TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 48: Jul/Aug 1994



part 3/5



Them Apples: The people complaining in the letters about too much whimsy will not be pleased, as we go straight from a second lighthearted adventure where you're expected to roleplay your way through a lot of the challenges to a third. A human orchard-keeper is jealous of his halfling neighbours growing skills, and hired someone (actually a shapeshifted wooddrake who would have done the job for free anyway because it loves creating chaos) to sabotage them. Now there's poisoned trees, a hill giant has kidnapped some of the halflings, and there's more havoc to come. Can you both solve the immediate problems and root out the ultimate culprits so there won't be another set as soon as you leave. As you're only basic level, you can't use raw force to get through this, so talking or sneakiness is the order of the day. This is the silliest adventure in here so far, with lots of exaggerated goofy NPC's, but thankfully it's less railroady than the last two as well, giving you much more freedom of how you approach the problems without spoiling the adventure as a whole. It feels very much like D&D for kids, consciously written to have something to run when introducing young people to the game. As such I can see how it could be useful, but it's yet again not something I'm very likely to be using at any time in the near future. This issue isn't turning out very well at all so far.



Melody: Straight away, we have another short adventure that's definitely on the more twee end of things. A bard found a harpy egg (after killing it's parents) and decided to see if it could be more than a ravenous monster if raised properly. Interestingly enough, this actually worked, although it involved a lot of lying to her about her true origin and keeping her ignorant of just how powerful her mind-control abilities are, and she's grown into a civilised and well-groomed young lady who wouldn't dream of eating other sentient beings. However, it wouldn't be an adventure if there wasn't cause for conflict so while travelling between towns they were attacked by ettins. Her adoptive father was killed, she was taken prisoner and forced to sing for their supper, and now the PC's are the latest people lured in. Will they be able to keep their wits about them enough to listen to the warning lyrics, not just the hypnotic melody, and not be easy prey for the ettin ambush? Then if they survive that, what do they do with the captive? Do they engage in knee-jerk fantastical racism and kill her as well, let her go free and be on her way without any concern, or investigate this interesting anomaly further and make her a recurring NPC? Another one where the combat is a relatively minor part of the adventure, and the interesting part is engaging with the worldbuilding and moral questions raised as a result. Does it make more sense to try and integrate intelligent monsters into society than driving them away or exterminating them? If you do so, how do you deal with powers like mind control & flight, as well as weird limitations and problematic dietary needs? A multi-species metropolis would be an absolute nightmare balancing accessibility and security needs for things with vastly different body plans and capabilities. Which is probably why most games shy away from that and make most playable races just humans with pointy ears or forehead ridges. So despite once again being very twee and 2eish in writing style, this does earn points for being actively antiracist, falling on the side that just maybe, there are better long term solutions to the problems of the world than killing things and taking their stuff. It may take generations of work and developing some custom magic to overcome the logistical hurdles, and some little white lies, but it'll all be for the greater good in the end. This first one this issue I'd actually willingly use.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 48: Jul/Aug 1994



part 4/5



Sleeping Dragon: In an issue full of lots of little adventures, even the cover story is only 15 pages long. Bill Slavicsek gives us a mid-level adventure for Council of Wyrms, in the unlikely event you ever manage to get that far with the wonky XP system making it near impossible to get over the 1st level hump playing by the RAW. (although they do include pregens if you want to do this as a one-shot) As is often the case when they do a tie-in with an all new setting, this also serves as an introductory promotional piece for people who haven't bought the boxed set yet, spending several pages explaining the basic details & history of the setting before getting to the stuff that won't be repeated in the actual books.

But enough context, and onto the actual adventure. An ancient red dragon who once tried to take over the entire Blood Isles has returned centuries later as a Dracolich. Key to his plans is recovering a macguffin that would let him summon the Tarrasque to wreak havoc on the Council of Wyrms.(notwithstanding that mechanically, even a single ancient dragon matches it in damage output & HP in 2e, they can easily evade it by flying and have all manner of other tricks to beat it in a fight, even if none of them have access to a Wish to finish it off, so playing by RAW all that would happen is the site itself getting trashed and a few demihuman casualties in the evacuation. ) So straight away, it's obvious that we have a very 2e style adventure where an official writer wants to tell a Big Story, and doesn't care that the physics of the game do not support the events they want to happen. The rest of the adventure is similarly linear and cheesy, with the PC getting dragged into the plot by dream visions (which most of the elder dragons don't believe of course, because that stupid trope apparently applies even when everyone knows the supernatural exists and has a ton of magical powers of their own) multiple bits of overwrought boxed text, destroying the artifact by throwing it into lava a la LotR and the main villain being killed by deus ex machina rather than your own efforts. Basically, this sucks on toast in both writing style and mechanics, treating you like an idiot and leading you by the claw from one cliched setpiece to the next. The kind of bad adventure only an official member of staff could get away with in here because they aren't being held to the same standards as freelancers. No wonder the setting never worked out in actual play despite being an awesome idea, given how shoddy the mechanical foundation was, and how the writers seemed determined to hem you in and make PC dragons less powerful than NPC ones in all sorts of niggling little ways. One of TSR's experimental ideas I'm particularly annoyed they botched the implementation of. This is D&D, so you ought to put extra effort into getting anything involving the dragons right.



