TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[el-remmen]

Dungeon Issue 49: Sep/Oct 1994

The Dark Place: Alien continues to be a popular franchise around here, so here's another adventure that specifically references it, forcing you to hunt down a single scary enemy that uses stealth and hit & run tactics so you can have multiple encounters with it before finally beating it. A wizard summoned a Yugoloth he wasn't equipped to bind and became it's dinner. Trapped on the prime material, it cut a swathe through the local town, who had no magic weapons to hurt it with despite their numbers, until the place wound up abandoned. Now it lurks in the ruins, and the PC's are the latest people to pass through. Will they have what it takes to beat it, or at least banish it back to the lower planes, or become yet another meal in it's belly? This seems like it could be quite effectively scary, particularly if the DM plays up the atmospherics of the ruined town. The PC's have free rein to wander where they choose, and might find some helpful stuff along the way, but the map is designed so the climactic final encounter will probably be one of the last places they'd naturally look. The only other monsters are a non-hostile ghost and maybe a few skeletons animated by the yugoloth as distractions that'll be no threat at the intended level. An effective demonstration of how less can sometimes be more, particularly when it comes to horror, and fiend's ability to teleport at will is what really makes them scary, not just their combat powers. Have fun with your jump scares. A pretty strong start to the issue, this is definitely one I'd enjoy using.

Ran through this one as a player back in like 97 and loved it. I have been looking to run it in one of my own games sometime.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 100: October 1994



part 2/5



The Analects of Sigil: Planescape's first article in here is also a bit of mechanics free fiction that's also an in setting document. In a universe shaped by belief, intangibles can be stolen, traded or given up, and there are those that value the knowledge of how this can be done highly. Our narrator sought out the Five Citadels of Surrender, places on the negative elemental planes that are themselves defined as absences in the surrounding material. (which is particularly tricky to discern in the already regularly empty quasiplane of vacuum) Exploring them will strip away your fear, hope, compassion, regret, and what the 5th one removes remains undocumented, because the narrator is already too sociopathic to function in society and got himself arrested by the Sigil authorities, which is how we're reading about this. A nicely atmospheric read that reminds us that Planescape was specifically designed as TSR's answer to Mage:the Ascension, trying to make the planes more than just more places for high level characters to go kill things & take their stuff and instead explore more conceptual avenues of storytelling. Not that it always worked out like that in actual play, but they still earn some points for trying to expand our minds. I quite like this, and unlike the Dragonlance one it's a plot hook not repeated in the books, so this is extra nice to unearth.



Cult of the Great Hunter: Looks like it's not just the usual suspects getting articles in here, as we have one for Earthdawn, of all things. The eponymous Cult are a decentralised group who worship Verjigorm, and are dedicated to stymieing and destroying dragons to whatever extent they can. (as directly fighting a dragon is very stupid for all but the most powerful adventurers.) This does not mean they're heroic in any way, as Verjigorm is an eldritch horror from another universe that can't enter this one as long as the mana levels are too low. So this is mixing your call of cthulhu with your regular fantasy campaign with elves, dragons, wizards and whatnot, forcing the regular people to choose between working with several different flavours of massive terrifying monster. What a choice to have to make. Not surprising that the creators of Shadowrun would make their fantasy world darker and more morally ambiguous than D&D as well. Another quite interesting article that shows this special is going to be a lot wider reaching than their regular issues. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what other less well known RPG's they'll give some space too.



Gorlash Spacescum: Speaking of space, now it's time for a spelljammer character. Gorlash was once a normal wizard from Toril who got turned into a three-armed kobold by a wild magic zone. Now he's a pirate captain in wildspace, where people are more accepting of weird looking creatures with unusual body plans. His third arm is fully functional, which means he can cast spells with his regular limbs and do something else with his third one, making him pretty dangerous in a fight. His crew include a Giff and an intelligent Shambling Mound, which are also pretty tough opponents with their own personalities and special tricks. A fairly interesting set of antagonists for your players, whether you meet them while sailing and have to fight them, or in port where you could form a more ambiguous relationship, this once again seems quite usable in both it's original context and adapted to other settings.



