TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 91: January 1994



part 4/5



With Great Power: The marvel-phile finished a few months ago in Dragon, and now it's Polyhedron counterpart also comes to an end, although they don't seem to know it yet as they're still asking for more comments and column ideas, and I'm still I'm not sure who's fault it was the licence didn't get renewed, or how abrupt it's pulling was. The topic is ironically fitting, as it's a set of random tables to generate a plot when you've run out of ideas, as even the official writers have done many times after nearly 10 years of doing this. Roll a d20 for adventure starters, and d10's for complications, motives and which type of dramatic monologue the villain will use when you catch up to them. The kind of thing that seems pretty limited in itself, compared to other articles of the same era that have 50 or 100 in their roster to keep things from repeating too quickly. Are comic plots really that formulaic compared to horror ones? A bit of a damp squib of an ending, but I guess they had already published a whole load of supplements and adventures and were probably suffering diminishing returns on sales by then. You can't say it didn't have a good run.



Necromagic: Time for a few more magical items aimed at necromancers and others attracted to the gothic atmosphere. Let's see if they're scary in a way that's good for storytelling, in a mechanically broken one, or quite possibly both.

Gloom Candles shed shadows instead of light when burnt, and heal undead, but also make them easier to control. Just the thing for a necromancer who's expecting unwelcome guests and wants to set the right atmosphere. Can't have a dramatic confrontation if you're still watching the crystal ball in your underwear.

Juju Wine turns the drinker into a living zombie for several days, harking back to the real world origins of the myth in drugging slaves to make them more pliable and pain-resistant. Do not expect the PC's to be merciful when they regain control if they were ordered to do gross or humiliating stuff.

Ghast Salve gives you a lot of the powers of ghasts, but also their extremely unpleasant odour and vulnerability to holy water. Not sure why you'd want that, but it might come in handy for nonlethal combat or infiltrating the kingdom of the ghouls. Just don't eat the people you paralyse unless you want the mask to become the reality. Or maybe that's a bonus. Eh, I guess it's your funeral, even if it will probably mean losing your class levels in the pre-template era.

Nether Scarabs not only protect you from energy drain, they store the negative energy and let you drain other people later. Fortunately for everyone else, they only have limited charges, and some will probably have already been used by the time you get hold of it. Tanking hits just to build up drains to use on future big bads is still probably not a good idea.

Shadowblades are also pretty self-explanatory, looking suitably wispy but still dealing real damage and draining strength. Regular use will shift your alignment even if you only use it for a good cause, like far too many necromantic powers. This collection definitely seems more aimed at making more challenging NPC's than providing toys that PC's can actually keep after beating them.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 91: January 1994



part 5/5



Uninhabited: After one set of random stuff in the Marvel column, the competition this month also goes back to the old school by giving us a twisty nonlinear set of caverns and inviting us to fill them with monsters. Whether they intend to use one person's entry or pick and mix the best individual rooms from multiple submissions remains to be seen. Since Dungeon has been pretty light on the open-ended sandbox dungeons lately, and Polyhedron has never really catered to that end of the market at all, this is very welcome to see. I look forward to seeing the results, however long they may take.



With two surprisingly good adventures and a high amount of other game useful material, this issue is way better than any of their recent ones, making it pretty top tier in terms of being one I might actually return to and use the things inside in actual play. If this is the difference between Dave & Skip's taste in articles and not just particularly good luck in what they were sent recently then bring on the new regime. But in the meantime Dungeon's adventures have been going downhill, so let's see if that trend also continues, and we switch around which side of this I most look forward to doing. Wouldn't be the strangest thing that's ever happened.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 45: Jan/Feb 1994



part 1/5



80 pages. What do gargoyles talk about in the long dull hours sitting on their elaborate cathedrals when there's no adventurers around to swoop down on? Anything particularly scintillating, or are they no more cultured than the average orc despite the longer lifespans and better view. Quite possibly complaining about the price of things these days, as they've put it up by 20 cents after many years of stability. Time to see if this issue has any interesting worldbuilding that can be applied to campaigns in general, or just a string of encounters in order with little opportunity for deviation that's not worth it at any price.



