TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 113: November 1995



part 1/5



32 pages. Not every adventure goes smoothly. The cover star this issue definitely isn't working under a system where you just keep going full steam until you hit 0hp. Not sure exactly what's following behind but I'm sure it can't be pleasant. Time to find out how gritty and lethal the contents of this issue will be, and if there'll be any second chances if we fall to them.



Notes from HQ: The editorial is pretty repetitive this month. The deadlines for cutting table size to 6 and making a strict accounting of your magic items are now fixed and growing ever closer, so don't forget about them! They're also considering further tightening up the definitions of first-run, new and classic tournaments, and reducing the number of first run ones a particular convention can order. Unless there are any particularly loud complaints, you'll be stuck at 4 adventures per day, only 2 of which can be in any particular Living setting. On the plus side, they are putting adventures in the newszine again, presumably as a result of reader complaints, so it's not a completely foregone conclusion. But overall, the number of tedious little regulations will continue to creep upwards for the foreseeable future, as in any bureaucracy.



Forgotten Deities: This column is particularly short this time, filling barely a third of the page, so they have to blow the image up to fill up the rest, making it look grainy from being expanded beyond it's natural resolution. Shiallia, korred god of the high forest and fertility. You can bet any services to her involve a lot of dancing and orgies. Her specialty priests have basically the same spheres as druids, only with considerably less impressive granted powers. That's about it folks. Either he was busy elsewhere this month, devoid of inspiration when writing this or his more detailed descriptions of her worship practices ran afoul of the code of conduct. Either way, I'm very unimpressed at both the writing and presentation here.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 113: November 1995



part 2/5



Jungle Tales: The first set of Living Jungle submissions by readers finally makes it through the pipeline. Regular writer Tom Prusa reminds us that he's one of the people responsible for a big chunk of the silliness in their Living City adventures and intends to spread it here as well. Boo Two, Boo Dos, Boo Da, Boo Tue and Boo Deux were sent up Fire Mountain to placate the angry volcano spirit. Boo Two fainted in terror, and the other four sold him out to the spirit to save their own hides, claiming that he wanted to be it's servant, but was merely overcome in the moment. Accepting the deal, he was whisked away, and according to legend serves still. Underneath the comedic trappings, that's actually pretty mean-spirited once you boil it down. After the past year has been spent introducing settings that want to be more serious and continuity heavy, goofy late 80's style articles like this stick out like a sore thumb. Not a very welcome throwback.



Raft Dwellers: The second Living Jungle article is a lot less irritating. An introduction to the Zantira tribe, who as the title says live most of their lives floating on the water, to the point that most of them struggle to sleep on dry land without the gentle rocking of the waves beneath them. (except adventurers, obviously) The rest of their culture is shaped pretty logically by this lifestyle; small families because you can't have too much weight on any one raft, a diet based on fish and harvesting floating plants, carefully maintained detente with the local crocodiles and a quite justified fear of the fogs of the Dreaming River. A quite decent bit of worldbuilding that they're happy to make available as an official PC option going forward. As they have a useful skillset and are neither overpowered or comedically superstitious & incompetent, I'd have no objection to using them either.



The Hungry Spirit of Fire Mountain: A second trip up Fire Mountain in quick succession, this one somewhat more serious. The basic details remain the same, the volcano spirit wants regular tribute or it will visit magmarey death upon all the tribes in the neighbourhood. If the tribute is extra pleasing in a particular year, it'll leave behind a smooth shiny stone for them to take home, which doesn't seem to do anything, but gets used as an object of worship anyway. This has been going on for many centuries, so there are many different stories of how different people have dealt with it and the unpleasant ends they met when they took liberties. What's behind it still remains mysterious though, and if your PC's will ever be allowed to find out how it works or defeat it in a high level adventure. Not having to tip a big chunk of your stuff into the lava every year would definitely make it easier for these guys to advance beyond tribal level. But then they'd have to change the whole premise of the setting, so that's unlikely to happen.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 113: November 1995



part 3/5



Cast Your Ogles Here: Despite the increasing tightening of the Code of Conduct, the writers do manage to slip some stuff through. Some of that is by using slang words that were vulgar in centuries past, but are now too obscure to trigger the wrath of the censors. Here's a single page primer to victorian thieves cant, for those of you who want to put a bit more historical accuracy into your argot and put one over on the addle-coves. If you've got Planescape, you'll already know many of these, because they're drawing on the same source material. Evidently someone :cough:zeb:cough: brought that into the offices last year and now everyone's jumping on the bandwagon. Not that I have any objection to this as an idea, but between Planescape and MotRD, it may get overused and start to lose it's shine. Then it'll have to lay low for another generation until someone on tiktok discovers it and it goes viral all over again. Such are the circles of life.