Index to Issues 37-48: The index follows exactly the same formula as last time, sorted by alphabetical order of adventure title, just over a page of writing padded out to two with artwork, with the only change looking at them side by side that the font has increased in size slightly at some point in the last 2 years, as have the margins. If anything, that's a mild step downwards, and a reminder that upper management will impose some more petty cost cutting measures that don't work (surely decreasing font size and page count with the same amount of content would be more effective than the few cents you save by mildly reducing writer's word counts) before TSR collapses. So much for linear concepts of progress.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 48: Jul/Aug 1994



part 5/5



Honor Lost, Honor Regained: We finish off with another little adventure that'll probably be over in less than a session if the players are focussed. The PC's come across a disheveled crying warrior by the side of the road. Turns out it's a Paladin of Helm who let his arachnophobia get the better of him and fled from a fight, leaving his companion to be webbed and eaten. This cowardice made him lose his paladin powers. You need to talk him through his emotional crisis and get him to buck up, then go back and do a short linear dungeon full of giant spiders with a Drider at the end. Yet another very 2e feeling one where the dungeon crawling part is probably the least interesting part of the adventure, and the real meat is the characterisations of the various NPC's, the roleplaying before and after the fighting and the potential spin-offs you could develop from this involving them. Not really that great for people who just want prefab adventures then, but for DM's who use these as a starting point and then use the casually mentioned ideas later in the campaign it has potential.



An issue that's absolutely packed with the bad aspects of 2e, short perfunctory dungeons with lots of railroady talky bits throughout to bore people who prefer to make their own decisions, a general air of trying to make things simpler and more whimsical to attract a younger audience at the expense of their existing one, shoddy worldbuilding & rules design, almost entirely written by recurring writers who are obviously not being edited as strictly as they were a few years ago. It all adds up to one of the least useful issues yet, and given the contents of the letters page, it's obvious that many readers weren't keen on their current direction even back then. I guess the things that led to their downfall continue to progress then. Let's see if next issue is even worse.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 98: August 1994



part 1/5



32 pages. A wizard and a pipe-smoking halfling. Now that's a familiar starting point for an adventure. Where will their wanderings take them, what dangers will they face, and what treasures will they find at the end? Under hill or over mountain, time to see how challenging and dark the latest issue I face manages to be.



Notes From HQ: Progress ticks onwards. Apparently this issue is the first produced entirely on desktop software. They've been typing up individual articles on macs for many years, but now memory sizes have reached the point where you can lay out and color an entire issue as one file, making moving things around, changing typfaces and font sizes etc much quicker and reversible, allowing a lot more experimentation. As usual with computers, there was a bit of a learning curve, but before too long they'll take all that extra flexibility for granted, just like musicians switching from editing on tape to being able to shift things around non-linearly. Nice to know when it happened, and as with the internet, I think they're slightly ahead of Dragon & Dungeon technologically, who didn't start futzing around with desktop editing until the little red triangle issues next year and had a somewhat rougher learning curve.

On the other hand, human nature hasn't changed at all, and even a small organisation like this can have very vicious and petty politics. Jean has to tell everyone to simmer down on the backstabbing. You won't get a regional co-ordinator job by overthrowing the person currently doing it, and trying that kind of crap blatantly will get you marked as someone to avoid giving any kind of responsibility too or even expelled. Don't cut other members down, poach their customers by running a convention on the same weekend as another in the same region or spread rumours about them behind their backs. Instead, work together to make the RPGA and gaming as a whole bigger and more welcoming. This is the problem when you have people who see social interaction as a zero-sum game with winners & losers, rather than an opportunity for mutual gain. Of course, there's the equally problematic other end of this spectrum, where people squash rumors that turn out to be accurate in the name of appearing unified, allowing someone to get away with sexual harassment or financial wrongdoing for years while the people reporting the problem get pushed out, but the RPGA is a long way away from any kind of #metoo revelations, so the current company line is towards making a show of unity and getting along even if you don't actually like each other. Hopefully we shall see how this is received in the letters page in a few month's time.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 98: August 1994