Battlecards are a whole new breed! We kick off the year with an advert reminding us that collectible trading cards are about to go from just something you collect to things with massive games behind them, fuelling buying sprees as people seek to assemble the most awesome rare cards for their deck. Many companies will jump on the bandwagon, but only a few will survive.



Editorial: Roger Moore retired from editing Dragon a few months ago, which also means he's no longer putting secondary input in here either. Now Barbara is the senior member of staff, with Dale putting in some work on here as well as Dragon. This time, she's decided to go for a girl power theme, selecting multiple adventures with strong female characters. Well, Dragon & Polyhedron have both made statements on this, and without adding articles, how else are they supposed to join in? Let's see if the adventures are good enough that they would have got through anyway, or there's some forced tokenism going on.



The statement of ownership is particularly interesting this time, as the number of issues being printed is sightly up, but the number actually sold is slightly down. Both only by a few hundred, so they're still improving their relative performance compared to Dragon, but even here, the amount of freebies and waste is creeping upwards as the cracks in the company as a whole start to show. Will they be able to retain loyalty better than the other departments again next year?



Letters: First letter thinks people should let go of the real world physics and just play the game. If we spend too much time nitpicking about why things would or wouldn't work the story falls apart. Presuming storytelling was your goal in the first place, as it might be increasingly popular but there's still the other axes of GNS theory to consider.

2nd, 3rd and 4th praise Jacob's Well, Lady of the Mists and Ransom respectively. It's important to let them know what you like, as it increases the odds of future adventures by the same writer getting published.

5th is from someone who doesn't play D&D, but still buys the magazine because of the cool ideas. Those are the important things the writers should be focussed on, not the precise details of the mechanics.

6th also thinks the mark of an experienced player is focussing more on the roleplaying over the rules. It does seem to be the current fashion in general. The kind of people who are likely to complain when "system matters" people take over and 3e swings back the other way hard.

7th is a contrasting one, sulking that they don't do 1e adventures anymore. They note that the rules aren't that different, all you have to do is change the page references anyway. Just wait until there are several very different old editions they're not catering too anymore, all competing for table space with their respective retroclones.

8th is general praise, thinking the average quality of adventures in here is actually superior to most of TSR's standalone modules. I'm not going to disagree with that, but sometimes you do crave something a little larger than they can fit in here. It might be about time they tried a multi-part adventure again.

9th wonders if they ever plan to go monthly like Dragon. More people are for it than against it, but it's a matter of convincing upper management it would be profitable and not hit diminishing returns or reduce average adventure quality. Any one group can only play so many adventures, after all.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 45: Jan/Feb 1994



part 2/5



An Artist's Errand: Steve Kurtz continues to send in more Spelljammer adventures than everyone else put together, on top of his freelance work on Al-Qadim. The PC's are approached by a strongly (but deniably, because code of conduct) bisexual-coded Reigar to retrieve her stolen necklace. As usual for mysterious employers who hire adventurers in seedy dive bars, she's not telling the PC's everything, and it's considerably more important to her than just an expensive family heirloom. If they accept the mission but don't have a ship of their own, they'll find themselves supplied with a rickety tradesman called the Astral Empress staffed by comic relief gnomes and powered by giant space hamsters. Pursuing the magical signature of the necklace, they find out it was stolen by a Drow disguising himself as a regular elf, and has the power to open magical gates large enough for a whole ship to travel through, which has immense logistical purposes for a bunch of sneaky pirates. As usual for Steve, this is a fairly long adventure, going through multiple locations, each with quite linear maps. On the plus side, it doesn't end in a big treasure destroying explosion this time, unless you brought along your own ship with considerably better weaponry than the default. It also seems like spending time working on Toril has rubbed off on him, as there's considerably more detail on the sex lives of the NPC's than usual. He continues to be the very 2Eiest of the 2e authors, with lots of probably extraneous worldbuilding, (but you never know, it might come in handy) opportunity to ham up the roleplaying and big action setpieces which give you a chance to break out the ship to ship combat rules. It's not the most annoying adventure he's done. He continues to be an interesting read with plenty of flavour, but one I'm ambivalent about using in actual play.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 45: Jan/Feb 1994



