TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[Bupp]

This one is on my queue of adventures to run. I've already have the derro Uniting War starting up.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 90: December 1993



part 1/5



32 pages. A two-headed tiger? Cerberus would chase that kitty away without breaking a sweat. But for a regular adventurer, that's a pretty solid XP earning challenge, and when your spear is flint-tipped, things look increasingly dicey. So let's roll the dice and see if we get through this issue unscathed or not.



Conventions: Little Wars the magazine is long since merged into Dragon and forgotten, but there's still a convention of the same name, focussing more on the wargaming than the roleplaying. Good to see a few grognards keeping the flame alive. If you want something a little more funky fresh and modern, there's Vampire LARP in PrezCon or LaserTag at Wyvercon to keep you on your feet and interacting with lots of people instead of being sat at a table for 4 hours for tournament adventures. Good to see them advertising plenty of variety in here.



Notes From HQ: Another membership drive? Feels like we barely finished the last one! Despite having their biggest year yet, they're in no mood to rest on their laurels, and want to figure out how to reach new audiences. The idea of changing their name was roundly rejected by the majority of members, so they will not become the organisation formerly known as the RPGA any time soon. Instead, they're just going to put more pressure on you to get out and go proselytising. Convert your friends and family! There are (moderately) fabulous prizes to be won! Well, they've just added a new member of staff to focus on tournament co-ordination, so they need to pay for that somehow. No matter how much you grow, you never seem to have the time or resources to do everything you want to get around too. They still feel like a plucky little organisation, with only half a dozen full time staff, and never quite enough judges volunteering to go around the number of players. Let's see if they can keep on growing and penetrating new territories next year, when the CCG craze really hits and starts to compete for gamer time & shelf space. Will they incorporate Spellfire & Dragon Dice into their competitive tournament rosters, or be slow to react and left behind?

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 90: December 1993



part 2/5



Letters: The first two letters are thank you's from the charities mentioned in last issue's editorial. Guide dogs for the deaf and sick kids in Wisconsin can sleep a little easier knowing we're donating money to them.

Third is somewhat more substantial, as it's from a fresh recruit who's a little baffled by all the rules and in-jokes of the RPGA. They don't repeat them every issue so it's quite understandable it'd take a while to feel like you really know what's going on. Losing accessibility is one of the things any fanbase really has to worry about as they get bigger and longer established, particularly if gatekeepey people get into a position of middle management.

Fourth praises James Lowder's movie reviews. They do seem to be pretty popular. Let's hope he's not going elsewhere anytime soon.

Fifth is about more unofficial charity work by individual RPGA members, this time doing sponsored walks and donating to GMHC to fight AIDS. We've had a few deniable moments of homoeroticism in here before, but this is the first time they've openly mentioned the existence of gay people. Now how long before they'll allow that in game material as well? Hopefully the majority of the membership agree with this and will donate as well, or at least not cancel their memberships and send vitriolic letters attacking them for supporting degeneracy.

Sixth is from someone who wanted to buy ultra-early back issues and put in a classified ad asking for offers, only to have some anonymous kind soul just send them for free! Thank you very much, mysterious benefactor. That could have been pretty expensive done the hard way.

Finally, someone complaining how slowly the lines went at the RPGA booth this Gen Con. Victim of their own popularity. That's why they're so keen on getting more volunteers to help out, make things run more smoothly next year.