The Tower Of Gold: Al-Qadim gets a mini adventure that's both very setting specific, and very railroady, as it involves the kind of genies that are powerful enough to basically do whatever they want, so the players have to make the right choices to pass their tests no matter high level you are. The ruler of a city mistreated a genie, and was cursed to be trapped forever inside his tower along with his daughters, while the rest of the city fell into ruin. You have to pass one test for each daughter, plus an additional one from the genie himself to free them, at which point they'll be exceedingly horny from centuries of confinement and want to marry the PC's straight away. Once again we see that what works in the stories can be irritating and disruptive if applied to groups of PC's in an ongoing campaign, even if it's faithful to the source material. The aesoping morality play elements are quite heavyhanded, and the fine details still need filling out to make it a complete adventure. Not satisfying at all.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 100: October 1994



part 3/5



Insect Labs Incorporated: For Amazing Engine material, we get served details on the Caribbean in the Kromesome setting, a biopunk world of genetic engineering and the messed up stuff megacorps get up to with that power. Insect Labs are engaging in some extremely overzealous gentrification, releasing three different plagues on the population to whittle them down before buying everything up and converting it into a shiny chrome utopia. The big executives each think they'll be in charge of the new world, but the company's supercomputer has become intelligent, is playing them off against one another, and wants to reduce humans to it's obedient hive of servants and become the true ruler. Can the PC's figure out what's going on, gather enough data to actually pin the creation of the diseases on the company rather than just being natural mutations, and will they spot the power behind the throne or just take down a few executives by revealing the scandal but not providing a full solution. A complicated and open-ended scenario that seems depressingly plausible after seeing the way big corporations have profiteered off a real life pandemic while regular people lose their jobs or find wages increasing far less than inflation. Who knows how far the likes of Amazon or Google will go to increase their control over the world, or what the algorithms are pushing for their own benefit that their original creators didn't intend? This manages to be genuinely unsettling but also pretty playable. Maybe it might be worth digging up the books for this after all.



Conspired To Succeed: Dark Conspiracy has been mentioned in here a few times, and it's obviously one of those games they'd like to see more of, as it's another non-TSR game that they give an article too. This one is some fairly basic new crunch, giving us 4 more career templates to build your character with, some less formal forms of employment than others. (Struggling) Genre writer, hitting a little too close to the truth with your writings and attracting the attention of the monsters as a result. Asylum inmate, framed by the monsters and institutionalised. Whether you've escaped or not, you can actually pick up some valuable skills in there. Zoologist who stumbles across cryptids or worse in your investigation of the wilderness and starts to investigate them as well. And finally, someone who detached from normal society and lived in the sewers for a while, which is an excellent position to observe the weird underbelly of the world from as long as you can keep healthy down there. All quite quirky, as I guess the corebook covered all the more mundane archetypes. It seems quite heavily inspired by Traveller, with every 4 years you spend doing a thing giving you a set amount of skills. A decent enough little article, neither brilliant nor annoying, that adds a little more very welcome variety to the issue.



A Squid's-Eye View: Mystara gets our longest article, another bit of correspondence that's particularly interestingly meta. There are no mind flayers on the planet, because they're an AD&D monster, and the Known World was a regular D&D setting, and never the twain shall crossover for reasons of internal politics. But politics shift, so the Known World as a setting is being rebranded and sent across cosmologies to play under the AD&D 2e rules with all the other settings. As with many of their decisions around this time, this would turn out to be a bad idea, making what was a fairly generic setting compete directly with all the other settings made people wonder what the point was, and it would die again having only converted only a small fraction of the previous material over to the new rules. But anyway, an illithid from another world is looking for new places to conquer and this is framed as it's research processes and conclusions, as it looks at various countries and the oddities of the planet like the hollow centre and the day of the year magic stops working. A quite amusing whistlestop tour that comes to a head when it scries Glantri, and find that the wizards there scry & summon back. I guess no matter how much of a supergenius you are, you can't be prepared for everything. So this is an article that playfully makes the best of the situation, trying to convert people to the setting who were oblivious or put off by it's "basicness". Will this encourage more readers to send articles in here, or are the ones I've already seen in Dragon the limit of what there is to be known? Let's hope the next few years have at least a few hidden gems for this setting, as I still retain some fondness for it in both it's incarnations.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 100: October 1994