A Pirate's Life for Me: The return of adventures turns out to be surprisingly nontournamenty, as it's nothing to do with any of their Living settings, and it's not even particularly railroady, although it does include pregens. (which contribute to the worldbuilding even if you don't actually use them) Contrary to the title, you're not engaged in piracy, merely hired to stop a particularly large and successful group of pirates who are seriously interfering with trade around the city of Lidah. Can you find them before they manage to fence their latest haul and return the stuff to it's rightful owner, or will this only get resolved after multiple missed raids? You get a timeline of when events will happen, and are then free to wander around the city looking for clues. As long as you're decently proactive it's not that hard to get the best ending, but even if the players are lazy, the problems will eventually catch up with them and they'll get a decent fight out of it at the end. So this is actually a pretty good urban adventure that allows for plenty of roleplaying and various degrees of success while not dying, and gives you info on the author's own setting without making it overbearing and unusable in other ones. A substantial improvement over the old editorial policy. If they keep on improving the adventures here while Dungeon's get more linear and focussed on telling a specific story, I might actually wind up switching around my favourites.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 113: November 1995



part 4/5



A World of Your Own: Roger spends all his time this issue sketching out one particularly unpleasant setting. How could a world be one massive dungeon? Unless you completely abandon the idea of topology anything like our universe, it has to have a surface at some point. Well, if you want to make the surface unimportant, set it on an airless moon where life has retreated underground to survive. What creatures would dominate in the winding tunnels of an inhospitable place like that? Surprise surprise, it's the Drow again, because the GDQ series sure does have a lot of throwaway lines that could be expanded into entire campaigns in their own right. They certainly don't have it all their own way though, between turf wars with mind flayers, various weird oozes and slimes, and their own internecine treachery. There's plenty of room for adventurers from other world to slip through the cracks and survive, or finally getting to use the PC rules for the odder and more powerful races native to the world. Putting in gates to Oerth and the world being invaded in the previous issue makes me think these connections might well become important in future issues, building up to a big crossover adventure. I guess that's one big advantage of playing D&D over some sci-fi setting. A solid enough middle episode to a series then, moving things forward but neither an origin story or big climax.



Putting It On Paper: Guidelines on how to write adventures? We had that twice in the last issue alone! They are getting very repetitive on that front lately. They really must be desperate for more submissions. Like their article submitting guidelines, which are very similar anyway, things remain pretty much the same as last year. Decide whether it's linear, situation based or matrix based, create a bunch of encounters, playtest them, make sure it sticks to time limits, has decent spelling, punctuation & grammar and most importantly doesn't violate the code of conduct by endorsing drugs or criticising cops. The only big difference is that they're now electronic only, as sending the adventure by floppy disc saves a lot of typing things up again at their end. No new insights to be had here, and the degree of repetition is growing increasingly irritating. It would probably be a little less grating if I were reading these issues in real time as they came out, but it is still getting noticeably worse lately.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 113: November 1995



part 5/5



Available Tournaments: Another little column starts up, letting us know what fresh new tournaments are available to order and play at your convention. 48 Living City and and 10 Living Jungle ones are on the current roster, many of which are tied into metaplot events mentioned in the Trumpeter. Hopefully they'll be able to add some Living Death & Virtual Seattle ones to the list soon, as those need all the help they can get to recruit more regular players.



The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: The news is also more than a little repetitive, as the legal battles over Discount Merlin's monster grinding emporium become pretty grindy in their own right. I grow increasingly doubtful they'll ever manage to solve them. The increasing strictness over magical items also gets in here, as the supplies of admantite in the city ruin out. Even though it's not technically magical, owning admantite gear will still need to be certified and count as one of your magic item slots now. Hope you're paying attention and remember to do so before the deadline.