The Dragon's Den: R. A. Salvatore recycles the notes from his Gen Con speech and gets them printed in here. (without all the ums and ahhs) Asked to talk about the past and future of gaming, he decided to go for a sappily heartwarming story of how it can turn young lives around. The Dragon's Den, Fitchburg, MA is a FLGS that really works on the F part, providing free gaming to socially disadvantaged young kids as long as they go to school, stay out of fights and get decent grades. This actually works pretty decently; as we've seen before, gaming is a good way to improve your maths & english skills without it feeling like a chore, while also learning co-operative social skills that are applicable to the real world. Their parents can feel safer knowing they're rolling dice after school instead of wandering the streets getting into gangs & drugs. The only problem is that having deliberately opened shop in a rough neighbourhood, getting enough well-paying customers to keep the shop going is proving tricky. Maybe making a few more people aware of what he's doing will help with that? Googling it, it turns out that the owner died in 2016, at which point he was the owner of multiple stores, so it looks like he did become more financially successful and help a lot more people in the intervening decades. I can't really say if that's a happy ending or not, as this is the real world, not a story, but it does look like he made a lot of people's lives better, many of whom are still alive today and hopefully passing those lessons on in their own way. If there's a point to gaming other than pure pleasure and escapism, this is it. The delivery may be a bit schmaltzy and lifetime movieish, but he's not wrong. There's always going to be challenges in life, but by working together they can be much easier than everyone going it alone or fighting over the same limited resources. If you can leave the world a better place than when you came in, then by that metric, your life was a success.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 90: December 1993



part 3/5



Marvelous MaGuffins (sic): Here we go again with another round of reader-submitted magic items. Will they be awesome, problematically game-breaking, or just boring? Time to see once again if their tastes coincide with mine, or they'll indulge in the worst kind of cheese.

Anklets of Sure Footing give you the balance of an experienced sailor. The kind of low key handiness that's not useful all the time, but when it is, you really appreciate it.

Aslyferund's Armor is right on the other end of the power spectrum, giving you all the toughness and energy resistance of the Gold Dragon who's scales they're made from. Not quite at full artifact levels of prestige, but still a pretty decent boost to your tankiness as well as an interesting backstory.

Bags of Many Bags turn into any other type of container on command. All your storage needs in one ergonomic package! Low key useful but not world changing.

Bags of Teleportation send anything put in them to a predetermined location. Plenty of logistical uses there, but only if you know where that is, otherwise you might just confuse it with a bag of devouring and throw it away.

Brodow's Ring of Utmost Weapon Harm gives you a whole suite of offensive buff effects to choose from, although they have short durations and using all of them puts a strain on your system. Save for genuinely dangerous fights, not just to show off.

Enchanted Leaves are one-use magical items with pun names that transform into appropriate things when commanded. Like Quaal's feather tokens or your standard potions & scrolls, you can safely include these to solve a particular puzzle without worrying about their long term effects on a campaign.

Loquacious Lyres boost your musical skills and can provide harmony singing as well as chords, but this intelligence can be annoying in an adventure setting because they rarely shut up. You might be able to get some useful lore out of them, but will it be worth the constant chatter? Get some more intelligent magical weapons and then they can entertain each other.

Money Changers turn your coins into an equal value of other denominations. Convert all those copper coins in a hoard to platinum to save on encumbrance, then break it back down into change when you need to spend it. Another one that makes a gritty game where everything gets strictly tracked decidedly less irritating.

Rings of Fearlessness are your basic useless item that makes you think you're awesome, setting you up for failure due to recklessness. I'm sure we'll see their like again.

Sticky Shields ensnare the opponents weapon if they roll a natural 1, adding their plus to it's own if they're magical to enhance the humiliation. The kind of thing that's not going to be useful every fight but when it is, it can really change the tide of battle.

Scimitars of the Sands can summon sandstorms with a whirl, protect your eyes from their detrimental effects, and hide your tracks when travelling across the desert. Don't underestimate the advantages battlefield control can offer over another single point of damage.

Spider's Boots of Stealth are enhanced slippers of spider climbing with a notorious backstory. Whether you act friendly or stick to the same neighbourhood while wearing them is up to you.

Tunnelrunner's Axe lets you walk on cavern walls, so you can get your wuxia on and make dungeoncrawl battle scenes a lot less gritty. Once again, the plusses aren't the whole story when it comes to how handy a weapon is.