part 4/5



Kre'ketrac: When Dark Sun started, it was obvious that at some point Athas was a more pleasant place, but the precise details of why and how long ago it changed were mysterious. But setting expansions and metaplot have moved fast, and now we know why Rajaat started this in the first place (to kill all humanoids but the original halflings) and seen the cataclysmic results of his recent attempt to escape. We've also seen a few hints of what life was like before arcane magic was invented, with psionics and life-shaping the dominant supernatural powers. Which brings us to the hard to pronounce artifact that makes up most of this article. A very CG lump of amorphous stone that gives it's owner a whole load of psychometabolic powers, but may also activate them to be "helpful" according to it's own whims. It's thousands of years old, but prefers to live in the moment, so getting specific information out of it about the past is near impossible. This article manages to showcase two of the most unwelcome parts of Dark Sun at once, the overbearing metaplot, and writers who didn't really get the memo about the intended tone and kept putting saturday morning cartoon comic relief characters in. It's all very irritating. I'm definitely passing on this one. The cheese is coming from inside the building and they need a different line manager if they don't want to alienate their fans and kill the setting.



Crimebuster: No, they're not including a Gangbusters article in here, which is a bit of a shame since that's a very interesting part of Polyhedron's history it would be nice to have a little nostalgia for. Instead, this is your typical batman-esque rich guy fighting crime with gadgets but no actual superpowers for the Champions RPG. It demonstrates just how much flexibility you have in point buy systems compared to D&D, but also how dense the character sheet can get in systems like that, leaving them little room to give him any particularly interesting history or personality details. He's an old-fashioned hero, stalwart and true, who's rich enough that he doesn't have to struggle with the hassles of juggling a day job and costumed crime-fighting. Unless you're deep into the number crunching aspect of point-buy systems, this is a bit boring and cliched as a read. Another one that's mainly here to let RPGA members know about a system they probably haven't ever played before, and hopefully lure in a few new customers.



Arms Against the Dragonlords: Don't see a single Dragonlance article for years and suddenly two of them come along at once. This is a more standard collection of magical items sent in by a freelancer though, as are common for the Forgotten Realms. How will these fit into the much smaller history and geography of Krynn?

Pathfinder was created for a solamnic knight, and helps suitably heroic wielders navigate the wilderness. Even illusionary terrain won't be able to faze your impeccable awareness of where you want to go. That could save you a lot of time and rations in an epic adventure.

Ground Breaker is a warhammer that unsurprisingly lets you cause earthquakes by hitting the ground. A good way to keep your enemies off balance, which won't win the fight in itself, but is very handy if used in the right time and place. (ie, not when surrounded by allies, as anyone who's tried to use a fireball in melee will tell you)

Honor's Face is a battle axe with two very useful extra tricks. You can summon it to your hand at any time, and only honorable people are reflected in it's surface. Note that honorable does not always mean nice, but for a warrior without any social nonweapon proficiencies, it's at least a good metric for who might swindle or backstab you, so it's once again much more useful than an extra plus.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 100: October 1994



part 5/5



Shadowrun Archetypes: Shadowrun gets something more mundane, but curiously quite historically significant. Physical Adepts weren't in the original corebook, but added on in a supplement and then incorporated into the core of subsequent editions. They channel their essence into enhancing their body rather than casting obvious external spells, letting them function as superskilled martial artists or low level superheroes. Just as in D&D, that's probably not the most optimal build, but it's a fun one conceptually, so once introduced it remains fairly popular nonetheless. I don't think this is their very first appearance, but it is interesting to see here. (and it would be extra interesting if it was. Can anyone answer that?)



