TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 109: July 1995



part 2/5



The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: Having announced the creation of a monster grinding mart last issue with great fanfare, they now muddy the waters with legal challenges by NIMBYs. What if the monsters escape? How dare you pay vampires to work shifts and then just let them roam free when not working like they're just regular people?! Do you really know where the tarrasque is sleeping and plan to use it for the highest level adventurers to kill repeatedly or is that just marketing lies?! On top of that, apparently there's another travelling wizard calling himself Discount Merlin (man, they really have got to reinforce that 4th wall) which opens up the problem of trademark disputes. All the kind of stuff you see in the real world, played up for comedy. Do they ever plan to actually finish this project and let PC's use it, or was making it just to have something to create drama about the plan all along? Either way, this makes for pretty entertaining reading, so I look forward to the next instalment.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: After a full year's vacation in the relatively peaceful environs of Turmish, Ed decides it's time for a little more action and takes us to the Border Kingdoms. A narrow strip of fertile land between the lake of steam and the large empty arid expanse of the Shaar, they're a figurative and literal hotbed of activity. Small kingdoms rise and fall faster than historians can keep track of them, which is good for adventurers looking for challenges to gain levels, but really annoying to Calishites wanting to expand their empire eastward. Even Elminster doesn't know a huge amount about the place, as there's lots of wild magic zones around that could do nasty things to anyone using magic to survive beyond their natural lifespan. So it's taken a fair bit of persuading and lots of alcohol from Ed to persuade him to investigate further, and much of the information in the next few issues may be inaccurate reports from second-hand sources. Another reminder in quick succession that the 4th wall of the forgotten realms is pretty porous, with archmages from there travelling back and forth between earth, oerth, krynn and various other places, exchanging spells and information, not all of it true. This also makes it easy to do retcons by saying that the information in our books was wrong because of the unreliable sources delivering the information between worlds. Not a huge amount of actual useful game information in this one, but lots of flavour, with Elminster's ramblings and his interplay with Ed being the main focus. It shows that he's now big enough that he can get away with things none of their other contributors could get away with, filling a full 4 pages with preamble knowing that the more detailed examinations of individual locations will still be safely published in subsequent issues, not cancelled unexpectedly like several of their other columnists recently.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 109: July 1995



part 3/5



Races of Cerilia: The second part of the Birthright teasers leans even heavier on selling to the race realism crowd than the first one by applying ability score modifiers to the human ethnic groups. All of them are very obvious expys of real world human ones, unlike, say, Oerth or Athas, showing they're really not bringing their A game to making this new world original. The Celt analogs are wise but clumsy. The germanic ones are agile but reckless. The arabic equivalents are smart but soft. The vikings are tough but ugly. And finally, the Mongols are strong but dumb, and the most likely to be seen as evil by all the other races. That's a … series of design decisions alright. At least they all get a +1 to one and a -1 to something else so you can't say any of them are objectively superior overall to the others. But it's still pretty jarring that they make a big deal of no racism being allowed in the Code of Conduct for freelance submissions, and then turn around and say a setting built on blood purity and objective differences between races is just fine and dandy. Did no-one at all in the offices see the inconsistency between those two statements? It's all very baffling in hindsight. It also makes it very obvious that the campaign world isn't actually a world, but a UK sized island in a much larger world that will mostly go unexplored, including any of the ramifications for how the powered bloodlines would affect the rest of the world if they ventured elsewhere, facing natives who don't have that supernatural advantage. ( or if those places do have their own gods and bloodlines, and if so, how they differ from the Cerilian ones. ) It all feels like the designers just wanted to put the wargaming with ethnically coded sides back into D&D after a decade of that being in decline, and didn't think many steps beyond that. I'm not sure if this or Dragonlance has aged worst overall, as it's a competition between lots of little problematic bits vs a few huge ones, but it's a pretty fierce one.