There are some new bits of news as well though. A recent adventure involved the Red Wizards trying to kidnap the lord mayor and replace him with a shapeshifted minion. Fortunately his acting skills weren't the best, so people familiar with the real deal soon figured it out and got :cough: group of adventurers to fix the problem. Was this any good as an adventure? We're also seeing a rise in giant activity in the region, quite possibly connected to the Giantcraft book making them playable and the tie-in trilogy of novels. Somehow I don't think they'll be permitted as a PC option in Raven's Bluff though. Can't keep your adventures railroady when one character is more than twice the size of the others, with all the attendant advantages and limitations. Instead, you'll be joining the other groups of mercenaries fighting them in another upcoming adventure. I look forward to seeing how the paper reports on that.



A very repetitive issue indeed, repeating not only things covered in recent issues, but saying the same thing repeatedly in different ways at different points throughout the same issue. Trying to make sure everyone is following the new rules is obviously proving somewhat of a strain, no matter how necessary they may be to keep their living settings under control. Let's hope they don't have to keep on doing it every issue for months to come, because that's not fun for either the nagger or the people being nagged.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 56: Nov/Dec 1995



part 1/5



80 pages. Ugh, trolls in swamps are the worst. How are you supposed to get a decent fire going to finish them off for good when all the wood around is wet? Without spellcasting or advanced technology like matches you're fighting a losing battle no matter how good a swordsman you are. Still, they haven't set us an unsolvable adventure in many years, so I'm sure there'll be some way to even the odds inside.



Editorial: They did a new survey recently, but it's not saying anything surprising. Most people are happy with what they're doing overall, and the most popular settings in wider sales are also the most in demand here, so they're going to try and keep things going consistently. Keep on sending in those adventures folks! All pretty boring really. Dave isn't as good as Barbara was at writing interesting editorials, whatever his other merits.



Letters: First letter praises their attempts at shakespearean adventure, but criticises Unhallowed Ground for having the players stand around doing nothing meaningful most of the adventure. If you're going to be melodramatic, at least make sure the players have important roles in the play.

Second praises Umbra for taking Planescape, a setting they're not that fond of, and still making a good adventure out of it. Now if only someone would do the same for Red Steel, which also badly needs some adventures that do justice to the cool premise.

Third is the writer of Savage Beast, who's happy to finally see his adventure in the magazine, and with excellent illustrations too, but peeved that they misspelled his name. Another one of those eternal battles, particularly if your name is even remotely foreign looking.

Fourth is another person who thinks a traps column to add a bit more variety is a good idea. They can't just keep on going round the same few settings forever.

Fifth is also in favour of a traps column, but not so much on non-generic adventures. Don't forget your basic dungeoncrawls and give us too many adventures that only cater to a very small proportion of the fanbase.

Sixth is also irked by highly setting specific adventures, particularly large ones like Umbra that make the issue mostly useless for everyone else. They also complain about crucial details being delivered in throwaway lines. You need to read the whole thing through to understand it! Well, yes, that's how adventures work. If you can't retain the contents of 20-odd pages in your brain, how do you ever cope with full-sized standalone adventures?

Finally, an internet commentator trying way too hard to be cool in a very 90's style. They're generally complementary, but ironically against the putting of modern technology in Ravenloft. Steamboats and telegraphs? That's not the right tone for a fantasy setting! What's Lisa Smedman playing at?! Keep that stuff in MotRD where it belongs!