Pumpkin-Charley: Ravenloft contributes an unpleasantly ableist bit of poetry where the narrator torments a mentally handicapped man, culminating in him getting his head stuck in a halloween pumpkin, to become a spooky bit of folklore in the tradition of Jason Vorhees or Leatherface. He does not get any comeuppance for his cruelty at the end, and is just openly telling his story to the tourists like it's funny, which is particularly worrying. That's a big naughty word yikes, and you should be ashamed for writing this J. Robert King. This is just bizarrely mean-spirited, lacking any of the morality play aspect of most horror stories. If they were in any way consistent about their code of conduct this should never have got published in here.



Alien Technology: WEG's Shatterzone is another one we haven't seen in here before. They get one of those mad science pods that messes with your genome. Will you die horribly, go mad, gain awesome superpowers, or some mix of traits that may be advantageous in some respects, but also awkward and deforming in others? Like drinking from magical fountains in old school dungeons, it seems very much like a crapshoot, so only risk it if you're not too attached to your character concept and are fine with starting a new one if the dice don't go your way. Well, it's been a while since those were common so this gets my approval as another interesting bit of variety in an issue that's already been very heavy on that.



Troubleshooter Exam: We finish things off with a typically absurdist quiz for Paranoia. Which answer you pick doesn't really matter, because most of them have no right answer, and you're a commie mutant traitor who's going to annoy someone and die soon anyway, unless you blast them first. You know the drill by now. No surprise that they're still firmly stuck in the Zap playstyle given the rest of their output.



With far greater quantity and variety of material than usual, this issue stands out quite a lot as a big celebration despite being no larger than a regular issue. Some of the individual articles are still annoying, but even the bad ones are mostly annoying in interesting ways. If they took inspiration from this and made the regular issues denser as well I would be quite pleased. But I guess that would require more freelance submissions, particularly for the non D&D material. We shall just have to see how much that continues to be a struggle for them.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 101: November 1994



part 1/5



32 pages. Dragon featured a bit of falconry at the start of this year, now it seems Polyhedron is rounding it off with the same idea, albeit with a much lower budget. It's not a particularly common gimmick for adventurers to use, as it falls prey to the usual problem of animal companions failing to scale with the PC's and becoming uselessly fragile in combat. I very much doubt this issue'll do anything about that, but hopefully there's still some interesting and relevant material inside.



Classifieds is particularly New York heavy this time, with 5 different players seeking other players adverts in quick succession. Hopefully they're paying attention to other people's posts as well and some of them manage to pair up.



Notes From HQ: Round about this time of year, they normally talk about how Gen Con turned out. They've been bigger and busier than ever this year, so instead of devoting a whole article to it, this is a whistlestop tour of what happened at 5 conventions this year. 8 hours of running Chemcheax at Origins when they'd only scheduled for four, because people were so desperate for magic items. This was then quickly beaten again at DragonCon, forcing them to spend 13+1/2 hours selling and trading so people could customise their living city characters. Dex Con was notable for it's awesome pinball machines and sweet selection, they've obviously been hitting those Caves of Confection hard. Gen Con itself was a LARP extravaganza, with many of the staff dressed as their characters, a whole load of living city tournaments, and plenty of money raised for their choice of charities. And finally, AndCon featured the first showcase of the updated high detail Raven's Bluff maps coming out next year. All seems pretty optimistic. If they keep on working at it they could still grow the living city by several more orders of magnitude without it becoming stale. As long as there's new people coming in, even the repetitive bits will still be new and interesting to someone.