part 3/5



Side Treks - All Things Nice: In a world with no magic marts, the opportunity to get hold of magic items without killing their owners (who hopefully know how to use said equipment, making the fight trickier) can be pretty rare. So when you do get the opportunity to just buy things, some people will be less cautious than they should. Which is where this quartet of grifters come in. They'll sell you shiny-looking but shoddily made weapons & armor with Nystul's Magic Aura cast on them and hopefully be long gone by the time you realise your mistake. If you have suitable nonweapon proficiencies or local knowledge of the areas they come from (which are all quite specific forgotten realms places, making this one work particularly well there) your odds of spotting something that arouses your suspicions before buying go up quite a lot. So this is a fairly roleplaying heavy short encounter that could go very differently depending on how your characters are built and how well they roll, then if they fall for the scam, tracking them down to get revenge could be extended out to a much longer adventure. It goes into enough detail on the characters that you should have no problem playing out their distinct personalities, while not overstaying it's welcome. Decent, but nothing worldshaking. If they have more money than sense it's a good one to throw at them to keep them on their toes.



Rudwilla's Stew: The second full-length adventure here is another from regular freelancer and future staff member Chris Perkins. A lighthearted low level one where many of the encounters don't need to be resolved by combat, the PC's are sent to gather ingredients for a special stew that'll placate the local Bugbear tribe - if they don't do it by the chief's birthday it's war! Unsurprisingly, their taste buds do not work quite like humans, and some of the things you're sent to gather are gross and found in dangerous places. So you have three short challenges you can do in any order to gather them, and then a 4th when you take the stew to the bugbears, dealing with the logistics of encumbrance and a bugbear who'll try to poison the stew if it's left unwatched and pin the blame on the PC's, because he'd prefer to go back to the old ways of looting & pillaging the humans. It's highly modular and could easily be expanded or shrunk down. (and they note in the intro it's already been pruned a fair bit in editing. ) It's not quite as interesting a read as Steve's work, but one I'm more likely to actually use, particularly if I found myself DMing for younger players. Seems a good one if you want to start them off in a non hack and slashy way, as while the monsters are often quirky and obnoxious, few are just mindlessly irredeemably bad. Also, while it's lighthearted, it doesn't have any obvious 4th wall breaking jokes to ruin the immersion, unlike too many Polyhedron ones. That makes it much more tolerable as a whole.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 45: Jan/Feb 1994



part 4/5



Side Treks - Gritzel's Guidance: A second side trek in the same issue? Again? They must be getting more of these, as they used to struggle finding even one. Like the other one this issue, it's a short one involving a scammer that could easily be expanded upon depending on how the initial encounter goes and how suspicious & vengeful the PC's are. Thankfully, the specifics are pretty different though, and it's aimed at much higher level characters. Gritzel is a corpulent Illusionist who uses his spells to manufacture threats and charge large sums of money to solve them. He'll turn up at a PC's stronghold pretending to be a wandering seer, foresee a terrible danger, and then charge as much as he can get away with to hang around for several weeks eating all your best food and stealing whatever little bits & pieces he can get away with. If you don't pay him, there'll be a whole load of illusionary misfortunes incoming, which once again will be used as a cover for theft. So this is very unusual because it caters to name level domain play, which they've barely done at all. If they had made a few more adventures using the domain play and mass combat rules, maybe they wouldn't have been abandoned in future editions. It doesn't seem too hard to use if the PC's are murderhobos either, just have them visiting some noble at the same time as him and getting justly suspicious of his sales patter. This is pretty decent, and gains a few extra points for it's unusual context. Like solo adventures, a few things aimed at a different kind of play does a lot to keep the boredom of repetition and diminishing returns away, even if most groups won't actually get the chance to use them.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 45: Jan/Feb 1994