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 56: Nov/Dec 1995



part 2/5



Briocht: Willie Walsh once again plays up his irish heritage with a very celtic adventure indeed. A pair of tribes are engaging in extremely competitive potlaching for status, which has reached the point where one commissioned a wizard to create a helm of invulnerability as a gift. This has not arrived on time and the chief is getting worried, so it's time to send some passing adventurers to find out the cause of his tardiness. He did manage to complete it, but it turns out a dragon killed him and took his stuff, deciding to stay in his house as it's bigger on the inside than out and has all sorts of magical amenities, much more comfortable than some old cave. If you just knock openly on the door he'll be in human form, pretend to be the wizard and bluff his way through the conversation. (while not surrendering the helm under any circumstances even if that means resorting to combat because dragons gonna be greedy) If you sneak in, you could encounter him at multiple points throughout the place, plus plenty of other magical defences and he'll be even less friendly. While this could devolve into a hack & slash dungeoncrawl, it's written in a way that encourages lots of roleplaying along the way, with plenty of detail given to your employers, the dragon, and various other celtic flavoured encounters along the way. (which does include trickster faeries, predictably) As usual for him, it's mildly whimsical, but not in a way that breaks immersion and works best if you engage your brain to solve the puzzles rather than brute-forcing your way through. Despite the number of adventures he's had published by now, he's not letting the quality control slip, which is pleasing to see. I could still stand to see more from him.



Janx's Jinx: A little more mild continuity here, as we head back to Dovedale for some more low-key problem solving. The local wolves have an infestation of foaming mouth fever, (ie, not particularly scientifically accurate rabies) which means they're very aggressive, but will mostly die off soon. In the meantime, you need to protect the village, and particularly the cattle, because if they lose too many that would cause problems. So you have fairly free reign to either set up defences or explore the village & surrounding area and take the fight to them, with short but decent enough descriptions of various locations of interest. Things get weirder when a weird teleporting wolf appears, attacks and then disappears in the night as soon as you hit it once. Turns out it's actually an elf's pet blink dog that was infected with the fever. He'd very much like you to save it. Of course, catching something with at-will teleportation is easier said than done, requiring either magic or use of the grapple rules and lots of determination. If you're using this at the expected level, you also don't have Cure Disease yet either, so you'll need to find the macguffin to fix that. (which if you explored the area properly earlier on you'll already have stumbled upon, but one of the villagers will give you a pretty obvious clue if you didn't.) Cosy stuff that's fairly low in real danger but can still be played to tug on the heartstrings, this is a solid but unexceptional campaign-starter that becomes better if you're a long-term reader, as it references several other adventures it's easy to incorporate into the area, while still functioning just fine standalone. As long as you're ok with using basic and advanced D&D material interchangeably this selection should get you out of the fragile levels with minimal DM prepwork.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 56: Nov/Dec 1995



part 3/5



A Watery Death: Don't mistreat your summoned minions, or if you do, be very careful not to give them a chance to betray you. Now there's a lesson they have to reteach us every few years. This time it's a water weird and a nereid that managed to kill their master, only to find that didn't solve things and they're still stuck in the vicinity of his treasure vault for spoileriffic reasons. They want their freedom, but obviously don't trust humans after years of magical enslavement, so when an adventuring party happens by, they'll try and separate your wizard from the rest of the party and get you to free them with threats. Will you fight to the death, comply reluctantly, stall them until the rest of the party can catch up and kill them, or manage to talk to them long enough to find out the backstory, become sympathetic to their plight and solve the problem in a less antagonistic way? A pretty interesting little encounter where the enemies aren't villains and don't want to kill you, (or at least not all of you) which forces them to use unusual tactics. This both looks decent to play and gives you plenty to think about on a philosophical level, how adventurers and the intelligent monsters they deal with are trapped in a cycle of revenge handed back and forth down the centuries, and a lot of unpleasant adventures simply wouldn't happen if they didn't go around summoning and mind controlling things from other planes in the first place. If you talk before you resort to violence, it's surprising how much of this you could avoid and who knows who might benefit from the butterfly effect in years to come because of one act of kindness.



The Bigger They Are: Mmm, quicklings. Now there's a monster you can really troll the players with, reminding us that speedster is one of the most dangerous superpowers, so they have to nerf it compared to media in nearly every RPG. The PC's wander through the territory of Angwarngaxx, a typically unpleasant member of his race who lives in a giant mushroom with his pet giant spiders. He has a number of traps set in the vicinity, and careless PC's could be caught without even seeing who's responsible. If he catches the PC's, he'll sprinkle dust of diminution on them to make them easy to imprison and only let them go if they have some useful information to offer him. (and even then he won't give their stuff back or restore them to their regular size, requiring a whole other quest while still quarter-sized to fix yourselves.) If you beat him but hang around the area too long afterwards, a group of Drow he trades with will come along to further complicate your lives. So this is the kind of short encounter that's easily expanded into a much longer story, depending on how it goes, allowing you to lose but not die and have more interesting adventures as a result of it. It's sufficiently inventive and sadistic with it's various magical tricks to amuse me and make players develop a real grudge against this guy if he beats them, while not being so laden down with contingencies as to be impossible for smart players of the intended level. I think this is worthy of a good high-pitched nyahahahaha!!!!

