TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 87: September 1993



part 3/5



Eye Of The Leviathan: Another issue, another tournament adventure that is both linear and jokey, making me roll my eyes. The PC's are hired by the ex-speaker of Raven's Bluff to retrieve some valuables recently stolen from his home. Unknown to both him and you, one of those is a powerful artifact, with a whole load of water and mind control powers. (which you will absolutely not be allowed to keep at the end if you realise that and try to pretend you failed in your mission to use it for your own benefit.) As usual for tournament adventures, there's no actual detective work involved in finding the culprit, you're pointed straight in the right direction to go from one encounter to the next. A bar fight at Embrol Sludges', which at least earns them a point for reusing established setting details from previous issues. A search along the dockfront that soon reveals the destination of the thieves, and only one ship headed in that direction so you don't get a choice of your companions. A pirate attack involving weresharks, who'll escape underwater with the artifact no matter how you roll in combat. Thankfully there's a plentiful supply of water breathing potions onboard so you can follow them. This leads you to a crashed spelljamming ship inhabited by a walrus called Googoogoojoob, who communicates purely in song, filled with 4th wall breaking joke cargo, and finally to the wereshark lair, which is another small linear dungeon, to finally confront them and their aboleth master, which is also played for comedy. It doesn't push the boundaries of worst adventure they ever done, since it's a decent length, doesn't have any racist jokes, and has some degree of choice in how you resolve the encounters, but it's still yet another formulaic railroaded tournament adventure that does intentionally irritating things, doesn't let you enjoy all the rewards for your hard work, and really not what I'm looking for. Another one to put on the boringly bad pile.



The Living Galaxy: Roger's topic this time is another fairly generic one we've seen plenty of times before. Advice on how to build NPC's? You need that for every system, not just sci-fi ones. Since trading cards are a current fad in the TSR offices, he suggests cutting out a photo of someone suitable to their personality & appearance, sticking it on a bit of cardboard and then writing the abbreviated stats on the other side. This forces to you cut things down to what's crucial to actual play instead of waffling on about backstories that the players will never actually engage with. If D&D alignments are getting boring as a shorthand for personality types, you could use Myers-Briggs instead. (I'd rather not, since it turns out the creator was a massive racist) The other suggestions are more familiar ones, giving you lots of good places to steal from, including real life of course, which is full of weirder characters than any novel. Just make sure you remix the details enough that it's not completely obvious, because does the world really need another James Bond or Robin Hood expy? Overall, I'll rate this one as above average because some of the ideas are genuinely novel even after all the other variants on this topic I've seen over the years. It's just a matter of using them all in the right combinations to get the best out of them.



The Fun Proficiency: A whole new proficiency just to have fun? In this edition, with our limited slot selection? I think not. Thankfully it isn't new crunchy stuff where the system least supports it, but one of our regular bits of advice on how to handle yourself at a convention. Learn how to pace yourself, a 3-4 day convention takes a lot of energy. Having fun is more important than strict adherence to the rules. Don't try to rules lawyer the GM unless you want your character to die horribly. Now that contrasts sharply with Gary's old pronouncements that tournament games must adhere strictly to the RAW to count, otherwise it's not fair on all the other people running through the same scenario around the world, but I guess that was always a theoretical ideal even he never adhered too. Making sure you show up to all your booked events on time and prepared never goes out of fashion though. (although once again, you need to strike a balance between being prepared and not giving yourself back problems by lugging a rucksack full of rulebooks around all weekend) Be polite to everyone, particularly the servicepeople, they do a lot of work for the pay they get (and at an RPG convention, many are volunteers) and can make your life a misery if you annoy them. Not that different from the previous times they've done this, but with the emphasis shifted around. I have no doubt we'll see it's like again in the future.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 87: September 1993



part 4/5



Bartering Made Easy: Dark Sun evidently isn't getting enough reader submissions, as this is merely a promotional excerpt from an upcoming book that's of no use once you've bought the thing. Like many a desert culture, Athasians treat the price label on items at a market as merely a starting suggestion - if you just pay that straight away word will soon get around that you're a soft touch and then the starting prices will be even higher. If you enjoy the process of haggling you can string it out into a whole minigame detailed here, pushing the price up or down in 10% increments over multiple rounds before finally reaching a conclusion somewhere in the middle. Because this is taken from Elves of Athas, elves are extra awesome at haggling, as they are at so many other things. So yeah, this is very specifically aimed at elf fangirls who love to spend entire sessions shopping. (Living in a valley is like, totally optional. )There's definitely a fair few of those working in the TSR offices and playing 2e, as also demonstrated by the existence of Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog. It's an interesting example of them taking D&D away from the dungeon and making something other than combat more crunchy and involved. It loses a few points as an article for being recycled, but it's still an interesting development worth commenting on, as a precursor to later edition's skill challenges. Just needs making a little more generic and less dependent on a single ability score, so you can't just reliably win by pumping your charisma to the max.



