TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 116: February 1996



part 3/5



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Unlike Roger, Ed's material continues to be consistently good, even if the sheer quantity of things he produces makes them lose impact when taken in large doses. This time we look at the towns of Blackbarn, which does indeed have a large black barn built when it was first founded. It's a prosperous farming town, which doesn't have to worry about the brigands who plague the rest of the Border Kingdoms due to a group of ghostly riders who attack any groups of overt troublemakers and are typically immune to nonmagical attacks themselves. They won't attack anyone poking around underground though, which means more sneaky adventurers can still do some looting, and the place also has an unusual frequency of gremlins, so be prepared for pranking and small items going missing. That should keep a visit from being boring despite the relative safety. The town of Bloutar, on the other hand, is particularly dangerous for outsiders, as it's right in the middle of monster-infested hilly forest that's a real challenge to navigate. The people who live there have to be pretty tough to deal with that, so picking a fight with a random local is probably not a good idea. Still, if you want to do a little XP grinding, you could pick far worse places. These once again manage to pack in both interesting histories and present day challenges into page sized chunks.



Forgotten Deities: Some more plausibly deniable portfolio juggling going on here. Malyk the Dark Mage seems to be just your basic ascended archmage, providing patronage for the still young school of wild magic and encouraging wild mages to create more wild magic zones wherever they can. He's actually an aspect of Talos, giving him an inroute to attracting a slightly smarter selection of chaotic evil havoc causers. No-one knows this apart from Mystra, who's obviously aware of these new perturbations of the weave, but doesn't seem to consider this muscling in on her portfolio a threat for the moment, or actually wants someone else to take credit for that kind of magic so she doesn't have to be responsible for it's negative aspects in the same way that Tempus keeps Garagos around but weak rather than completely wiping him out. Like the Krynnish gods of magic, he doesn't actually have any conventional priests, but he does give wild mages who worship him an expanded spell list with access to Chaos and Elemental priestly spells, which is nothing to be sneezed at. Certainly looks like you can have plenty of fun using his followers as antagonists in your game, with their very unpredictable magical powers and agenda of spreading chaos. Looking forward, he'll gain independence and become a full deity in his own right in 5e, so his number of followers must grow over the following century without integrating them with the Talos worshippers. Another danger of messing around with aspects and multiple portfolios for deities. When the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing, there's a danger of them becoming full entities in their own right and turning on the head, making all your centuries of clever machinations fall apart. Doncha just hate it when that happens.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 116: February 1996



part 4/5



Runefire: The adventure this issue continues the trends of being less linear and nothing to do with their Living settings since they brought them back. It's still very much a tournament module in other ways though. Ullr is annoyed that the people of the far north didn't appreciate the artistry of his latest winter and if not properly propitiated, may never allow spring to come. The PC's have to light all 10 runestones within 6 hours of game time (the current day length) or face the consequences. Each has some kind of challenge you need to get through before you can light them. While in theory you could do them in any order, in practice that means you'll probably go in a clockwise or anticlockwise circle simply due to the time constraints so the freedom of choice is actually pretty illusionary. Also illusionary are many of the challenges, because Loki is involved, so expect trickery and whimsy. It has a full four writers, which is a bit much for an adventure this size, and it feels like each of them was told to come up with two or three of the individual encounters and then stitched together. Between the tightly tracked time limit, high level of overall difficulty aimed at challenging the brains of the PC's as much as their character's stats, heavy use of norse setting material and general level of whimsy it feels like a throwback to early tournament modules like the Saga of Brie and Maiden of Pain series. This even extends to the pregen characters, which have some very interesting twists indeed. Overall, it comes out at above average for Polyhedron, but not quite up to Dungeon standards of writing & editing. Still, it's interesting enough that if you like old school adventures full of tricky screwage encounters you can probably get some use out of it and refreshing simply because we haven't seen any of those for a few years now. Absence can make the heart grow fonder I guess.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 116: February 1996



part 5/5



A World of Your Own: After having come up with a pretty cool world last month, Roger then treats it in a pretty restrictive way that seems intended to keep the most interesting parts of it out of PC's grip. As soon as they appear in this fantastical Madgascar they're met by a dubious Mr Johnson who seems completely unsurprised by outworld visitors, will tell them just enough to get them on side, and then send them on a macguffin hunt from one location to the next, which will eventually turn out to be a nazi plot to get hold of an old uranium golem and cause mass devastation. It appears that like most of the TSR staff at the moment, he's been thoroughly seduced by the idea of big metaplotty railroads that tell world-changing stories, even when we haven't been given enough time and opportunity to get to know the specific world as it is, which would make changing it have an impact. There's still some useful material here, plus a comprehensive set of references, but his personal creative contributions to the mix are not very satisfying. Another example of how the TSR office culture was becoming increasingly detached from what regular gamers want in their adventures, trying to tell their own stories rather than giving you the tools to make better ones, made worse by Lorraine : organ music, rumble of thunder: discouraging playtesting so they didn't even know if the math added up to make the plot desired outcomes plausible if the dice rolled average results, or have contingencies prepared for the other common choices PC's would make in a particular situation. As with his previous article this issue, reading this just makes me feel frustrated and a little bit sad.