part 2/5



The Ministry of Art: As they said in the newspaper last issue, they've recently managed to get wizards of all specialities and none to sit down together and co-operate enough to form an organised government ministry in the same way as clerics. This has caused much grumbling, both among other power blocs in the city who feel threatened by the new one, and among wizards themselves about the specifics of who was appointed, with plenty of accusations that the chairmembers were chosen for political skill rather than raw power, and many of them were diversity appointments that mean women & demihumans are more common than they are in the general population of arcane spellcasters around here. (Apart from gnomes, who are very peeved one of their number didn't get the Illusionist seat) The meat of the article is short descriptions of the 14 members, one for each specialty school, element, wild magic & Ambassador Carrague in the generalists seat. (They'll need to reorganise come 3e and the introduction of Sorcerers then. ) As you'd expect, they're diverse, eccentric, and many are much older than they appear. If they all agree on something, they could accomplish a lot, but I strongly suspect that they'll spend most of their time bickering and incorporating them into the government was a way of keeping them from just doing whatever experiments on their own. So this continues straight on from the editorial in talking about both the fun aspects and irritations of politics, as well as reminding us that affirmative action & diversity quotas were already a thing in the 90's, along with the predictable reactionary backlash. You could definitely get a lot of adventures out of the interactions of this lot, so I think this article is a success.



The Ambassador and The King: This also follows directly on from the last article by giving us full stats for Ambassador Carrague and his dog King, who is actually a human ranger transformed into a dog years ago who found he prefers the doggy life. The only drawback is that after a couple of decades as a dog, he's already feeling pretty geriatric, and isn't sure how that would interact with his human lifespan if he was turned back. Carrague's life is also pretty interesting, with a long sequence of adventures that got him up to level 19, several decades as the building inspector, his recent "death", and then being given the chairman job at the new ministry of art. He's definitely showing signs of senility these days, although as with many wizards, it's uncertain how much of that is faked, and he's still pretty dangerous in a pinch so few people are going to push their luck with him. The two of them keep pretty busy, so they could turn up in the unlikeliest places. He plays basically the same role in Raven's Bluff that Elminster does for the wider realms, a good guy, but not one you can rely on, as he might be absent, preoccupied with a bigger problem, or choose to help you in an obtuse way, and has no patience for stupidity in his supplicants. That keeps the players from running to him whenever there's a problem, and Raven's Bluff a place where low level adventurers are needed. Once again this takes things mentioned in previous issues and builds upon them, making it feel extra significant, and I strongly suspect we'll be seeing them again in the future as well. This issue is turning out pretty interesting so far.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 98: August 1994



part 3/5



A Handful of Dust: Another month, another Raven's Bluff centred adventure that's specifically designed to probably be nonlethal whether you succeed or fail at the objective, but allow for various degrees of financial gain or loss in the process. The PC's are walking the streets when there's an explosion, and then they get press-ganged by a wizard into finding some mummy dust, which they need to do in the next 3 hours, or his experiment will fail, and they can look forward to life as a toad or similar small animal. This puts you in a 24 style scenario where real time is also game time, so the DM needs to keep track of exactly how much time has passed for the proper tournament experience. As is standard formula around here, you have to get through half a dozen different challenges in a purely linear fashion to get there and back, testing your combat, roleplaying & puzzle solving skills as well as your moral fibre. The individual encounters are pretty interesting and varied, and the conceit of linking up game & real time surprisingly effective, so this is actually pretty decent as tournament adventures go, taking the strict limitations the writer is working under and making the best of them, but it still has an irritatingly high level of whimsy and is much too railroaded for my tastes. It shows once again that having persistent characters is making them dial the lethality of modules way down and try to focus more on roleplaying heavy urban adventures, which is not what the D&D system is designed to do well. It could still probably be fun in the hands of a good judge, but it could be so much better if it wasn't hemmed in so much.



