty good as a bit of folklore. If you like perusing big books of real world local legends from across the globe, this is written in a way that hits the same buttons. If your PC's like getting into their roleplaying and detectiving, it seems worth using. Just don't expect it to fill more than a session at the very most.