Into The Dark: James once again demonstrates his cynicism about what he reviews. There's a lot of Sword & Sorcery films out there, and most are formulaic low-budget drek. Get ready for one of those columns who's main purpose is to warn you away from most of the things in it.

Dragonslayer is a familiar one if you're a long-time follower of my Let's Reads, as they did a big special feature on it in ARES magazine at the time. It gets the highest score this time round, as it does actually have decent writing and special effects, but it's still ponderously slow and dominated by shades of brown. Peter MacNicol works much better as a comedy actor than a heroic lead. It's not going to make many people's top ten fantasy movies this far in the future.

The Warrior & the Sorceress is a blatant rip-off of Yojimbo with added fantasy elements. If you watch them back to back you'll see just how formulaic and obvious the copying is, while lacking the quality of the original. Or you could not bother, since it's already been done for you.

Lionman II: The WitchQueen is one of those cases where James is baffled how the first one got a sequel given it's quality. Turns out it was bankrolled by the guy playing the villain, making it a vanity project. Like most vanity projects, it may have some good ideas, but many of the technical aspects are lacking, the quality of the rest of the actors is highly inconsistent, and the english dubbing does not improve matters. Another one probably bettered by many youtuber movies on a smaller budget.

Deathstalker III: The Warriors from Hell is mildly improved from the first two instalments, but still, this is another case where it's puzzling that they got this far in the first place, and will manage a 4th one before petering out altogether. I guess when you're this low budget, you don't need that many sales to turn a profit, and a good cover can lure in a lot of suckers at the video rental store.

Sorceress also gets a low overall rating, but a slightly more positive review, as it at least manages to be interestingly bad with it's cheesy dialogue and immature humour. When they don't take themselves too seriously, it's easier to forgive the bits that don't work.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 87: September 1993



part 5/5



Take A Byte: As we also saw in Dragon 171, Jim Ward knows little about the technical aspect of programming computer games, but he knows what he likes, and one thing he really likes is sending the programmers into a panic by asking them to do something that sounds like a cool idea, but is actually a pain in the ass to make work on a computer, with no regards to deadlines. This article does mention various upcoming games, but is more an interview of him and his part in the creative process. He wants to have a decent story that isn't too far from the setting the game is set in, and to use plenty of different settings, although since the Forgotten Realms sells the best, it obviously winds up getting the most. At the same time, he wants the games to be comprehensible to non tabletop players, as that's a whole other lucrative market they can tap into if they can become a household name amongst casuals. So he pokes around at every level in the design process, often resulting in several month delays when he orders something to be changed. I guess a team does need people who's only connection with gaming is playing the end result to check if it's actually fun or not, but he does sound pretty annoying to work for. He was definitely more useful as a writer rather than upper management, but I guess when you've been with a company for over a decade, being promoted above your skillset is a common problem, as it even has it's own trope name. Probably another of those things that contributed to TSR's downfall long-term.



Raven's Bluff cracks down on illicitly created magical items! From now on, all items purchased or won in Living City adventures need to be properly receipted. Any character caught with items that they can't properly justify will be summarily removed from play! If you're guilty of this, the best thing to do is quietly erase them from your character sheet before the next time you attend a convention and we'll say no more of it. Kinda depressing that they need to punish it so harshly, but I guess it was inevitable that someone would doctor their sheet so egregiously that they couldn't ignore the problem any longer. Still, that's a fairly significant development in their history that's definitely worth noting. How much pushback will they get in the letters page, and how will they tweak the tracking system to make sure it isn't too bureaucratically onerous? Looking forward to seeing the response to this.



The Roving Eye: This would-be column makes a third and final appearance before succumbing to apathy, this time not even telling us what convention the photos are from, although it looks like somewhere with a warmer climate from the way people are dressed, plus one of the shots is outside. Seems like even the photographer can't put much focus and enthusiasm into this. It's not surprising this experiment didn't really catch on.