The Sable Feather: Time for another collection of NPC's that would have been put in the Rogues Gallery column a few years ago. The Fellowship of the Sable Feather is one of the increasing number of clubs and guilds that your PC's can join, giving you extra adventure hooks and an easy way to denote allies and rivals when meeting other RPGAers at conventions. Founded by a paladin of Tyr and his wizard son, it's very firmly on the heroic side, which also means it's accumulated more than a few enemies distinctly unhappy about their evil schemes being foiled. Despite both being firmly heroic, they're not boringly written, with both carrying trauma from their active adventuring days, and some tension between father & son over him choosing arcane magic to study rather than divine. So this avoids the big trap most of the old galleries fell into when telling you about other heroic characters and their exploits, and gives you a way to engage with them for mutual benefit without making it all effortless, as they have high standards for who they'll allow to join. This seems like it could be built upon in quite interesting ways, especially if they add a few more intentionally contrasting organisations competing for PC members in future issues. Fingers crossed other writers see the potential and exploit it properly to make the setting even more active and player-directed in the future.

 

[TBeholder]

Polyhedron Issue 96: June 1994

Fire Wake superheats your target's posterior, sending them running around screaming like Super Mario when he hits lava until someone dispels it or they run out of hit points. Another one that's not really competitive with corebook combat spells of the same level in terms of raw damage, but worth it for sheer humiliation value.

Or a diversion, or setting more things on fire as the target runs around.

Scapegoat makes everyone in the vicinity hate and attack one person. They get to save every round to snap out though, which puts this initially very powerful effect at 4e levels of weakness long-term.

Again, it also can provide distraction, and in a more subtle way if set up just right.
If someone "snaps out", they are not automatically disentangled from the fight, especially if the victim has allies.
Also, depending on the targets, there may not be "long term".

Nemicron's Transference swaps a single physical property like weight, temperature at which they melt/boil, tensile strength, conductivity, etc between two inanimate objects. This is permanent, so repeated use by a patient wizard can abuse this in all sorts of creative ways to make technically nonmagical but fantastical items. Have fun driving the DM to despair with your exploits.

Why "non magical"? But yes, it looks more versatile than other spells with similar effects (such as Glassteel or Merald's Meld).

Polyhedron Issue 97: July 1994

Among their staff is one of the Realms' growing numbers of heroic drow, teaching sign language to the deaf kids and trying to get over his own trauma from a lifetime of living in an evil female dominated society.

That's not "heroic", that's simply "fed up". But IIRC, the drow sign language was supposed to be

1. fully usable only with elfin fingers and
2. ideographic (rather than alphabet based, which makes sense if it's a "tactical" language optimized for speed)?

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 98: August 1994



part 4/5



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Having established the relatively safe and peaceful norm of Turmish, Ed gives us 5 societies of varying degrees of secretiveness that are competing to keep it that way or change things more to their liking. The Masked Masters, a group of illusionists who primarily serve as historians and storytellers, but of course that means they must have pretty effective divination magic as well, to accurately recreate all those historical events, which makes other people paranoid about what secrets of theirs are in their records and if they use that knowledge to more practical ends as well. The Ghost Swords, mysterious floating macguffins that lead people to treasure or other things in trouble and the cult that's grown up around them. The Nail, a secret group of merchants infiltrating other trading organisations to engage in insider trading and eventually take over the whole distribution chain. The Five Lions, your typical group of retired adventurers that now make a decent living training up other adventurers and sending them to test dungeons intentionally restocked with easy monsters. Whether they're actively colluding with deepspawn to do so remains unproven. And The Fellowship of the Purple Staff, a pan-faith network of clerics working together to keep Turmish stable and prosperous, although their plans involve reducing the amount of wilderness and may bring them into conflict with the local druids. So most of these are more good than bad, but even with no obvious cackling villains around there's still enough ambiguity for them to come into conflict about goals and the means they accomplish them by. You can have some interesting political intrigue here without it ruining the overall feeling of pastoral safety. It's useful to have some safe places in the world to give the darker ones like Thay or the Moonsea some contrast, so I have no problem with this at all.



The Living Galaxy: Roger has another bit of very generic advice to string out to 4 pages with sci-fi examples this time. Always have a notebook. (or in the modern age, a smartphone with both written and voice notes easily accessible) Noting down interesting things you see and ideas you have while out is important because the simple act of writing it down makes you much less likely to forget things, and even if you do, you have the physical notes to remind you. I can't argue with his reasoning, as I know my brain works better when up and moving around than spending hours at the computer trying to squeeze out a little inspiration, but this is particularly basic as advice goes. If you haven't already encountered it in your own education you've led a very sheltered life. I can't work up any enthusiasm about this one at all.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 98: August 1994



part 5/5



Weasel Games: Lester turns his attention to the idea of the nuclear option. What does it do to a game when there's an overwhelmingly powerful move that there's no defence against? You would think that everyone would try to get hold of it and use it as fast as possible. But in many cases, people don't, or get it and then come to gentleman's agreements not to actually use it unless someone else does first, because it would make the game unfun. Still, even if you don't actually want to use it, you can get concessions from other players simply by the threat of using it, as in Chicken and other games of brinkmanship. A reminder that making a game completely fair and balanced does not always make it more fun, and definitely does not make it more realistic. Sometimes you should intentionally leave imbalance in for thematic reasons, make sure the game isn't polished into blandness, leaving reviewers with nothing but polite indifference. His approach continues to stand out and amuse against the backdrop of the rest of the articles.