A Rod of Equestrians is basically a hobby horse that turns into a real one when you spend a charge. This means you look slightly ridiculous until the magic kicks in, but hey, at least you don't need a lackey banging a coconut following you around to make it work.

Utensils of the Cultured Palate make anything put on the plate delicious tasting and nutritious. If you're stuck in a dungeon with only the slimes, oozes and fungi you've just fought to eat, this is another one that could be a lifesaver.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 90: December 1993



part 4/5



The New Republic Campaign: Bill Slavicsek once again juggles the desire to tell cool stories in the Star Wars universe with an editorial mandate that wants to stick strictly to canon and make anything the PC's do not as cool and universe-shaking as the events that happen in the movies. The battle of Endor was big enough that you could have multiple rebel groups that never even see Luke, Han or Leia, because they're busy fighting their own fights and disabling other key locations. Here's a trio of example things they could be doing down there, each of which is a decently heroic challenge in itself, but it doesn't really matter if they win or lose, unless the GM is going to abruptly depart from the timeline here. Another adventure outline that's more interesting than their completely linear D&D tournament adventures, but still feels heavily constrained compared to the adventures we're seeing in Dungeon, and underwritten in terms of setting building. It would work best if you build on it further with some more locations and potential encounters and are willing to break from canon if the PC's actions merit it. Otherwise, you may be following the letter of the movies, but not the spirit.



The Living City: Magical chess sets are a fairly familiar idea around here, with multiple covers featuring them and a previous one fully statted out in issue 82. Here we have another one, as Marbol's Chess Shop has a magical chess set that comes to life when people aren't looking and helps the owner keep the place immaculate and well stocked. They're nowhere near as powerful as the ones a few months ago, but can remain active longer and show more personal initiative, and have developed a loyalty to their owner so anyone stealing them won't get nearly as much benefit. Marbol himself is one of those wise old gents who's always willing to play a game with anyone, and use it as a learning experience to help them deal with any problems they may have in other areas of their life. If the PC's are stuck on a particularly puzzling conundrum, be it tactical or of the heart, he's a good mouthpiece for the DM to deliver some cryptic but highly effective advice. So this place is unlikely to be the main driver of a plotline, but might well be a stop on the way to resolving one, and has a decent amount of flavour to make it distinct from the many other shops we've seen by now. Fairly middle of the road in usefulness and writing quality overall.



Road Trip!: Another of those somewhat humorous articles where we get to see the RPGA staff from the outside, as one of the regional co-ordinators pays a visit to TSR HQ. Their urges for heroism were satisfied by the 500 mile trip from Connecticut to Lake Geneva, as they encountered not just one, but two damsels in distress who's cars had broken down along the way. Once they got there, they found things were memorable for good reasons as well, as the arrival of Dave Gross seems to have lightened the mood in the offices, as he's good at solving other people's computer problems and getting things working smoothly. Skip Williams in particular was so much more cheerful than usual that they worry if he's been replaced by a pod person or something. So this is mainly notable in that their usual impulse for teasing and taking the piss is mitigated by things going well enough that there's not much room to get a foothold upon. Bring on the next outbreak of con crud, because being this nice consistently would get boring very quickly.



The Living Galaxy: Roger looks at another 11 overarching concepts for your campaigns, some in much more detail than others. Hunting for the promised land, in whatever form that may be, which then has an obvious follow-up of what happens when you get there and it isn't what you expected, or already occupied by people who don't want to share. Alternately, you could go the Star Trek/Princess Ark route, and have the ship and it's supporting cast feel like home in itself, so you can concentrate on the fun of the eternal journey. If you want something with a more definite endpoint, even if it could take years of actual play to achieve, there's things like being kidnapped and trying to escape and get home, crashing on a primitive world and trying to build up civilisation to the point where you can get spacebound again, long running wars of the hot or cold kind, cheesy reclaiming your legacy/fulfilling your destiny stuff (which fits better in a fantastical campaign than a hard sci-fi one), and sweet revenge on a specific person who wronged you. Most of these have had whole columns on them, some in this very series (particularly the stuff on developing/escaping a primitive world) so I'm getting a distinct sense of deja vu reading this. Another of those articles that isn't exactly bad, but would have more impact on someone who hasn't already read hundreds of issues of periodicals and seen how they repeat topics every few years. How many times can you repeat the same ideas before people get jaded and seek out weirder ones even if they aren't optimal for creating the kind of arcs that make for good stories? I guess it would also explain the explosion of increasingly weird settings in TSR at this point, even though it hurt their profitability having so many of them competing for people's money at the same time. There's a definite price for doing something like this for so long.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 90: December 1993



