TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 44: Nov/Dec 1993



part 3/5



The Hand of Al-Djamal: An Al-Qadim adventure? That would be nice. Nope, it's a Mystara one, because they have an arabian themed area as well, among many other things. Glantrian wizards excavated a Ylaruam tomb and brought a bunch of artifacts & mummies back to put them in a museum. Now a couple of security guards have turned up strangled overnight, and they strongly suspect the mummies are not quite as dead as they seem, despite not pinging their magic detectors. Better hire some heavily armed adventurers to stake the place out and see what happens next night. Turns out it's not just mummies, the titular Hand of Al-Djamal is actually a Druj, one of the scariest and most magically adept undead in the Companion set. Like the similarly scary Odic encounter in issue 21, it'll use it's nasty selection of spell-like powers intelligently to reanimate and support it's minions rather than just attacking mindlessly. You can't just create horror with atmosphere in D&D, particularly once they have levels in the double digits, you need to be able to back the theatrics up with aging, disease, energy drain, or something else more significant than just lots of hit points and damage once you get into combat. While not as large as it could be, this strikes a nice balance between the scares & misdirection and the very real threat behind it. It also takes the latest metaplot developments into account, which is quite nice to see, making Glantri somewhat less hostile to clerics and magic resistant demihumans, and talks about some interesting edge cases of ways to use certain spells. All in all, a quite pleasing package I'd have no problem using.

 

[el-remmen]

Dungeon Issue 44: Nov/Dec 1993

A hot day in L'trel: Following straight on from the editorial, we have a 4th trip to Volkrad, T. J. T. Zuvich's germanic influenced, fairly low magic home campaign setting. During a hot dry summer, a large concentration of a certain highly flammable substance explodes and now the whole city is on fire. How much of a difference will the PC's be able to make? After a bunch of vignettes of firefighting in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, they find out that any equipment & money they left in the inn (with encumbrance & fatigue penalties enhanced due to the stifling heat to make sure that happens) has been destroyed. This puts them in a precarious financial position, and they're "strongly encouraged" to volunteer in the army until things are decently fixed up. (Which explains why this should only be used in a low magic setting, if you have plenty of bags of holding, sleep in a Rope Trick and spells to alleviate environmental penalties it'll fall at the first hurdle) This leads into a full month's timeline of things that will happen as they clear debris, maintain order, try to keep supply chains working, deal with various opportunistic monsters and generally prevent complete societal breakdown and the massive amounts of death that would follow. It's all pretty gritty and open ended, but there are a few moments of humour to lighten things up and provide contrast. You won't be able to save everyone unless you're way higher level and more magically adept than intended, but your choices can still make a real difference, and you can succeed or fail in individual encounters without it being the end of the campaign. All the layers of revision makes it feel like an odd duck tonally, not sure if it's intended as a one-shot tournament adventure or an epic exploration of the long-term ramifications of a catastrophe that can easily be further expanded to a full year of further events. It leaves me ambivalent overall, as it's interesting to read, but also wouldn't fit in many campaigns due to it's specificity and the way it destroys the PC's possessions to push them into the plot. Given the sheer volume of submissions they get, I can see why Barbara rejected it at first.

I ran a revised version of this in the last 3E campaign I ever ran and combined with the plot of another adventure I cannot remember currently, where an epidemic of sleeplessness causes the dazed townfolk's carelessness, paranoia, and waking dreams, which starts the fire. The first part of the adventure had them fighting the fire (while the harbor fortress was locked up in quarantine to keep it the sickness from spreading and leaving the town vulnerable to attack - thus no back up from the authorities), while the second part had the PCs hunting down the magical experiment gone wrong that released the sickness in the first place and dealing with it.

It was a big success, but like most things from Dungeon, I did not run it as is. I see the mag more like a grab bag or toolkit to build adventures from.