A distinctly irritating issue, with a lot of subpar articles, and signs of tension between the management and the regular members as they take shots at both players & judges to keep them under control. Still, that does also make it more historically significant than the average issue, so it's interesting in it's own way. Let's see what response their statements get in the near future.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 43: Sep/Oct 1993



part 1/5



80 pages. Dragon has been having dragons on it's cover every issue this year. It's been a while since we had one this large in Dungeon though. Just how high a level will you need to be to have a decent chance of taking on something that can rip down a whole castle, and will it involve searching for macguffins first? Time to see what kind of selection they've picked for us this issue.



Editorial: Another round of talking about the nonlinear tango here. It can be difficult to keep your balance when your feet are in different time zones, and your head is planning things several years into the future. In real terms this means that even if they accept your module, don't be surprised if it takes them a year or two to publish it, as every issue has to be a set length, so they need to pick bunches that fit together both in total word count and in being aimed at a good mix of levels, plus maybe some kind of thematic connection on top of that. Being patient definitely helps with that. Which also shows the problem with abrupt edition changes where they just completely stop supporting the previous ones, and freelancers haven't seen the new rules yet, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Will the average adventure quality take a nosedive when we hit 3e or 4e, and will it pull out again after a few years? After all, they can't pad the transition out with a load of system-light articles like Dragon did. Keep on tuning in and eventually we'll find out.



Letters: The first letter wonders how much it would cost to retrofit the Dama Rosa into a spelljamming vessel. Unless you can find some Arcane to sell you a helm, it's not an option anyway. You don't get to go into space unless the DM specifically lets you.

Second complains that most of their current adventures are too linear. You should see the Polyhedron ones! But yes, Dungeon is also getting worse about this lately and it's a cause for worry. Best thing you can do is to send in adventures that you would like to play in, give them plenty to choose from.

Third complains that they don't do any Battlesystem mass combat scenarios or solo adventures. Another thing they have no objection to covering, but don't get enough submissions for, like many of their campaign worlds. There are a few solo modules in the back catalog if you check out the index. If you want more mass combat, the writers guidelines are right here.

Fourth is one of those complaints that NPC's in adventures have power selections impossible for PC's of that level. Yup. Another indicator that they're currently prioritising storytelling over strict adherence to the RAW. No, you can't have those powers when you kill them and take their stuff, so nyah.

Fifth is from someone who likes more plot heavy adventures and finds randomised dungeoncrawls boring and easy to make by comparison. They need to do both to keep their playerbase as a whole happy.

6th is another rules nitpick, showing what happens when you get your square/cube law calculations wrong. Scale in general is one of those things RPG's struggle with, and frequently get fudged for the sake of story anyway.

Finally, someone who wants more adventures with psionics in, but only if they work thematically, rather than just plonking psionic monsters in a generic fantasy game. Fortunately, they do indeed have one of those this issue. Let's hope it pushes the envelope in the right way for you.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 43: Sep/Oct 1993



part 2/5



Jacob's Well: Another adventure that very clearly spells out it's primary influence in the preface. It's Alien in a fantasy campaign. The PC's are trapped in a remote trading post by bad weather, with a newly-born Slaad. Over the next few days, it'll go from relatively weak but sneaky tadpole thing to full-grown frog thing able to infect people and subject them to chestburster situations in turn. Can you catch it before it does, or will you lose large quantities of the various NPC's trapped in here with you to it's depredations without ever seeing what's responsible? This gives you a fairly open-ended scenario with plenty of potential for roleplaying and ratcheting up the paranoia between actual attacks, trying to keep the NPC's from doing stupid counterproductive things, because of course they've never watched horror movies and don't know the tropes of these situations. It's not particularly consistent with slaad lore from other sources, (red slaad infections produce blue slaad and vice versa) so it's another case where they're prioritising what's cool for the current story over rigorous application of mechanics, but it's a pretty entertaining read taken on it's own merits, reminding us how to make familiar monsters feel weird and scary. Still seems very usable in a good variety of campaigns.