The Raven Express: The actual ravens of Raven's Bluff have appeared several times now. Ravens that curse you, wereravens, ravens that are trained to act as an alarm system for the fire department. Here we add to that with ravens trained to act as a carrier service, which they're much better suited to than pigeons because they're bigger & stronger, and you can actually send them to different destinations and have them come back on their own. You can send them to any of 9 neighbouring cities, with more likely to be added in the future. This has multitudinous possibilities for espionage and smuggling small light items of contraband, and the owner has no problem with that, being a thief himself. In fact, you'd better watch out, because he's reading your messages and has no qualms about using that inside knowledge in other ways to turn a profit. So this is both useful for players in an obvious way, and has plenty of potential to be turned into an adventure in itself when a letter they send goes missing, or someone who shouldn't has information they tried to keep secret and they investigate the inner workings of this place. Then if you do bust up the joint, you'll have to figure out how to clean it up and keep it working without the current boss and his raven training talents, or there'll be a lot of people pissed off about a basic utility stopping working, which would also lead to unpleasant consequences if they know you're the ones responsible. This all seems like it has plenty of potential for fun roleplaying and inspiring socioeconomic debate, so it gets my approval.


With Living City content taking up well over half of the issue, it feels like they're doubling down on what's most successful, reducing more generic material to a sideshow. Elsewhere in TSR the number of settings is booming, but here it's all Raven's Bluff and it's neighbours, with even more far-flung areas of Toril barely mentioned. It makes me worry they're going to oversaturate the place to death without any replacement or alternative. Such are the perils of success. Time to see how the next issue varies the same basic formula and if it's too much or too little change for the readers at the time.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 99: September 1994



part 1/5



32 pages. September is Dark Sun month in here as well as Dragon, as we have no Living City material at all and four Athasian articles instead. After my complaints about last month, that comes as very welcome indeed. Not entirely sure about the garters on that gladiator, but when you only have a little metal to work with, you have to get inventive with placement to optimise the chances of it blocking at least some attacks. Let's see if this breath of fresh air will stay fresh all through the issue, or reach unpleasant temperatures long before then.



Notes From HQ: TSR and many other RPG companies do love to put quotes at the start of chapters. D&D is built on a kitchen sink of magic and mythology from all around the world, and it's not surprising that they'd do similar with more recent sources as well until a few litigious sorts spoil the fun for everyone. (and it's not as if a single sentence from a larger work is any kind of threat to people buying it, so it really should fall under fair use) So this month's editorial is all about their regular use of quotations, puns and references, how they serve as a useful shorthand to other knowledgable geeks as well as a means of entertainment in themselves. What would later be known as a basic primer on meme theory. Since many social media sites increasingly communicate in images and gifs clipped out and twisted around by photoshop and a good one can earn you many likes and shares, this is one of those times where we're reminded that technology may change, but human nature does not. Originality is rare, and most creativity is merely taking and recombining already existing ideas with your own spin. So why not have fun with your references and in-jokes? Just don't ruin the campaign by shoehorning in a joke that doesn't fit the lore, as a long running campaign has less room for that kind of shenanigans than a tournament module.



Coin Collecting: Even in a dying world where just surviving is a challenge, the large city-states will only allow you to pay for things in their proprietary currency, and if you don't have local coins, you'll have to pay a substantial percentage in changers fees, many of which are unscrupulous sorts who'll bilk a rube for even more than they say they are. Surprised they have the energy and resources for custom mints when metal is so rare but I guess poor decisions like that are one of the reasons the world has ended up in the state it is. A three page fluff piece full of descriptions of the shape and designs for each of the 7 city-states, this seems firmly aimed at the demographic of gamers who like to spend hours of real time shopping in game, and find out about linguistics, what musical instruments exist in the world and all that flavour stuff that doesn't really affect the events of most adventures, but makes a world feel more fleshed out and alive. Not particularly useful if you just want to get down to the action, but some people will enjoy it, particularly if they're also Forgotten Realms fans.