Our big list of tournaments covers the non AD&D ones in their repertoire. 6 Amazing Engine ones, 2 Amber Diceless, 2 Boot Hill, 1 Buck Rogers XXVc, 14 Call of Cthulhu, 3 Champions, 2 Chill, 1 Cyberpunk, 1 Dark Conspiracy, 4 Marvel Super Heroes, 12 Paranoia, 1 Runequest, 18 Shadowrun, 1 Shatterzone, 8 Star Wars, 1 Teenagers from Outer Space, 4 Timemaster, 1 Top Secret (not S.I., I note), 8 Torg, and 2 Traveller adventures. The big ones are pretty much what I expected, as is the complete lack of WoD ones despite it's popularity due to their refusal to comply with the Code of Conduct, but there's several systems that are long out of print now and were never particularly big even when they were current, which is interesting to see. A little worried by the lack of Earthdawn ones when it's supposed to be one of their officially supported Living settings though. Has anyone bothered to play that outside of it's original creators at all?



An issue which has a few interesting old school throwbacks, but the way they're done shows that history as a whole continues to march onwards, and even if the same people are involved, it's not quite the same because they're now over a decade older and not quite the same either. If you're struggling in the present, is it a good idea to try to go back to past glories, or will it only make the present problems even worse because new solutions are needed? Now there's a question you could go round in circles with many times and get no good answers. I'd rather not get stuck like that so onto the next issue.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 117: March 1996



part 1/5



32 pages. Tarzan?! How'd you get so big? Oh well, at least it'll keep you from catching a chill in the snow, presuming the square/cube law even applies in this setting anyway. Time to see how fantastical and memorable another issue will turn out inside.



The Incantatrix: Now here's a blast from the past and no mistake! The extremely rare alternate spellcaster from the Forgotten Realms. Introduced in Dragon issue 90, and then appearing in several of Ed's novels, they excel at metamagic effects, taking other people's magics and removing them or turning them back on their caster, while lacking access to many conventional spells unless they can drain them from the mind of another spellcaster. This makes them terrifying beyond their level in a one-on-one battle with other magical types, but less useful than a regular wizard at practical everyday stuff. Here's where they get updated to 2e, courtesy of Eric Boyd, who's becoming a pretty familiar face in here as well. They get a bit of mild tidying up and standardisation compared to their 1e incarnation, being turned into a type of specialist wizard. This also moderately increases their power level, as they gain the usual extra slot per level, full access to 9th level spells from 4 of the 8 regular schools of magic and more spell slots in general than the idiosyncratic 1e table. Still, the lack of conjuration, invocation, illusion or necromancy spells is more negative than positive, so even with their boost they're still not on the level of regular core spellcasters, and if you strictly enforce the need for training to gain levels they're at an even bigger disadvantage due to the difficulty of finding mentors. You should still be able to use them in a group without problems. A very interesting and unusual article indeed, reminding me of the things Dragon does that they don't. Sending in all that new crunchy stuff just doesn't have the same appeal when you know it won't be allowed in their tournament games even if Polyhedron does publish it. With Roger also doing new races last month, is this going to change in the near future? Well, either way, I guess the plethora of new classes in the 3e minigames will make up for lost time.



Larger than Life: Following straight on from last article, this one gives us an incantrix NPC. I wonder if that was co-ordinated by the staff, or they got this one first and then decided to reprint the previous one so this would make sense to the non-hardcore. Verity Shanae is an angsty self-taught spellcaster who only learned magic as a tool to fight another wizard who killed her father & son, and magically imprisoned her husband. Having had anything tying her down to a normal life destroyed, she's extremely obsessively motivated, and will take out any spellcaster abusing their power in her path, all the while wishing she could just stop using magic entirely. Like many a self-taught person, she doesn't even realise how different her skillset is from someone who learned the regular way is and how special she really is. Sounds like she'd find a lot of common ground with the likes of Drizzt, but less so with the perpetual cheerfulness of Elminster. Blatant novel protagonist bait, in other words. This feels like Steve Miller's attempt at pitching his own trilogy of cliched extruded fantasy product to add to the Realms. Thankfully he'll be staying on the adventure writing side of things and this character will never be seen again as far as I can google.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 117: March 1996