The Age of Legend: Having finished putting together Virtual Seattle just a couple of months ago, they're striking while the iron's hot and trying to do a Living setting for it's fantasy counterpart Earthdawn. That's taking us from 1 to 5 in less than a year, which is definitely starting to seem like an unsustainable explosion of expansion. Earthdawn is less famous than Shadowrun as well, so they've got a tougher job selling it to complete newbies. So here's a single page, system free primer to the setting. Your basic fantasy world, only the magic level goes up and down according to cosmic cycles. When it gets too high, astral horrors can enter the world and things all get a bit cthulhuesque, so the people retreat to underground bunkers (ie, a good excuse for there to be tons of dungeons across the world) to wait out the worst of it. They're currently just coming out of the high magic phase, which means the world is fresh for the exploring and rebuilding, which will probably also involve a fair bit of warring for territory. It's easy to see how that's a setup custom designed for adventurers to thrive in. Now onto the next page to see how they restrict things to make it suitable for a tournament based campaign.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 109: July 1995



part 4/5



Threads of Legend: As with the Shadowrun living setting, the Earthdawn material is not being managed by the RPGA itself, but just two passionate volunteers. I do not envy the work they'll have to put in to keep it going. They are going for quite different approaches though. While Shadowrun embraced the strictly mission based approach to tournament adventures that the format encourages anyway, our Earthdawn admin is actually encouraging you to come up with detailed backstories and roleplay your characters with mechanical rewards for doing so. You get bonus legend points at character generation for the quality of your backstory, you need to write a short story to justify it if you want to become a questor, and you also have to do so if you want to research spells or magic items in downtime or get rid of horror marks & curses. Basically, they're going to be swamped with bad gaming fiction every downtime, and possibly complaints about favouritism for giving some people more points than others for judgements of subjective writing quality. I'm having flashbacks to my time in WoD city by night online games. An interestingly different approach to any of the other Living settings, that has the potential for a greater amount of roleplaying and immersion if done well, but also looks like much more work to manage, particularly between conventions. I hope he gets enough enthusiastic players to make it worthwhile, but not so many he has to cut down on the RPG elements to keep it functioning at all and the whole thing loses that personal touch. Definitely looking forward to seeing what, if any followups this gets, and if other future Living settings will follow in his footsteps by putting a bit more trust in the hands of the players to write their own stories.



The Living Galaxy: Roger's reprisal of the alternate history theme concentrates on one that should be very familiar to all of us by now. Dystopian worlds ravaged by disease. Be it a particularly virulent flu variant, black death, anthrax, HIV becoming airborne or some completely new horror developed in lab, crossing over from another species or being released from melting ice, they can pop up any time and our social structures are woefully unequipped to deal with them even if there is a cure because the way you fight them is counterintuitive to people who treat everything as a physical battle to macho your way through or a social challenge to be negotiated with. A few years of even a less lethal one shows you just how fragile civilisation really is. Then there's the dangers of a meteor strike or volcanic eruption that devastates everything within hundreds of miles and covers the whole world in ash, resulting in years of reduced temperatures and starvation because the sun is blocked out, which has also happened in the past and will happen again, it's just a question of when. But as we just saw with the Earthdawn stuff, the aftermath of a natural disaster is rich ground for adventurers to explore, take the bits that are still functional and do new things with them without any strong central authorities regulating and taxing everything. It's just a question of how you survive the intervening bit and if you can manage to protect anything else in the process. So he's not saying anything new, but the words have new resonance due to the way real life has gone lately, and our greater knowledge of how people really react to a large scale existential emergency. How will that affect the game scenarios and movies of the future and make them different from the 90's predictions of disaster?

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 109: July 1995



part 5/5



Drawing A Paycheck: A picture is worth a thousand words, which is pretty literal here, as they update their rates for art submissions. As usual, they have to remind us about the niggling little technical details; they don't have the budget for color, so B&W illustrations only, and use ink or paint, not pencil, as that doesn't show contrast properly when being scanned. Plus the stylistic ones, realism, not ridiculous hypermuscled characters wearing impractical clothing and for gosh sakes stick to the code of conduct! As with the writing guidelines last issue, not much change since 1983 then, and there won't be until WotC takes over and decide to go for a more edgy direction with the 3e art. Not very exciting for me to read about.



Regional Directors: Along with the reminders of how to submit to the magazine, it's time for our irregular updates of the list of regional directors, so you know who to write too if you have a problem. They're up to 40 now, although it's still a pretty uneven distribution. 31 USA ones, with some states having multiple and others none. (Texas has 4!) Three for australia, one each for Germany, Canada, Mexico and Sweden, plus ones specifically devoted to US military expats and the general management of Raven's Bluff. We have lost a few people since last time, with the loss of a dedicated online advisor particularly surprising, but the overall trend continues to be upwards. Hopefully that will continue to be the case next time they do this.



Exclusive Savings: We finish things off by bringing back the exclusive mail order bargains for RPGA members. T-shirts, sweatshirts, baseball caps and belt buckles, featuring famous D&D characters and iconic monsters! Now with free shipping if you send your order before September! Very cheesy. Reckon these are rare enough to have appreciated in value if you sold them second-hand?