The Book of Exalted Deeds: Here we are again at the release of the Encyclopedia Magica, where slade went through every D&D book and periodical ever released (so far) and collated all the magical items. It got a decent amount of promotion in Dragon, but here's where you get the real behind the scenes dirt. The idea of a big index of magical items was originally pitched as a series of articles in here, along with the Chemcheux magic shop framing device that did make it in, before Jim Ward realised it's potential and promoted it to a full product. Just listing the items and where they could be found did not satisfy the general public at all though, and it's taken them several more years to put the proper definitive four-volume set together. In the process, he had to decide how much editing to do on items that were scrappily described, jokes, or horribly unbalanced, of which the newszine has been responsible for far more than it's fair share. In the end, they included them pretty much as they are, including both the overpowered sword of Babette Maelstrom and the exceedingly irritating sword of underwear snatching. It shows that these books had a more dramatic genesis than the average book, and also that the battle about how much whimsy to include in their products is an ongoing one in the TSR offices. I'm not the only one irritated by Jean & Skip's excesses. Still, at least they're just as willing to poke fun at themselves, otherwise we'd never have seen this article published. Much more interesting than a straight promotional article in any case, and it's nice to view this particularly epic bit of history from a different angle. This still feels like it was worth reading and writing about.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 101: November 1994



part 2/5



Adversaries: The final attempt at this column that never really caught on decides to ditch the moral ambiguity, and put you in the middle of two chaotic evil monsters. Both really ought to be destroyed, it's just a matter of what order you do it in and if you'll temporarily side with one or the other in the process to make it easier. A mummy who resents her noble family's loss of wealth and status, and curses anyone who tries to take their ancestral home with lycanthropy, and the latest contender, a robber baron who forged documents to the place and is trying to go legit. Now she's losing a servant every new moon and in denial about the cause. She might hire the adventurers to help, but if they ask the wrong questions to the wrong people and find out about her criminal past she'll have to turn on them. Or as the deaths rack up, other people are bound to get suspicious anyway and investigate. This seems like it could be expanded out into a decent enough horror/mystery scenario in which the players have plenty of freedom of choice to affect the outcome. Another of those cases where the column improved as it went on, and it's irritating that it never got the support it needed to reach it's full potential. You have to give people a chance to get through the ultra-cliched basics before they can start to come up with decent material.



Back In Black: The Living City material this month is particularly continuity heavy, only really having full impact if you've been subscribed for a while. Lord Charles Blacktree was the former Lord Speaker removed in last year's elections due to his pomposity and laziness. A child of privilege, he'd taken the luxuries of his status for granted all his life, while his supposedly loyal servant was skimming money off all the house's business deals and this humiliating public loss was a big wake-up call for him. He disappeared from Raven's Bluff for a year and came back several levels higher, toughened up and with his pretensions knocked off from adventuring with people who treated him as equals and expected him to pull his weight. He then spent the subsequent 5 months taking a much more active role in his family affairs, trying to rebuild his reputation and growing increasingly suspicious something was up. This culminated in a criminal trial that thankfully, he was exonerated from and the guilty servant caught through the joys of lie detector spells. That brings us up to the present, where a few people are still suspicious of him and think the new leaf he's turned is fakery, but most have accepted the new Charles for who he is. All's well that ends well, although hopefully this isn't truly the ending, and he'll make further appearances in the ongoing Living City metaplot, particularly as said servant escaped before he could be executed and is likely out for revenge. That's an obvious plot thread left dangling for future writers to grab. Interesting stuff, but also quite dense, and I could understand if it annoyed new players unsure about how they could actually interact with the big Raven's Bluff movers and shakers. People who've been playing since the start might have earned a few levels and have a chance at winning government posts, but for everyone else, the bar keeps on getting higher.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 101: November 1994



part 3/5



Turkey Feathers: The adventure department continues to push for low lethality scenarios with other metrics of success and failure with this little escort quest. You start off with 500 turkeys, and have to get them to market in 5 days. You face 8 challenges along the way, each of which will make you lose a certain number of turkeys based on your decisions and luck with the dice. (and it's near impossible to get there with a 100% result unless you're overleveled for the scenario and can use unexpected magic to short-circuit them) All pretty easy to understand. A linear tournament adventure, but a fairly decent one because it's not so short that getting through everything in 4 hours seems a foregone conclusion, and it has a solid metric of success or failure (how many turkeys you lost in total) that you can use to measure your performance against other groups with, making it extra well suited to it's original purpose. Still not really the best use of your D&D, and would probably work even better as a board game, but a pleasant enough read.