 

[el-remmen]

A Wizard's Fate: An adventure where a wizard only just died, and the PC's are sent in to deal with the power vacuum and find out what happened? We've seen that idea before. (issue 28) Thankfully, the specifics are completely different. That was a high level one where the wizard's ambition outstripped his reach. This is a low level one where he was redeemed by the power of love, trying to get out of being evil and be a better person, and was assassinated by his imp familiar, for the 9 hells are notoriously unforgiving of deal-breakers. Now the imp is holding said girlfriend in the dungeon underneath the tower and enjoying his relative freedom to be an inventively sadistic little pain in the ass, while trying to cause enough misery down here to earn a promotion when he gets home. He'll use his invisibility, shapeshifting, poison and other various tricks to make your life considerably more difficult while you're facing the various static challenges throughout the dungeon. Sounds pretty fun to DM, as you have a decent selection of powers, but they're not very strong ones, so you're free to play it smart but fair and not have to pull your punches to keep the PC's alive. Plus if you defeat him, he won't be killed permanently, so having him appear again further along the road in a more powerful baatezu form with a grudge is a very good option for an extended campaign. It's good to get those kinds of plot hooks going in the early levels so you have something to call back too later. So this isn't the biggest or most spectacular adventure, but it's a solid low level one that's easy to build upon and make your later adventures better. Well worth using.

This is the first adventure I ran for my current 5E game, having run it in a 2E game back in '96, I kinda did a botched job and everyone hated it (and Erilyn died). In the more recent incarnation, the part defeated the imp and Erilyn would later become an apprentice of one of the PCs. I also used the backstory of the necromancer's previous wives and lovers to develop a few other plot points (like one they found he had cursed to be a harpy during his evil days).

 

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Old man Katan and the Mushroom Band: After an issue that's been very heavy indeed on various kinds of humour, the cover story is by far the weirdest and most whimsical of the lot. Old man Katan lives in a swamp and is plagued by Campestri, mobile mushrooms with terrible singing voices. The PC's happen to be passing while he's having a bath, and the Campestri steal his clothes. This leads you on a Rube Goldberg contraption of an adventure through the Glitchegumee swamp, discovering how the most unexpected of things can have complex knock-on effects on an ecology. Can you uncover what's behind the sudden influx of giant mosquitos and rebalance nature, preferably not by killing everything and restarting the whole ecosystem from scratch? Despite it's lighthearted exterior, there's actually a fair bit of clever thinking going on under the hood to connect things up, so the events you have to deal with aren't just wackiness for wackiness' sake. If the PC's are willing to use their brains and engage with the puzzles it'll actually reward them, rather than just stalling like the tournament adventures that break if you think even slightly outside the box. Obviously it won't work with the grimdark or hack & slash crowd, but this does look like fun if you have a suitable party, and it's an entertaining read regardless. I can see why they'd pick it out of the slush pile, as it stands out even in this issue.

I love this adventure, but I hacked it up and combined it with a revised version of "The Vineyard Vales" from issue #23. The party cleric was devoured by the giant croc and all the rest of the party ever found was part of one of his legs.

 

[el-remmen]

The Curse and the Quest: For a third adventure in a row, we have an adventure which comes to the PC's, so they don't really have an informed choice in whether they participate or not. There was a letter complaining about their players turning down too many missions a few months ago, so I guess this is the editors overcompensating in response. The PC's come across a dead body by the side of the road with a book. If anyone touches the book, they get cursed to be attacked by an exponentially increasing number of incorporeal horrors every day until it's too much for even the highest level party. Fortunately, one of the previous victims figured out and wrote down what it takes to destroy the book and free yourselves of the curse, if you can only get to the right place at the right phase of the moon and perform the right ritual. Double fortunately, the full moon is just a few days away. Better get cracking then. So you have to negotiate both the challenges of the wilderness, and the humans who own the land you're passing over, who will not be particularly sympathetic to the plight of some rando adventurers trespassing, and then figure out how to use the book to venture into the weird extradimensional place where it can be unmade & the curse lifted. While not as linear and restrictive as some of the worst Polyhedron adventures, this is still far more railroady than any adventure we've seen in Dungeon apart from Irongard, and while this offers more freedom of movement than that in terms of map routes, it has several horrible pixelbitch puzzles near the end that have very specific solutions, and if you mess up, you'll either die by running out of time and being swarmed or be trapped forever. In fact, you can destroy the book, and still be trapped forever to die of starvation all too easily if you don't think ahead or talk to the right NPC's. It's all a little irritating and worrying, and I hope it doesn't herald adventures like this becoming a regular thing. Not my idea of a good time.