part 2/5



The Citadel of Protection: As part of our extended buildup to war in Raven's Bluff, we now get a good look at the temple of Helm, who's just as involved in fighting as Tempus, but from a more defensive viewpoint. Despite one being LN and the other CN, their temples have a lot of similarities in both layout and day to day routine, being designed for defensibility and spending a lot of time training people to fight properly, craft armor & weapons, make sure they have enough supplies to hold up if besieged, etc. The difference is that Tempus will eventually blow it all on a glorious display of battlefield carnage while Helm is happy to turtle forever if nothing happens, which weirdly enough makes him less popular with the common people despite all the charitable work his temple does. (being the cop of the gods during the time of troubles also didn't help with this, as worshippers of pretty much every other god still have grudges about that.) So this shows that they're seen as the stodgy religion who are respected but not particularly liked no matter how hard they try to be responsible and helpful. There are more characters statted out than the previous entry, but each of them gets a relatively short backstory/personality and none of them are particularly unique or rebellious. Like the things it's describing, this article is useful but not particularly interesting, which at least makes it an effective bit of writing on a meta level. Between these and the Forgotten Deities series they're really stepping up the amount of focus upon religion lately.



Feather and Claw: The second knightly order to get a full writeup of their own is the Knights of the Griffon. Don't think that just because you manage to join you'll get your own griffon to ride straight away though. If you don't spend a slot on the appropriate nonweapon proficiency you'll be kept in the lower ranks. As I expected, they're somewhat harder to get into than the roosters, requiring you to be between level 5-7 (depending on class, with the fighty ones having an easier time) and have a decent number of chivalry points. You'll also be held to higher standards, being expected to swear an oath to protect the innocent, act honourably at all times and defend Raven's Bluff in times of need. On the plus side, it's a lot cheaper to be one than a rooster, as you not only lack the regular membership fees, but get a 20% discount on weapons & armor and fast tracked resurrections for 10,000gp, plus the possibility of riding a muthafuckin' griffon on adventures. (which I suspect they may wind up nerfing if it turns out to be disruptive to their railroads) It does seem like a definite step up overall if you're serious about the whole knighthood thing. It'll be interesting to see if the higher knightly orders can manage to top that in terms of cool factor and keep people motivated to climb the ranks.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 117: March 1996



part 3/5



Forgotten Deities: The deity entry this month is rather larger than the previous ones, filling a whole two pages. Bright Nydra, goddess of the winter moon, worshipped by the marsh drovers of Farsea. At some point she might have been an independent goddess, but now she's merely another aspect of Selune who's church is allowed to maintain it's own customs, like Pixar after becoming part of Disney. Most notable of these customs is the extremely dangerous occupation of catoblepas farming, with the cheese they make from their milk an infamous (and very expensive) delicacy. This close association does have it's benefits though, as they can use the cheese as a material component in a spell that replicates their death gaze, so it's not a good idea to mess with them. Other than that, they have the same requirements, equipment limitations and spell spheres as druids, but a different set of granted powers, making them particularly good at dealing with the murky swampy terrain they live in, but not quite as powerful overall as the things you can do with wild shape. An entry that's particularly interesting for the amount of worldbuilding included, letting you know more about the worshippers rather than the god and showing that while small, this is a living faith integrated into the community rather than something secretly practiced by a few evil cultists in their spare time who wouldn't know what to do if their god did get powerful again. That gives players plenty of material to work with if they want to play a character from this region, which is all for the good.