The Living Galaxy: Roger once again seems to be running out of sci-fi ideas, as he goes for ultra-basic gaming problems with sci-fi examples again. Problem GM's. A game can survive one or two problem players, but if the GM sucks, the game is going to suck for everyone. Overgenerous DM's lead to the monty haul problem, where the PC's accumulate wealth and cool powers far in excess of the challenges they're up against. Then there's the opposite problem, the killer GM, who puts them up against challenges that are overpowered or unfair and screws you over for not taking exactly the right precautions. Finally, there's the insufferable railroader, who has a specific story in their head, and will transform you, mind control you, ignore dice rolls and whatever else they feel like to the point that you might as well not be playing at all. Yeah, there's a lot of that around here. Couldn't you have had a word with your editors rather than just warning us against doing it in our home campaigns, leaving the tournaments as linear as ever. Nothing I haven't heard before, and it rings particularly hollow in the context of it's surroundings. If TSR can't practice what they preach, what kind of example is that setting to the rest of us?

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 101: November 1994



part 4/5



Weasel Games: Lester's ruminations continue to be less practically useful for the average gamer than Roger's, but a more interesting read. Humans are omnivores, capable of eating both vegetables and meat to survive, with a mix of both making it much easier to get all the nutrients you need for long term health than either on their own. However, if you have to choose, it's easier and healthier to survive on a purely vegetarian diet than a purely carnivorous one long-term. The same analogy can be applied to your gaming. Sure co-operating all the time is healthier in the short to medium term, but to really get ahead, mixing in a bit of backstabbing is both easier and more fun than playing it straight 100% of the time, and even if you don't plan to do so, it's important to remember that other people might not be so nice and take at least basic precautions. Basic game theory stuff, made more interesting by the specific example, where his character was mind-controlled, but decided to keep on working with the bad guy even after being freed because he (correctly) thought it would increase his odds of winning the game. Who would have expected he'd do that? Which I suppose is another important lesson. If you're going to betray people, you've got to switch up the ways you do it so they're less likely to be prepared to counter it. It looks like he's going to cover this topic from every angle by the time he's done, which is not what I was expecting from this newszine, given the shallowness of much of it's material. More power to him, I guess.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Ed continues to talk about the customs of Turmish, making it clear that while it might be bucolic and rural, it's not unmanaged. There's lots of little guesthouses, wells and root cellars along the trails so it's rarely hard to find shelter and food in a pinch. Just don't take everything or leave a mess behind you and ruin the system for everyone else. Careful not to let too many Sembians in either or they'll privatise and charge for all that stuff and the place'll become much less hospitable. Curiously, both their big festivals involve acting out of character, the first by going to places you normally wouldn't, and the other your basic Purge Night where anything less than outright murder or wholesale destruction is permitted, so people spend it getting revenge, confessing dark secrets and otherwise unleashing all the pent-up frustrations of the rest of the year. Mentioning anything that happens on that day during the rest of the year is a big faux pas and will be punished more harshly than actual crimes committed then, so save any retaliation for the next Reign of Misrule. That has a lot of adventure potential while keeping the havoc confined to a tiny proportion of the time there. Having spent most of the word count on the status quo again, the actual adventure seeds are pretty short, but make it clear that Turmish has enough wizards capable of coming up with cool custom magic that invading Red wizards or Zhentarim won't find them a pushover. That's the thing with peaceful places where everyone chips in to help other people for free. Evil forces may mistake that niceness for weakness, and be surprised at just how well prepared they are to defend their way of life. Once again Ed manages to make even the nicer places in the Realms interesting via adding lots of little details and emphasising the contrasts with their neighbours. They should have enlisted his help when doing the upper planes books for planescape, particularly given how well his nine hells work turned out.

 

[aileron]

Am I allowed to ask questions in here? Now that I've discovered this thread, I definitely will work my way through it, as well as looking up your old Dragon thread. However, I wanted to ask: 1) Are you reading physical copies or digital? 2) Either way, how did you acquire them? I.e., if physical, subscribed back in the day or collecting/purchasing later? If digital, is there a website that sells/hosts them? Thank you.