I transformed this into one of the most fun and desperate adventures I've ever run and people who played in it still talk about it - though to be honest, I have no idea beside the cursed book and the shimmering wraiths, I am not sure how much of the rest I kept - though the extradimensional space was tied to an ongoing campaign plot with an evil wizard manipulating the party into doing some tasks for him including finding this place.

 

[el-remmen]

Song of the Fens: We kick things off with a distinctly silly comedy of errors. A troll with an unusually good singing voice has moved into the swamp near an inn. The sheltered innkeeper's daughter falls in love with the singing without even seeing him, and asks the PC's to find the singer and set them up on a date. Will she still feel the same way after actually seeing his face? Can a troll find a human physically attractive either? Can they overcome the fact that he's very poorly socialised and prone to violence at the slightest offence, like most trolls. (when you have regeneration, dismemberment and being pushed off cliffs is just harmless foreplay, as many a looney tunes cartoon demonstrates) This seems like the kind of scenario where you're probably not going to get a happy ending for everyone unless you have extremely high social skills and possibly a little magic to grease the wheels, but it should be fun finding out, with opportunities for things to go off the rails at nearly every opportunity. Even when Dungeon does silly adventures, they give you much more freedom in how the wackiness plays out than Polyhedron. So I guess this is a decent enough april fool for the year, giving you plenty of opportunity to stretch your roleplaying muscles, while not precluding the option of things taking a sharp turn into tragedy. (But in a way that probably won't end the campaign.) Not for every group, but much more usable in a regular game than the latest instalment of the interminable pursuit of small, annoying canines through time, space and multiple genres.

One of my all-time favorite adventures. Both times I ran it, I tied it up with "A Wizard's Fate" though the second time it was a sidetrek in dealing with N1 - Against the Cult of the Reptile God, too. Wendell has ended up as a follower of the party's Circle of the Land Swamp Druid and now lives and helps guard the marshes by their HQ. I described his singing as sounding like Chris Isaak doing "Wicked Game" and gave him a couple of cousin and a two-headed troll uncle to complicate things (he just wanted to be left alone and sing!).

 

[el-remmen]

Asflag's Unintentional Emporium: Willie Walsh once again delivers something fairly lighthearted with plenty of opportunities for roleplaying on top of the dungeoncrawling. The Wizard Asflag met an unfortunate end when a magical experiment went wrong, and now the wards on his tower are starting to break down, letting all sorts of weirdness leak out. Who ya gonna call? The twist is that instead of lurking in the forbidding wilderness where this wouldn't disturb anyone, he's right in the middle of the city of Serin, which has turned into a boomtown of wizard's towers. You have to deal with both the bureaucracy of the legal authorities, which is at least less obnoxious than Westgate or Raven's Bluff, and the various other wizards of the city, who all want to get their hands on various magical items he possessed, preferably without getting into an open bidding war which will jack up the prices. Then there's the traps and monsters themselves, which are also on the more quirky side, with heavy Fiend Folio representation. The dungeon-crawling bit probably won't last you more than a couple of sessions, but the social bits before and afterwards can be dialled up or down quite a bit depending on the tastes of your group, and seem like rich grounds for starting petty feuds between the wizards and PC's that can come back and have long term repercussions on your campaign. Another one by him that mixes it's various elements to good effect and allows you plenty of freedom in how it plays out, plus giving you prefab setting details to speed your worldbuilding along. Just generally good all round.

I ran this way back in the 2E days to some success, but later in a 3E campaign in the same homebrew setting, the PCs ended up buying the now emptied property to use as their HQ.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 44: Nov/Dec 1993