Moving Day: We've had several road trip adventures where you guard a caravan through various dangers, and some sea ones too, but I don't recall them doing it with a river journey before. So this is a variant on a familiar theme, but one that manages to stay interesting by mixing up the specifics. Most pertinent is that among the cargo is some cockatrices, which you REALLY don't want getting loose, plus an evil wizard wants to steal them to use in making magic items. You get a nice scenic river ride, with various increasingly blatant heist attempts to foil and a few unrelated challenges along the way. There's plenty of opportunities to fail at your mission without dying, and enough flavour encounters to serve as red herrings that being surly and responding to every threat with maximum force would be a bad idea. It's mostly linear, but in a naturalistic way rather than feeling like a railroad, gives you freedom in how you react to each encounter and won't fall apart if you make a single unexpected decision like many of the Polyhedron ones. It's just a relief to see that at least someone can do these kinds of adventures with style and without shoehorning in bad jokes every other encounter.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 43: Sep/Oct 1993



part 3/5



Mayhem at Midnight: The basic lore errors in this issue are particularly egregious this time. Black Robe Dragonlance wizards don't have access to Illusion/Phantasm spells! That's a Red Robe thing. (not that it stops treacherous side-switchers like Raistlin.) Since he's only a catalyst, and doesn't actually appear in the adventure, that's a completely unforced mistake as well that can be changed without affecting the adventure in any way. Anyway, said wizard sent a bunch of adventurers to collect Shimmerweed seeds for his research. They got them, but were eaten by ogres on the way home, spreading the seeds over a wide area. Now a Wyndlass uses their hypnotic powers as bait and eats people entranced by them. A simple synergistic creature combo encounter they could easily have fit in half a page, but padded out to three with backstory the players will probably never find out about. It does get points for using two less common creatures from a specific setting, but this is both bloated and sloppy despite it's smallness. Another case of 2e writers putting storytelling over mechanics. Which I suppose was always particularly common with Dragonlance, so it's in theme, but still annoying for anyone else trying to game in that world and maintain consistency.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 43: Sep/Oct 1993



part 4/5



King Oleg's Dilemma: The first adventure this issue was reliant on the trapping effect of winter weather to function. In contrast, here we have a far north summer adventure that takes advantage of the 20+ hour days and tiny nights to add some flavour. King Oleg of Borr hires the adventurers to engage in diplomatic relations with the nearby dwarf clans against marauding gnolls. There is a traitor in his court who will feed information to the gnolls and do their best to sabotage your attempts. Spend several days trekking up the mountains, facing rather more encounters than you would with just a random roll, until you come to an abandoned dwarven fort, where you're surrounded by the rest of the gnoll forces. If you blow the giant horn on the roof, the dwarves will hear it and arrive to save you in the nick of time. If not, you'll have to fight them off for several hours longer. A second road trip adventure this issue that's fairly linear in terms of what you face, but gives you plenty of freedom in how you deal with each individual encounter and encourages using your brains. Solid middle of the roader in terms of overall quality, easy to use in most campaigns but not going to change the course of them radically. No problems with this.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 43: Sep/Oct 1993



part 5/5



Into the Silver Realm: Steve Kurtz once again makes the cover adventure big, interesting and envelope-pushing, but also strongly story based and relatively linear, firmly marking him as one of their most 2eish of authors. What seems initially to be a simple dragonslaying mission for high level characters entangles the PC's in the aeons long conflict between the githyanki & githzerai. The 'yanks are doing their typical thing of hunting for a Silver Sword that was taken by previous adventurers a few decades ago, while also generally building up temporal power and red dragon servants in the area because they're smart enough to plan long term and you never know when it might be handy, while a single Zerth manipulates human agents under various disguises, including you, to bring about their downfall. Your strike on the dragon's lair turns out to be a lot tougher than expected due to the gang of supporting githyanki, and if you do beat them, you find that they're gathering the components to create large permanent planar gates. Your mysterious patron then turns up to deliver a load of exposition, disguise you as Githyanki, and send you through the gate to their fortress to find and sabotage the macguffins that'll destroy their gate and set their plans back by decades.

This second part is actually not too bad in terms of linearity, but it is very heavy on making it clear that you can't fight your way through a whole castleful of githyanki, so you need to use stealth and roleplaying if you want to get out alive. There's plenty of care and attention to detail put into the design of the NPC's, combining their magical and psionic abilities intelligently and working together with good tactics, which further reinforces the idea that this isn't an adventure you can just hack your way through and survive. It thinks about how the weird physics of the astral plane affects their day-to-day life, although it doesn't make the layout as 3D as I would have liked for a zero-G environment. As usual for him, it'll probably end with the PC's having to frantically make their escape at the end, and a dramatic explosion as the portal is destroyed with your enemies in close pursuit, so they'll wind up taking home only a small fraction of the treasure they could have got if they were able to kill everyone & loot everything. So he continues to have a strong, instantly recognisable authorial voice, and use a very particular formula for his adventures that most other writers don't. Overall, this is very much a Steve Kurtz adventure in both the good and bad ways. Like watching a Zack Snyder movie, that should make it clear whether it's right for your group or not.