part 5/5



Prism Keep: Danger, Danger! The submission is coming from inside the building! The cover adventure is not from a freelancer this time, but actual employee Rich Baker III, who's already responsible for a whole load of Dark Sun stuff and several other supplements. This is his first adventure in here, but not his last by a long shot, as he'll still be working for WotC in the 4e era. As with Steve Kurtz's one, it's only slightly too small to be a standalone module, and could probably have been padded out into one if they'd really wanted. But enough preamble. The eponymous keep is a flying castle with six rainbow themed spires (blue AND indigo? What newtonian nonsense is that?) created by a powerful wizard. His apprentice was corrupted by a suspiciously sexy demon, betrayed him and took the place over without really knowing how to operate the thing. Now it's flying all over the place and obviously appears near the PC's. An obvious plot contrivance makes getting up there much easier than the previous sky island adventures we've seen in here, so you won't be spending a big chunk of the adventure looking for flying mounts or negotiating wilderness hazards. Once you do, it's all quite pleasingly old school, you have a map, lots of NPC's and monsters, plus a few prisoners and freedom to approach the place with mindless violence, clever tactics or even diplomacy and joining up. The defences use decent tactics without being so paranoid as to make day-to-day life there unlivable, there's tensions between the bad guys you can exploit and most of the characters move around and do things rather than just sitting in their room waiting for the PC's. This is both well written and flexible, making it pretty top tier as an adventure. Indeed, it looks like it was actually influential on other game designers, as Castle Shard in Monte Cook's Ptolus is an obvious rip of this mapwise, and the two could easily be connected as a literal shard from this adventure's central power crystal summoned to another world. That's a cool easter egg that you could make something more of in your own campaign. As one that's both good and mildly historically significant, this gets a solid two thumbs up from me.



With all 3 large adventures being done by regular writers, this issue is actually pretty good in terms of quality, but does feel like they're becoming more closed in rather than looking at submissions by anyone fairly. It's a constant temptation not to take the easy path and get formulaic. Will they do the same next issue? Well, we'll get to that in a week or two.

 

[el-remmen]

Rudwilla's Stew: The second full-length adventure here is another from regular freelancer and future staff member Chris Perkins. A lighthearted low level one where many of the encounters don't need to be resolved by combat, the PC's are sent to gather ingredients for a special stew that'll placate the local Bugbear tribe - if they don't do it by the chief's birthday it's war! Unsurprisingly, their taste buds do not work quite like humans, and some of the things you're sent to gather are gross and found in dangerous places. So you have three short challenges you can do in any order to gather them, and then a 4th when you take the stew to the bugbears, dealing with the logistics of encumbrance and a bugbear who'll try to poison the stew if it's left unwatched and pin the blame on the PC's, because he'd prefer to go back to the old ways of looting & pillaging the humans. It's highly modular and could easily be expanded or shrunk down. (and they note in the intro it's already been pruned a fair bit in editing. ) It's not quite as interesting a read as Steve's work, but one I'm more likely to actually use, particularly if I found myself DMing for younger players. Seems a good one if you want to start them off in a non hack and slashy way, as while the monsters are often quirky and obnoxious, few are just mindlessly irredeemably bad. Also, while it's lighthearted, it doesn't have any obvious 4th wall breaking jokes to ruin the immersion, unlike too many Polyhedron ones. That makes it much more tolerable as a whole.

I ran this one (with some changes) in the last 3E campaign I ran, in a sandbox area that included the Caves of Chaos and the adventure "Moor-Tomb Map" from Dungeon #13.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 92: February 1994



part 1/5



32 pages. One jump ahead of the lawman, that's all and that's no joke. This bazaar is being made more bizarre as we speak. Looks like we're off to Zakhara for a bit, or maybe someone from there is coming to Raven's Bluff after making themselves unwelcome at home. Let's see which way round the adventure hooks will fit together best this issue, and how many we can chain before the campaign falls apart.



Notes From HQ: Another round of trying to combat agism here. Soonercon had plenty of under 18's, including some as Judges, and most of them worked out just fine. If you get sniffy about including younger people in your games, you'll put some of them off the hobby altogether. In a related concern, although still growing overall, their renewals rate is down. Are people being actively put off, or merely have too much on in their life and forgetting to send the form to resubscribe? Either way, what can we do about it? It's the endless juggle between appealing to newbies and also retaining long-term fans who's tastes may be a little more refined. On the positive side, they tease some of the adventures that are coming up this year at the big conventions. Some of them are obviously comedy ones just from looking at the titles, so choose which you preregister for wisely. That's obviously not going to change soon, no matter how much they irritate some members.