 

[el-remmen]

Dungeon Issue 56: Nov/Dec 1995
Janx's Jinx: A little more mild continuity here, as we head back to Dovedale for some more low-key problem solving. The local wolves have an infestation of foaming mouth fever, (ie, not particularly scientifically accurate rabies) which means they're very aggressive, but will mostly die off soon. In the meantime, you need to protect the village, and particularly the cattle, because if they lose too many that would cause problems. So you have fairly free reign to either set up defences or explore the village & surrounding area and take the fight to them, with short but decent enough descriptions of various locations of interest. Things get weirder when a weird teleporting wolf appears, attacks and then disappears in the night as soon as you hit it once. Turns out it's actually an elf's pet blink dog that was infected with the fever. He'd very much like you to save it. Of course, catching something with at-will teleportation is easier said than done, requiring either magic or use of the grapple rules and lots of determination. If you're using this at the expected level, you also don't have Cure Disease yet either, so you'll need to find the macguffin to fix that. (which if you explored the area properly earlier on you'll already have stumbled upon, but one of the villagers will give you a pretty obvious clue if you didn't.) Cosy stuff that's fairly low in real danger but can still be played to tug on the heartstrings, this is a solid but unexceptional campaign-starter that becomes better if you're a long-term reader, as it references several other adventures it's easy to incorporate into the area, while still functioning just fine standalone. As long as you're ok with using basic and advanced D&D material interchangeably this selection should get you out of the fragile levels with minimal DM prepwork.

One of my all-time faves.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 56: Nov/Dec 1995



part 4/5



Grave Circumstance: From one adventure full of trolling to a literal troll, as we reach our cover story. Bill Slavicsek takes us off to Athas, to explore the new lands opened up by recent metaplot developments. Well, I say explore, but it turns out there's an obvious trade route to follow that's common knowledge to people outside the familiar 7 city-states, which makes it strange that none of the previous books never mentioned it. So you head through a sequence of encounters that while longer than the average tournament adventure, with 14 wilderness challenges to get through plus a few social ones to break things up, are just as linear as the worst Polyhedron railroads. A bunch of B'rohgs looting another caravan. A gag of Muls attacking some still alive lizard men. A hungry undead beastie that will deplete your resources considerably or feed on you if you refuse it's demands. When you get to the next village, one way or another you'll come to the attention of the Ravagers, who'll order you to go and deal with a problematic defiler and won't take no for an answer. This'll send you through the big sandstorm of the barrier wastes, to hit the enormous cliff leading down to lands wetter than any of the PC's have ever seen before. Fortunately, the defiler is no more experienced at trekking through jungle than you are, so you don't even have to roll to follow the trail of broken plantlife. This leads you to an ancient Green Age building that contains the power to turn a user into a 30th level dragon just like that, (draining the life force of the entire swamp in the process) skipping all the painstaking XP accumulation and complicated rituals required in the previous books. Surprise surprise, the defiler has already realised that and will use it if not stopped. You have to beat him, plus The Last Troll on Athas™ which lurks around the area and save the day. You get 50gp as a reward for basically saving the world, which is a piddling amount even with Athas's exchange rate and feels like a cruel joke after slogging through everything here. I hate every moment of this. This is bad in the same way as his Council of Wyrms adventure, determined to tell a particular story regardless of the rules of the game or how people realistically interact with one-another, and putting in ridiculously unbalanced things without any thought for the ways they could break a campaign if ever used in anything but the highly specific ways the plot demands. Like Ed's adventures in here, its horrible in a way that they would never let a freelancer's submission be, and all the more grating to read because of that obnoxious privilege. It's becoming increasingly obvious that he was behind some of TSR's worst railroading adventures of the 90's. Complete and utter rubbish.