Another issue that's hard work, but in a more interesting way than the last one, showing them exploring new areas and trying to expand once again. Some of the things they're trying probably won't succeed, but you can't know which will and won't unless you actually go through with it, and it's nice that they do have the resources to throw lots of them out in quick succession to see what sticks. On we step to see how treacherous the next stone in this lengthy crossing of history will be.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Magazine Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1995



part 1/5



80 pages. The dead are rising early this year! Well, I guess it's not easy operating these newfangled alarm clocks, especially if your fingers are also a little stiff. Mistakes will be made. Let's hope they won't be asking us how to operate their new iThingyjmawhatyoucallit, as that would truly be a fate worse than death.



Editorial: Dave Gross does his first editorial in here, and once again, goes for the conservative approach. Everything seems to be working smoothly, so let's not mess with a winning formula. In practice, I suspect slightly less goofy humour and a greater number of shorter adventures if his Polyhedron tenure is anything to go by, but will he stick around long enough to really make a difference anyway given the size of their slush pile? Well, there's 7 adventures this issue, which is well above average, so that's a fitting start. Hopefully a decent proportion of them are also good and not a repeat of a previous idea.



Letters: Our first two letters are from people more who've submitted lots of scenarios and had few or none of them published, often with very curt rejection letters. Yes, it hurts, but they do get far more submissions than they need and something has to give. Don't get discouraged. Eventually you'll come up with something cool enough.

Third has noticed that they've been using lots of dragons lately and wonders if they should avoid submitting their own. Dragons are in the title of the game so nahh, don't be afraid to try. There'll always be space for inventive use of a giant lizard creature.

Fourth follows up on the school reunion started in issue 51. It's gone very well, so thank you very much Dungeon for facilitating it.

Fifth wonders why Dungeon doesn't publish convention schedules? They appear in both Dragon and Polyhedron, which already have lots of reader crossover as it is. It would be redundant here as well.

Finally, two more short letters with errata. Every room must have a door! Otherwise how are you supposed to get to it? Sometimes it's an intentional plot point, and you'll need to use magic or explosives to get in, but usually it's just mapmaker carelessness, particularly these days, where they seldom make their adventures particularly obtuse or deadly.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Magazine Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1995



part 2/5



Unhallowed Ground: We start things off with a murder mystery set in a monastery. One monk accidentally killed another, then panicked and covered it up as a suicide, burying him outside the walls with the help of his two hapless underlings. This then goes poorly for him when his victim returns as a revenant and systematically kills everyone involved while the players are caught in the middle, and quite possibly become suspects at first. You're staying there overnight while travelling elsewhere. As usual, you're expected to remove your armor & weapons even though it's a bad idea every time an adventure explicitly asks you to do so. Sit through their religious ceremonies, have the stuff you were forced to leave in your room poked through, watch a mentally handicapped monk get abused by another one, then find him dead in the morning. You're then strictly forbidden to use any kind of magic to investigate this. (and of course none of the monks will do so either despite their clerical abilities) Maybe you'll look in the right place to find some clues, maybe not. Not that it matters, as the revenant will manage to find and kill the second accomplice when you're not there as well. The only real active chance to make a difference you get is when it attacks the main murderer in the church, wanting to get a public confession for it's murder rather than just killing mysteriously and clear it's name. The kind of adventure which you don't get to have much influence on the story, as it'll happen pretty much the same way no matter what you do, and the main thing your actions change is how much you know about what's going on. A generally tedious adventure to read that's pushed from mediocre to bad by the combination of ableist abuse & fridging, and the way it just doesn't work with the D&D cleric system with objective morality and people losing their spells for breaking it. Might as well have just written it as a story instead of trying to shoehorn it into the D&D system where it's a poor fit.



Side Treks - Fetch: Trying to make Fetch happen nearly a decade before Mean Girls? You go, Matt Maaske. The adventure itself turns out to be your typical "What's that Lassie, is little Timmy stuck down the well again?" scenario. A careless druid gets caught in a trap set by a bugbear. He carves a request for help on a stick and sends his dog to get help. Hopefully the PC's will spot the message when playing fetch with the dog and let themselves become the ones being fetched. Once found, it's not too hard to free him, but he's in no shape to help you catch the culprits, so you'll have to do that on your own. If you're careless, you'll soon run across another trap and have to fight the bugbear and his pack of trained hellhounds from a disadvantageous position. A little more care and the element of surprise will be on the other foot, making the fight easier. Another perfectly serviceable but unexceptional short encounter that's mainly notable for the amusing double meaning in the title. The new editor still appreciates a bit of snappy wordplay, so incorporating that is a good way to make your submissions stand out from the pile at first glance.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Magazine Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1995