The Living City: They've obviously got a new mapmaker in, as this continues on from last month in being a solid step up in terms of production values. The Vast Brewing Company is a large and successful manufacturer producing beer for the whole region surrounding Raven's Bluff, despite the owners being only 0th level characters. You can make it big here without a class, honest! Although it does mean you can't defend yourself against thieves and monsters, and hiring adventurers to do it for you becomes an extra expense. But hey, their loss is the PC's gain as that's a solid adventure hook to engage with. The place itself doesn't seem that adventurable though, as it's a heavily realism based one that spends a lot of time talking about the everyday process of brewing, with a few low key magic items thrown in to speed the fermentation process along. The owners all have their act together and there's no secret evil brewing here alongside the alcohol. That puts it at middle of the road in terms of overall interest and usability, as it's all competently done, and the improved maps are still nice to see, but there's nothing particularly novel here.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 92: February 1994



part 2/5



The Door Islands: Over a year ago now, they did a competition to submit material on postapocalyptic Wisconsin as a Living Gamma World setting. It doesn't seem like they got enough support to make it an ongoing project, but they did get at least one submission, which appears here. Most of it is delivered IC in a colloquial accent, including liberal misspellings due to linguistic drift, with footnotes at the end offering more objective information. They pack in overviews of a whole bunch of locations, some quite dangerous, giving people & mutants living in the area both a safe home and opportunities for adventure. Each of them could easily be expanded into an article of it's own, which is exactly what you want to see in a setting overview like this. So this turns out to be another case where it's a real shame that their plans won't come to fruition, and if these places get expanded on it'll only be in your own home campaigns. There's so much more they could have done if D&D hadn't dominated everything else put together by such a large margin.



River Rats: The adventure this issue is set in Greyhawk City rather than Raven's Bluff, but it's the kind where the setting is easily transposable to anywhere adventurers are common enough to have an actual guild. You get hired by a typically treacherous Mr Johnson to retrieve his stolen barge (which he also stole in the first place, but he's not telling you that.) Like most river trips, this is an excuse to make the ultra-linearity of the encounters seem a little more naturalistic. Down the river, find the barge, fight the people who currently have it, and back home again. At only 6 pages and 5 encounters long, this is the kind of railroaded tournament adventure that's designed to fit into a single session with plenty of time to spare. You have to deal with comic relief trickster gnomes, the naming conventions are all over the place, you get betrayed at the end and don't get paid whether you succeed or fail in the mission, and don't even get to keep the barge to use in future adventures because the guild takes it away. It's all on the dull end of bad, being neither challenging mentally or combatwise, or taking itself very seriously. Filler material to earn a few more points in the RPGA's rankings without seriously risking your characters and really not worth using outside it's original context.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: The second half of the alphabet goes by a little quicker than the first, as we get from O-T in this instalment. The village of Orlimmin, where you can have some classic Dr Who style adventures in the gravel pits just outside town. The River Vesper, where a flying circle of ioun stones confounds adventurer attempts to grab it, and succeeding may well bring more adventures. The small village of Sabreenar, once a much larger city until destroyed by a dragon, then looted by orcs following in it's wake. The town of Sendrin, where a ruined temple to a fallen god of magic still has one functional stone idol that can be very helpful if you're suffering from persistent conditions, plus plenty of spellbooks & magical items if you're willing to do some digging. The self-explanatory village of Sword's Pool, where the worthy can get hold of magical swords distributed by mysterious forces from a pond. Not the best system of governance, but a good excuse to look at Ed's other articles full of cool magical items and pick one suitable to the PC. And finally the village of Tavilar, near the lair of a particularly obnoxious demilich who's defences tend to send you to other planes, making for a particularly dangerous and lengthy trip back if you don't have your own plane-hopping magic. All seem quite interesting and adaptable to your individual campaign, with a mix of ones that lean heavily on D&D tropes and others that draw on more mythic sources. Another entry well up to his usual standards.