part 5/5



Into the Dark: James must be busy, as it's just a small entry with no theme this time, returning to american films after our recent hong kong fest. Will any of them be good christmas fare, even if it's only by coincidence?

Matinee is a return to the idea of film within a film James has done columns on before. A young B-movie fan in the early 60's grows up as the Cuban missile crisis hits, showing the contrast between the schlocky screen scares and the horrors of the real world. Your basic nostalgiafest for a more innocent time, but done with style and good research. And now we're doing nostalgia for the 90's in the same way. Time keeps rolling on, and there's always a little more innocence to lose. Who will be cleverly referencing the format quirks and viral hits of instagram or tiktok in 2050?

Them! is one of the movies the previous film references. A classic 50's tale of giant radioactive ants attacking a small town, James finds it still holds up excellently and gives it the full 5 stars. Even if the ants are obviously models, the human cast plays things well enough that you believe the danger.

House on Haunted Hill is a second 50's film referenced by the first one, showing that we do have a theme here after all. This is less impressive, and mainly notable for it's gimmick special effects such as having a skeleton behind the cinema screen set to fly out over the audience's heads at a crucial moment. Seems a bit finicky to time perfectly with the screen image, but if it works it'll work for the whole audience, unlike 3D glasses, which fail to do a proper stereo image if the user is sitting too far to the side or remotely visually impaired. One of the few reasons to actually go to the cinema these days, when home screens get pretty big and high resolution as well.



Heart Of Evil: We finish the final part of the For Faerie, Queen & Country fiction and find out that the game title was a red herring - there's plenty of other weirdness in this world and no fae involvement in this particular mystery. It was an egyptian princess who swapped hearts with her brother to save him from the judgement of Maat. In return, she was barred from dying and became an immortal, indestructible mummy with a hunger for eating the hearts of others. Only by returning her true heart to her body could she be permanently laid to rest. Unsurprisingly, Holmes is the one to figure this out and have the presence of mind to do the right thing in the face of a seemingly indestructible monster with a penchant for maniacal monologuing. I guess when you're immortal it's easy to get complacent and start playing with your food. This definitely winds up on the cheesier end of the pulp spectrum, with the villain's own overconfidence being the main cause of their downfall, and a lot of exposition at every phase of the investigation. An entertaining read, but also a reminder that you need a fair bit of player buy-in for genre conventions like these to hold up in actual play. If they go into turtling paranoia or shoot the villain mid-monologue it won't be nearly as fun. Will you be able to drag your players away from the techniques they use to survive in deathtrap dungeons and get them to try something new like this out?



The form for the membership drive is on the back page, as they said earlier. Feel free to photocopy it as many times as you like. The more the merrier.



Another issue where I find myself saying another a lot, seeing everything as part of a series, or at least a long-term cycle of repeated events. The familiar fantasy worlds are looking increasingly filled up and the number of dungeons to explore has gone way down. Oh well, next year is the start of Planescape, which I've always loved. Let's see if there's any more little bits of lore hidden in these two magazines that makes the multiverse a little richer.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 91: January 1994



part 1/5



32 pages. Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell the blood of a rather small dragon. Barely worth making a meal of, but I guess food can be hard to come by in these craggy mountain passes. A giant's got to take what he can grab. But will he manage it, or will he overreach and topple to his downfall or something? Let's take a look at the adventure and other miscellania inside.