part 3/5



Fiends of Tethyr: Demons vs Dinosaurs! Not to be confused with Devils vs Dinosaurs, which we'll see very soon in Planescape adventure Something Wild. Must be something in the water. Tethyr's farms are being devastated by something with raptorian claws on their feet. The local sage suspects Vrocks, so you'll be loaded up with magical weapons and cold iron and sent to deal with the problem. Turns out it's actually utahraptors, still not anything to take lightly, but a much more mundane threat to clear out. However, in a shocking co-incidence, a group of Tanar'ri do teleport in to attack the dinosaurs in the final encounter to get revenge for being attacked by them earlier. They'll attack the PC's as well unless you offer compelling reasons otherwise because why the hell not, and the dinos will be even less likely to temporarily side with either of the invaders to win against the other. So the main meat of this adventure is the big chaotic three-sided battle at the end, and the rest is just lots of setup to have it make sense narratively. A bit gimmicky really, but it's a cool gimmick so i'm not complaining. If Sharknado can inspire not just one but a whole series of films, making an adventure because you want to mash several unrelated types of monsters together and see who wins like a kid playing with toys is a perfectly valid playstyle.



The Witches Fiddle: For a second time in a row, the PC's are given very inaccurate information when sent into the adventure, and hopefully will be able to roll with that and adapt their actions as more details become available. While travelling through a forest, they hear an argument. Presuming they don't just go barging in, and at least one of them speaks elvish you'll hear that they're complaining because a witch barged in on their rehearsal and stole a fiddle, and is now making horrible noises with it. They'll be quite happy to delegate the danger of getting it back to wandering adventurers, particularly if there's any elves or druids in the party. Turns out she's not a witch, just a slave who's recently escaped from the Drow, hence the pallid features and general disfigurement from a hard life of underground abuse, as well as the complete lack of experience with playing music. The general ramshackleness of her cave lair and complete lack of magical defences should give you some clues, then when you reach her some hook horrors have come out of the underdark as well and are attacking her. If you just watch, they'll kill her easily, breaking the fiddle in the process, then attack you, resulting in you getting none of the story XP for the scenario if you survive. Hopefully you'll save her, talk to her, clear up any remaining misunderstandings, and help her start a decent free life on the surface. Even more than the last one, that's a lot of backstory and talking for the amount of action, and a lot of making assumptions about the party makeup and niceness of the PC's. If you've screwed them over recently with dopplegangers or veiled medusas they may be in too paranoid a mood and just kill everything. A very 2e feeling one that's mainly for parties that don't resort to combat as the first option for solving every problem, and always try to do the good thing. Pretty mediocre overall.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Magazine Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1995



part 4/5



Redcap's Rampage: Another dose of fae, this time with a more murderous slant to their whimsy. A redcap lost his iconic hat when people came to renovate the abandoned keep he lives in and even though they've left it, he followed them back and is now on a vindictive rampage through the local village trying to find it, with lots of vandalism and the occasional murder putting everyone on edge. Being both invisible and tiny, the villagers don't know what's causing it, but are becoming increasingly fearful and superstitious, so they're quite willing to pay wandering adventures to fix the problem. This leads into the kind of old school sandbox they haven't done much of in recent years, where you have a village and a dungeon, and the village gets as much attention as the dungeon crawling so there's plenty of NPC's you can get to know and the place continues to be useful after the danger is over. In fact, you can solve this one without ever dungeon crawling at all if you use enough cleverness and set a trap for the redcap, putting him in a position where you can fight him without him just slipping away invisibly and coming back to inflict more grief on you when you don't expect it. Alternately, you could solve it without combat by going to the keep, finding the hat, realising it's significance, then just giving it back to him. (although there are some rats and wererats that mean that probably won't be completely violence free either. ) So this is an adventure with an intelligent but not hugely powerful adversary, that also respects the intelligence of the players and gives them free reign to use their powers to solve it how they choose, while not giving them obvious stand-up fights they can just roll dice for until someone runs out of hit points. Chris Perkins manages to deliver another well above average adventure despite the sheer quantity he's submitting lately.