Mr Whiplash, I Presume?: No plan survives contact with the enemy once again! No sooner have they introduced Fame Points to the Living City, than they have to revise them in response to feedback. So here's two new categories. Infamy points, for if you do something villainous, or people think you did due to being framed or deliberately choosing to take the credit from someone else. Accruing many of those will definitely make your life more interesting. (at least until you go too far, actually switch alignment and they take your character away from you) And Null Points, for when you do an act that would get you fame, but intentionally avoid having it connected with your day-to-day identity via doing it secretly or in disguise. These won't count for general reaction rolls, but are still worth noting down so other GM's know your character has superheroic tendencies, and if you build up a lot of them it may become plot-relevant later. Another couple of stats to keep track of that might improve storytelling, or might just slow things down and result in more admin after every tournament. It still remains to be seen whether this system proves to be a net positive or negative.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: The Border Kingdoms apparently have no places that start with C, as we skip directly from B to D this issue. The tightly packed river town of Dapplegate, kept from expanding outwards too much by marshy ground along the river banks, so what safe land there is is highly urbanised, noisy and bustling with trade. It's protector is the seemingly immortal archmage Danchilaer, who's in the habit of picking one or two people a year and giving them permanent magical enhancements in return for a quest, then being generally cryptically helpful for the rest of their lives. Basically, he's Zordon or the Dungeon Master from the D&D cartoon, which means adventurers from here have an easy route to lots of CR appropriate challenges. A little further down the river is the port of Derlusk, which is notable not just for trading raw materials, but it's unusually large and sophisticated literary scene. Whether you're looking to buy, sell, or merely ask a sage to find an obscure bit of information for you in the libraries, this is a good place to go, and then you can sell your autobiography when you come back from your adventures and make even more money. It's also notable for it's Mage-Fairs, a yearly event where spellcasters from all over the realms teleport in to engage in hijinks suspiciously similar to real world RPG conventions, only with magic to enhance their drunken tomfoolery. Ed does love his 4th wall jokes, and this is one that make extra sense put in here rather than Dragon, so I approve of this. Both of these locations offer their own distinctive adventure opportunities to make visiting them desirable for certain types of players over the thousands of other choices you have in the Realms.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 117: March 1996



part 4/5



A World of Your Own: Roger intentionally goes for something completely different from last month to keep the variety up. We have enough worlds stuck at medieval level forever, and we just did a high tech & magic one. (where the players are kept away from the best tech so they don't ruin other worlds when they leave) Let's get out HR4 and do an Elizabethan era one instead, where everyone is a native of the world and there'll be several years between each adventure so players can get involved in big historical events and see technology advance accordingly. Supernatural creatures will be mostly derived from the legends and fiction of the era, including giants, dwarves, fae, griffons, unicorns, and maybe a bonnacon if we're very lucky. Similarly, the further away from England you go, the more the map diverges from reality, with Prester John's empire being real in this world and the America's geography more like the early maps they had at the time. Your adventures are going to wind up being unironically eurocentric and colonialist. So this is an outline that would have read just fine at the time, but comes off as very dated now in unintentional ways on top of the intentional ones that come with any historical setting. They can't help reflecting the era they were made in as well as the era they're trying to represent. The core idea isn't unsalvageable, but this one could do with a few more revisions before trying to run it with a modern audience.



Notes from HQ is near the end for a change, which looking ahead will continue to be the case for the rest of the year. Like many of their format experiments this year, it's not an improvement. The news inside is even worse, which may well be why they wanted to put off telling it so it didn't spoil your reading the rest of the issue. The TSR mail order shop has closed down. This makes redeeming gift cards or getting that RPGA 10% discount on products just got a lot trickier unless your FLGS was one that's already got with the program. They're still offering some products discounted directly from this department to compensate and trying to put a brave face on things, but in hindsight this is one of the big signs that TSR is falling apart behind the scenes, their cash flow disrupted by dropping sales, which leads to unsold products being returned and distributors ordering fewer of future ones, which leads to even worse cash flow problems, inability to service debts and the whole house of cards toppling in slow motion. But we still have a few more months of trying to pretend it's all business as usual so they're still advertising their upcoming conventions as well, particularly the country-wide Weekend in Raven's Bluff special event, held in 12 cities on the same weekend. What big metaplot adventures will take place then, and how much will the actions of the players be able to influence the future? Will they get enough interest to turn Sarbreenar into a UK-centric Living outpost, which is another idea they're floating here? After the past few editorials got very repetitive and boring talking about little procedural changes, this is all much more dramatic and interesting to read about. Looks like we might get to discover a few more little details about what happened in the offices in those final months we didn't see in Dragon.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 117: March 1996



part 5/5



Decathalon Update: They've got the final results in for the 1995 decathlon, and the new one is just getting going. The ARC Fellowship were the winners, taking the lead by being the only group to even try at the Most Sanctioned Tournaments category, while the Players guild of central Oklahoma and the DOGS take silver & bronze. The whole thing winds up demonstrating again how few people participate in this thing, with only one or two entries for many of the events, and none at all for the multi-round non-AD&D tournament category. The RPGA just isn't big enough to have that many tiers of further hardcoreness within it and many of the things the admins would like to do in an ideal world simply don't get enough volunteers to run the events. Will that ever change? Probably not this year with the other big things we know are going to go wrong.