Notes From HQ: Dave Gross takes the editorial for the first time, and since it's his first time, he has more than usual to say. Most of it is on the topic of submissions, and how you should go about writing them. While they do want more, and your ideas can make a real difference to the direction of the Living City in particular, cool ideas on their own are not enough. If they're in a handwritten scrawl that's near impossible to decipher, or fail to have coherent spelling, punctuation & grammar, he probably won't have the time to edit them into coherence, and even if he does, the result may not be what was originally intended in your fevered brain. Learn how to edit yourself, and how to take constructive criticism from others without throwing a tantrum and revise further and your odds of being published goes up by many orders of magnitude. The less an editor actually has to edit, the happier they are. Seen that before around here, just as often from the writer's perspective as the editor's. You gotta learn to add that 99% perspiration to get your ideas as good as they can be. In less repetitive news, they've settled on their mascot, picking cute little dragon number 2 and calling him Rapscallion. (not to be confused with Rob Scallon, who makes youtube videos playing guitars with way too many strings) What mischief will he get up too in the pages of the newszine? So it doesn't look like Dave will be making any big abrupt policy changes compared to Skip, but the newszine is still evolving and adding new details to their setting. Will they manage any particularly interesting twists this year? More elections? Let's get to the first articles and find out.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Another 6 potential adventure locations take us from H-M. The caverns of High Haspur, many of which are mined and guarded by gnomes, so expect weird traps if you try to loot their treasure. The very wealthy crossroads town of Hlintar, where people are increasingly using proper banking for their treasure, but there's still a fair few forgotten caches of loot from more lawless times in secret compartments or buried in the countryside nearby. The similarly wealthy town of King's Reach, powered by a big smelting centre so you can turn your raw gold & silver into actual coins that are much easier to use in trade. This obviously attracts all manner of raiders and rogues trying to get hold of the stuff moving through, and the legitimate business people also tend to be zealous with the security and quick to violence as a result. The somewhat depressing walled town of Kurth, which was once larger, but was depopulated by frequent orc raids and now has undead roaming the abandoned parts of town at night. Once again, the high death toll means there's plenty of forgotten bits of treasure to be found in the abandoned buildings. Maerstar, known far and wide for it's horse breeding. Most treasures here are hidden underneath massive piles of dung, so bring a shovel, gloves, and maybe an Otyugh to help out. And finally, Raven's Bluff's satellite town Mossbridges, where people who prefer a quieter life and the occasional commute to the big city hang out, and a high level Paladin keeps it safe and thieve's guild free. Each of these could easily be expanded into a full module by adding maps and fully statting out the monsters and NPC's. Once again this is packed with modular usefulness that you could use when your players travel to the place, or steal and put somewhere in your own campaign. Ed maintains both his consistency and prolificness here.

 

[Davies]

Prolificacy.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 91: January 1994



part 2/5



Shhh!: The adventure this issue is quirky in a particularly unusual way. The pregens are all clerics of the church of Zorakiah, sworn to silence except in very specific situations. They're ordered to guard a prisoner being transported for execution, who has allies outside who will try to rescue him, plus his own roguish skills at slipping bonds & picking locks to contend with. They need to contend with multiple challenges along the way, plus the moral dilemma of finding out that he's being killed for stealing food to feed his family and his rescuer is of Good alignment, all without talking, otherwise their god will curse them for breaking their oaths. You'd think if they'd been living the monkly life for years they'd have learned sign language to communicate amongst themselves but oh well. So this is a gimmick adventure built around the challenge of the players figuring out how to communicate with each other without speech and choose their reactions to puzzles more complex than "here's a monster, hit it until it's dead." At only 5 pages long, it would be easily finished with lots of time to spare in a tournament slot without that handicap, but with it, the whole thing becomes much more challenging and memorable. It's linear in design, but the individual encounters aren't railroaded, and it encourages the idea that the players have multiple valid options and should be conflicted about which one to take. That puts it well above average for a tournament adventure, taking it's premise seriously and letting any humour arise naturally in actual play. It'd lose most of it's charm if used in a regular campaign, but as a one-shot, it's a great idea.