Side Treks - Eyes of the Iceborn: The second short adventure is one of those ones that's basically an excuse to submit a new monster with idiosyncratic powers and immunities so the players feel the fear of the unknown again. The people working in an ice house get killed mysteriously while the players are in town, and the only survivor is raving cryptically about how no weapon can hurt whatever it is. Hopefully this'll be enough warning to get them to stock up on various energy typed attacks ready to experiment to see what's effective or not, because you're dealing with an electrically charged fog creature that's not only incorporeal, but causes serious zap damage every time you hit it with a metal weapon. Dumb knights in heavy armor will die very quickly and possibly have their equipment melted in the process. This feels strongly like a throwback to old school dungeoneering where each color of ooze is immune to different types of common attack, poison is instadeath and there's no save against energy draining, so you approach unknown enemies with caution, because they can mess you up quickly if you choose your moves wrongly. If you like that playstyle, this should be suitably scary to people who know the quirks of the Fiend Folio monsters inside and out and want more of the same tension of discovery. If your playstyle is more concerned with fairness and game balance or narrative over combat you'll probably want to pass on it.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Magazine Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1995



part 5/5



Dark Thane Macbeth: A second shakespeare adaption just a couple of issues after the first? Very interesting. Was the second inspired by the good reception of the first, or were they sent in independently? In any case, this is the longest adventure in the issue, but still not pushing at any records due to the sheer quantity of other ones. Anyway, as you'd expect, it's the scottish play, only most of the NPC's are elves, the witches are hags, and Peyton is a deep dragon. Can you defeat the near invulnerable and increasingly insane Macbeth by rules lawyering the whole "no man of woman born" immunity or ridiculously overpowering raw force and restore peace between the grey & dark elves? Rather than bogging you down too much in angsty amateur dramatics, this turns into a surprisingly epic extended battle scenario where your 100 Reverend Ones face up against 100 Shadows, and the PC's tactics will be crucial in tipping the balance and winning the day. (although knowledge of the play definitely won't hurt when it comes to picking effective actions) So this is less faithful than the Tempest adaption aesthetically, but looks more fun to play, giving the NPC's lots of high magic tricks and expecting the PC's to pull out their big guns in response. High level adventures that embrace just how gonzo D&D characters can get with lots of magic items are actually pretty rare in here, so this is actually quite pleasing to read, even if most groups'll never get to the kind of level where they have decent odds of getting through it alive. The kind of thing I really wish they did more of, rather than fighting the system and trying to keep things mostly "realistic" in their campaign worlds.



The two rapid editorial changeovers are having an effect, because this was one of the more tonally chaotic issues I've seen so far, in both good and bad ways, as well as quite inefficient in terms of page count to adventure length ratio. The amount of backstory and general waffle has been creeping up throughout the 2e era anyway, but I guess losing the experience of a long-term editor has really reduced the amount that's getting chopped down before publication. So I'd have to do some extra work myself to make the best of these ones. Still, you generally learn fastest in your first few months on the job. Hopefully another couple will make all the difference for the next issue.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 110: August 1995



part 1/5



36 pages. Raven's Bluff has many a bold knight, including the odd halfling using their weight advantage to be a better rider than the humans. Just what do you have to do to join their ranks? Well, it looks like we'll be finding out inside, as it's time for another themed special issue making substantial additions to their Living settings. Those really are coming thick and fast this year. Let's see if they've hit the point of diminishing returns yet.



Notes from HQ: More staff turnover this month as Kevin Melka leaves and Robert Weise takes his place, so the editorial is split between the two. It's a fairly amicable departure, with Kevin staying with TSR, just changing departments, and he'll still be helping out with the Living Jungle stuff. Both hope that they can continue to expand their tournament programs despite all the internal rearrangements. As usual, it's all presented pretty optimistically, they don't plan on making any drastic changes straight away and only time will tell what gets lost with all these personnel changes and loss of institutional experience. It'll all catch up with us at some point.



Forgotten Deities: Our god this month is the ascended heroine Deep Duerra, an exceedingly badass duergar empress who managed to do a lot of conquering in her lifetime, and still encourages them to be more aggressive & less isolationist as a demigod than big boss Laduguer. Seems like a good patron for the more PC-like deep dwarves who fancy their hand at the adventuring lifestyle. While not granting a particularly great selection of spheres, she does enable her priests to exceed the normal psionic capabilities of their race as they advance on top of the spells, which gives them a decent set of tricks that aren't subject to antimagic effects to catch enemies out with. I can definitely see the uses in including her in a campaign, both empowering adversaries and as a patron for a PC in a more evil aligned party. This series continues to be pretty interesting.