Another issue that increases the proportion of linear adventures to sandboxes, showing that even with a few complaints in the letters section, this is a long-term trend that's probably going to get even worse before swinging back the other way. While the average quality and freedom of choice is still considerably better than the ones in polyhedron, it's still an irritating development. Let's at least hope we get a few more weird ones for specific settings out of the equation as well. Let's see what polyhedron has for us this horror season.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 88: October 1993



part 1/5



36 pages. One giant step for mankind looks like it'll be the last step for a man, as astronauts are about to meet a new world's natives and they don't seem friendly. That can definitely be scary, when you're billions of miles from home and no help could reach you in time even if your transmission gets out. Time to see what challenges are in this issue, and if they'll be a fair CR rating for the PC's.



Shatterzone Alien Contest: West End Games sponsors another contest for a game that's hasn't appeared in here before. Shatterzone is their new sci-fi setting that uses a variant of the Torg rules. What weird alien races are out there, waiting to be discovered? Winners get to appear in an official sourcebook! (provided you're willing to sign over all copyright to the company, as is standard for work for hire.) Can you come up with something iconic like Githyanki or Slaad that subsequent writers will build upon in the future? I should probably see if I can get hold of the book and find out how it turned out.



Notes From HQ: Last issue, they stepped up the enforcement of what items you can own and checking where you got them from, but it was only mentioned in a small note at the end of the issue. This time, they're making it very clear in the editorial. If you cheat on your character sheet, or play the same adventure multiple times at different conventions to grind more stuff easily, they will catch you, and you will face the consequences. The vast majority of players aren't doing this, but if they don't root out the bad apples, it'll spoil the fun for everyone else, and the bigger the RPGA gets, the more these things need to be consistently enforced. At least the RPGA is still growing, unlike Dragon's readership, and the number of people regularly attending conventions is also up again this year, with Dragoncon in particular setting a new records for number of tournament games run over the weekend. So a mixed bag of positive and negative news this issue, but at least it's all fairly interesting. Things could be going much worse for them.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 88: October 1993



part 2/5



Letters: First letter is on the question of what the RPGA should be focusing on. The answer is pretty much what they're already doing, but he would like to see more coverage of non D&D systems, and the computer column repurposed from promotion to showing you how to use computers to prepare & run games better. Since I'm not a fan of low content promotional articles either, that's a direction I fully agree with.

Second is another store that's added a discount for RPGA members. If you're in San Mateo, check them out.

Third is an Israeli gamer complaining about the lack of other gamers in the area. As I said last time, It's even worse in the neighbours. All you need to do is recruit half a dozen other people to form a club, and if that fails there's always advertising for penfriends in the classifieds.

Fourth is angry about the idea of the RPGA restricting how many tournaments a convention can run, and particularly how many adventure premieres or exclusives they can have. They don't like doing it either, but they only get so many adventure submissions to share out in the first place. They'll only do it if they have too, or you messed up basic procedure like requesting stuff too late or far more than the expected size of your convention could handle.

Finally, someone expanding on the alternate histories column of the Living Galaxy with some more recommendations. Unfortunately, one is now out of print and the company behind it dead. Good luck finding it second-hand. Maybe in an alternate history it was more successful.



Death Pits of Natatiri: Along with the Shatterzone competition, we have a Torg adventure this issue, showing WEG are one of the more popular companies among RPGA members. For whatever reason, the PC's wind up imprisoned in a pulp dungeon with a whole load of stereotypical death traps between them and freedom. Fight zombies in a room being slowly filled with poison gas. Answer a sphinx riddle. Jump a chasm over a piranha filled river. Inspire the other prisoners to revolt with you, or go for the stealthy approach. Listen to the monologue of the maniacal prison overseer, who automatically gets away from the fight to taunt the PC's later and become a recurring adversary. It's linear and formulaic, but in a very self aware way that leans into the pulp tropes the area runs on, and makes it clear that all the hamminess is intentional as part of Torg's multi-genre mash-up aesthetic. That makes it much more palatable than another D&D tournament adventure, as the humour has a proper place and purpose to reinforce the axioms of the cosm instead of breaking the 4th wall. (as long as it's the right sort, as the quips they do here wouldn't fly in Orrorsh. ) Quite a refreshing change of pace. I definitely wouldn't mind seeing some more adventures or articles for this system in here.