The Living City: Very unusually, this is the biggest column this issue, giving a full 8 pages to a place that's not just a single shop or set of NPC's, but a whole second adventure, including an unusually high number of illustrations as well. A swineherd who's father was framed for murder and imprisoned by the corrupt thief-taker Anton Paere, leaving behind hidden treasure somewhere in the vicinity of their farm. Since Anton doesn't miss a trick, he'll make it easy for him to escape, in the hope that he'll lead them to the treasure, so they can recapture him and get a load of extra loot on top. In the meantime, his son has taken up the family farm, working a poor but honest job and trying to save up money to get a decent lawyer for his dad's retrial. One of his granddaughters died in a tragic accident and has become a ghost haunting the spring on the farm, and there's several other things to discover in the area. As both setting building and adventure, this is also way above their usual standard, with multiple maps, and plenty of description of their everyday life and the various NPC's that makes the fantastical elements stand out by contrast. It takes elements from previous entries in the series and builds upon them in a good way, is flexible and open-ended in the ways you can use it and neither under or overpowers the characters mechanically. This gets my wholehearted praise and recommendation and I hope they do more like it.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 91: January 1994



part 3/5



The Living Galaxy: Roger continues his attempt at epicness, by ironically telling us how to stop things from getting too big and unwieldy, causing the campaign to collapse before you get to the conclusion. Draw up a flow chart of the obvious things the PC's could do, and come up with responses, but arrange things so no matter what they do, it'll always curve around back to the direction of the big story. Create the illusion that their choices are more significant than they actually are, but wherever they go they'll find clues leading to the same conclusion. Well, it's more subtle and considerate than most of the adventures they publish in here at least. Another reminder that sandboxes are now thoroughly out of fashion in the TSR offices and railroads are in, and they're increasingly pushing for adventures to be more storylike, with defined beginnings, middles and ends that can span a whole campaign rather than PC's just wandering the world and gradually getting more powerful until they either get killed or retire. Even when they are just doing multiple small adventures, there's still more desire to plan ahead, as the large number of letters Dungeon has got about building chains of adventures recently shows. (which Roger has obviously been reading, as he references that here.) I guess it's all part of an even larger shift in society in general, as both TV shows and comics also become much less episodic and more serialised over the 90's. A fairly interesting read, but not in an entirely welcome way. Having a clever long-term arc that'll span years works a lot better when one person is doing the writing. In an interactive game like RPG's, finding out how little effect you actually have can seriously sap the motivation to continue playing. When not using a prefab adventure, it's better not to plan too far ahead and be willing to change the direction of the game on the prompting of your players.



Into The Dark: James goes for a very specific subgenre this time, that of evil toys. Be they supernatural or merely elaborate machines, when they start moving they can be scary far in excess of their physical power, particularly when you're alone at night and the things in your bedroom are turned against you. Of course, if it's done wrong, it can turn to unintentional comedy just as easily.

Child's Play has managed to be relatively straight horror, unintentional bad comedy and good, self aware intentional comedy over the course of the series. But of course much of that is yet to come. James likes the first one, but doesn't think much of the second & third. Looking at the reviews, this is not an uncommon opinion to hold.

Toys is a tale of a toy factory being repurposed to create weapons of war by it's profiteering new owner, with soul-crushing results. It gets a medium result overall, good casting, visual design, soundtrack and special effects, but with an underlying weak script that's very heavyhanded with it's moralising about how war is bad. Quite decent to have on in the background, but doesn't bear up to close examination.

Demonic Toys, on the other hand is just all round bad. Dreadful script, primitive special effects, the most obvious lowbrow humour. It and it's equally awful spin-offs can lurk in the back room of the video rental shop forever as far as James is concerned.