The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: After the big battle last month, the newspaper counts the casualties. Nearly all their big ships and 400 sailors in the sea battle, and over 700 people against the land assault. Both the mayor and deputy mayor fought on the front lines and sustained injuries in the process as well. This means they're frantically trying to rebuild and find new troops as fast as possible, stepping up the calls for adventurers to sign up as mercenaries or city watch. They've also asked the neighbouring city-states for help. Tantras has decided to keep all their troops for their own defence, while Procampur is nice enough to help out. The leaders'll definitely remember that next time either of those are in trouble. On the plus side, the enemy lost nearly twice as many, but given humanoid breeding rates that might not be a good enough ratio in a lengthy war of attrition. Time for heroes to step up and make a difference! So this is their obvious pearl harbor moment, when everyone is temporarily united against an external enemy, and even if they're not quite organised and equipped enough to strike back yet, the war machine is grinding into action. Neutrality is no longer an option! At least, that's the theory. Just how omnipresent was the metaplot at the time at conventions? Did your PC's get involved, or wander off and keep on doing their own thing?



An issue that sees them heading full steam into making their settings bigger, more complex and more metaplotty, even as TSR starts to crumble behind the scenes. Despite a few complaining letters from people who would prefer to go back to the old school in the other magazines, the staff are too invested now to dial it back, and if anything are doubling down, trying to get more stuff out faster and squeeze more money out of the hardcore fans in the hope of keeping things from going off the cliff a little longer. The tension is really ratcheting up. What will be next to go or change in their attempts to turn the tide next issue?

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 58: Mar/Apr 1996



part 1/5



80 pages: She sells wolf howls on the sea shore? Doesn't have quite the right ring to it. Looks like it's time for another bit of gothic tragedy, quite possibly set in Ravenloft. Whatever the season, the readers do love a bit of that. Let's see if that's the only card up their sleeve, or they'll also manage a bit of april comedy as well.



Letters: First three letters are all pretty similar, first wants more Dragonlance, second wants more Shakespeare and third wants more Al-Qadim. All get the usual boilerplate about how they can only publish what they get, so if other readers agree, send it in.

Fourth is your typical contrary opinion, against them publishing anything particularly divergent from the core rules, particularly if it's a big adventure like Umbra that makes half the issue pointless to him. The new Players Option stuff seems particularly prone to making an adventure offputting to the non hardcore with all the ways you can fiddle with an NPC's stats. Since the majority of submissions still don't use them, you can feel fairly safe on that front until 3e makes detailed build selection core.

Finally, we have Willie Walsh again, complaining about covers/titles that spoil the whole adventure. How's he supposed to write fun mystery adventures if the Dungeon editors undermine him? This is why you need a nice solid GM screen between you and the players so they can't peek at your notes. It's even easier now if you're playing purely online.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 58: Mar/Apr 1996



part 2/5



Caveat Emptor: Ted Zuvich decides listing all his middle names every time he gets published is getting a bit much, and slims it down to something we can easily remember. Time to head back to Volkrad for a particularly gruesome bit of murder mystery that works best if the world is low magic enough that you can't get all the answers just by casting a few divination spells. A dentist is gruesomely murdered and her assistant is thoroughly traumatised. When you manage to get coherent words out of him, you find out a patient turned into a monster on the chair and ripped her to pieces and he barely managed to escape. It's not a huge leap of intuition to realise you have a lycanthropic problem on your hands. Just track him down, kill him or cure him, right? What you probably won't figure out until too late is that you're not dealing with only one werecreature. The dentist got hold of the skull of a seawolf and had been using the teeth as implants for nearly a month already, so there's a whole list of people that could have been infected. You'll have to track them down throughout the village, each of which is handling the changes they're going through differently and will be more or less amenable towards the idea of going to a cleric or losing control and having to be subdued. So this is an adventure you might be able to get through without killing anyone, (and it'll be extra rewarding if you do) but it'll take real effort on the player's part to not take the easier option in the face of ravening werebeasts, even when you know it's not their fault and a cure is entirely an option. (For this reason, it's one of their few horror scenarios that actually works better outside of Ravenloft, where curing lycanthropy is a real crapshoot, ironically making players more likely to go straight to the murderous option) Another pretty solid and flexible adventure from him that also includes a fair bit of worldbuilding, so it remains of use even after the adventure is over. It's just a shame that this is the last adventure we see from him, so Volkrad is never going to get any more filled out than this. Dungeon is never going to have any settings ascend to official status the way the Forgotten Reams managed at this rate.