part 4/5



Raiders of the Chanth: Another very setting specific adventure in quick succession, as we're off to Athas to sail the silt sea. The frequency of raiders has suddenly increased a lot, and their groups are comprised of races that wouldn't normally work together. This seem like the kind of problem for a group of wandering heroes. Cross the silt, talk to the people in the nearby oasis to find out where the troublemakers lair, and head to their tower. Once there, you find out it's a blatant rip-off of the Quintessons from Transformers, a five-brained psionic gestalt construct that's dominating the regular people and has ambitions of TAKING OVER THE WORLD!!!! (despite the fact that Athas is a dump that's more trouble than it's worth, but I guess when you don't have any knowledge of other worlds for comparison, you don't know any better.) The five personalities will bicker with each other in a hammy way, but they're united in their desire to conquer through whatever means, and will try to recruit the PC's with promises of wealth and glory, then psionic domination if they refuse. Since it has 5 brains, it gets 5 independent actions per round to use various powers with. So while there are some preliminary bits and fights with regular minions as well, the meat of this adventure is a big set-piece boss fight with a unique creature with a highly idiosyncratic set of abilities, tactics and weaknesses that's designed to be a match for a whole party. It feels like a precursor to the kind of design they'd apply to Solo monsters in 4e, albeit with a larger selection of powers than any 4e monster. It's another one that's an interesting read, but I'm ambivalent about actually using, as it's very setting specific, and a bit cheesier than I like my Dark Sun. Still, it's both specific and different in style from any previous adventures in here, it's not rehashed and adds some new ideas on how to run encounters, so there's a fair bit of value in it.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 44: Nov/Dec 1993



part 5/5



Train of Events: When people mysteriously die in a museum, there's only so many places the body could be. When you're a bunch of dwarves who've created an underground railroad through a mountain, and a whole shipment of cargo vanishes along the line, that's a several mile stretch to search for monsters and secret doors. Even if revealing your technology might have long-term ramifications on the surface world, it might be necessary to hire adventurers to solve the problem. Get ready for some playfully anachronistic heist mystery where following the railroad blindly will lead you into the same trap that caught the previous train, to face a mixed group of Derro & Duergar who are well prepared to deal with any guards and engage in efficient asset stripping. If you can survive that, the rest of their lair is a fairly standard dungeoncrawl, with a decent number of support staff and a few little surprises, but nothing as inventive as the first part. So for a third time in a row, the adventure is built around a big setpiece battle with enemies who use detailed tactics that will probably take quite some time to resolve, although this time it's closer to the middle of the adventure rather than being the big climax. Still, there's a fair amount of other stuff going on, including worldbuilding the surrounding area, and going into more detail than they need too on the villain's backstories so it won't fall apart if the players take a clever approach and come at the problem from another angle. Not for groups who are ultra serious about the integrity of their pseudo-medieval fantasy settings, but it's less setting specific than the other three adventures this issue, and seems fairly adaptable to being fiddled with and expanded upon. It gets my approval.



An interesting issue, as the adventures are slightly less linear on average than the last few, but make a sudden move towards big setpiece battles that take up a large percentage of the adventure's runtime. It's refreshing as a change of pace, but another idea that would hit diminishing returns very quickly if it became the norm every issue. Let's head into next year and see if this idea catches on quickly, or it'll take another couple of edition changes to reach it's full fruition.

 

[el-remmen]

Dungeon Issue 44: Nov/Dec 1993

Train of Events: When people mysteriously die in a museum, there's only so many places the body could be. When you're a bunch of dwarves who've created an underground railroad through a mountain, and a whole shipment of cargo vanishes along the line, that's a several mile stretch to search for monsters and secret doors. Even if revealing your technology might have long-term ramifications on the surface world, it might be necessary to hire adventurers to solve the problem. Get ready for some playfully anachronistic heist mystery where following the railroad blindly will lead you into the same trap that caught the previous train, to face a mixed group of Derro & Duergar who are well prepared to deal with any guards and engage in efficient asset stripping. If you can survive that, the rest of their lair is a fairly standard dungeoncrawl, with a decent number of support staff and a few little surprises, but nothing as inventive as the first part. So for a third time in a row, the adventure is built around a big setpiece battle with enemies who use detailed tactics that will probably take quite some time to resolve, although this time it's closer to the middle of the adventure rather than being the big climax. Still, there's a fair amount of other stuff going on, including worldbuilding the surrounding area, and going into more detail than they need too on the villain's backstories so it won't fall apart if the players take a clever approach and come at the problem from another angle. Not for groups who are ultra serious about the integrity of their pseudo-medieval fantasy settings, but it's less setting specific than the other three adventures this issue, and seems fairly adaptable to being fiddled with and expanded upon. It gets my approval.

I have never gotten a chance to run this adventure, but am hoping to maybe do so in one of my two current campaigns. I have no issue with the train, since I'd make it run on some rare commodity that only the dwarves have access to and that is inconvenient to get enough of to run more than one train. I'll also probably make the train connect the surface world to the Hollow World of my setting and have the "magic coal" or whatever only exist down there.