TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 5: May/Jun 1987



part 1/5



66 pages. A wizard, his apprentices and a kobold face the wrath of an air elemental. He obviously didn't secure his books well enough. Never summon anything you can't control is one of the first rules you should have drilled into you. Let's hope the PC's in your own campaign will be a bit more sensible and figure out a way to fix this mess, or maybe even prevent it from starting entirely. Let's find out how hard it'll be in the actual scenarios.



Editorial: Polyhedron has never stopped struggling to get enough reader contributions to fill the issues. In sharp contrast, Dungeon has been going less than a year, and already has a substantial slush pile to last them for years. What they do not have though, is the right sort of adventures. So Roger once again has to remind us that brevity is the soul of wit. They get fewer short submissions than long ones, so you're more likely to be published if you do send some in, hint hint. To further encourage this, he's shaking things up this issue, with 7 shorter adventures rather than 4 medium-long ones so you have plenty of examples of what they're after. Another example of how hard it is to constantly seek perfection, especially in periodicals, where even if you get it right one issue, you still have the next deadline breathing down your neck and have to come up with something different but also good next time.



Letters: Following directly on from the editorial, we have a complaint that they're doing too many AD&D modules and not enough regular D&D ones. Once again, this is what the public is sending in. You want to turn the tide, contribute! Or just convert them. The rules differences are hardly insurmountable.

David Carl Argall continues to have plenty of opinions on all their publications. He's another person in favour of more small adventures per issue. He also nitpicks their recent adventures mercilessly. There's always tweaks to be made to improve things, especially in small adventures where they have to leave out the little details to fit pagecount.

Praise for their april fool adventures. They too have their purpose in the great scheme of things.

Finally, another person who really does not want them doing non D&D adventures. Not even one! I'll thcweam and thcweam and canthel my thubthcwipthion! Didn't your mother ever teach you about sharing? You can't eat all the cakes yourself. It's not a personal affront to you if they make flavours you don't like as well as ones you do.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 5: May/Jun 1987



part 2/5



The Rotting Willow: Fresh from the ultra-whimsy of last issue, they still have some regular grade whimsy to give us. A small village plagued by trickster fae. But not the nice sort, the sort that don't care if their pranks are fatal or not, turning the place into one of oppressive paranoia and burgeoning superstition as the people try to ward them off and pretend everything is fine. Let's hope that by targeting the PC's, they'll have bitten off more than they can chew. This could be over very quickly, or it could ramp up over days of in-game time, which will make their defeat all the more satisfying for your players. And once again, they put a fair bit of detail into the village, so you can reuse it if they pass the same way again. If they do that at least once every 2-3 issues we'll have more than enough prefab towns to populate a setting with by the time we finish this journey.



Lady of the Lake: Our second short adventure keeps the whimsy, but gets even weirder. The adventurers find a girl by the roadside, severely wounded and with amnesia. Even magical healing doesn't work properly on her. Apparently, the only solution is to take her to Orb Lake, wherever the hell that is. If you do successfully get her there, she turns into a magic deer from another dimension, then vanishes. Um, yay?!? So this is a romantic fantasy influenced adventure with a load of worldbuilding going on in the background, that'll probably just go over the players heads and leave them baffled unless they go back and use divination magic or the DM just explains in narration afterwards. Big chunks of it will probably be useless, but I guess you never know which bits they'll be, depending on how the players act. At least it manages to be heavily story-focussed without being a railroad, even if it is pretty twee. And it definitely wasn't boring to read. Lots of good and bad points is always more interesting than blandly competent, even if the overall rating winds up in the middle in both cases.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 5: May/Jun 1987



part 3/5



The Stolen Power: Our third adventure also has a sense of humour about itself, albeit of a very different kind. The clerics of the local god(s) of love have noticed stuff being stolen from their churches recently. Now it's escalated to nabbing a major magical item and a paladin. Divinations have revealed the name of the culprit, but no-one's powerful enough to do a scry and teleport, so it falls to the PC's to do the lengthy overland trek to get there, and then explore his stronghold and engage in righteous killing and taking of stuff. Turns out they've been kidnapped to be sacrificed to Shami-Amorae, demon queen of shameful degrading sex, who in sharp contrast to the average goddess of love or lust only accepts hot guys and ugly girls as her worshippers. I guess it's easier to get to godhood when you pick a highly specific niche that has fewer rivals for the portfolio to split worshippers amongst. So this is a fairly standard adventure in terms of encounters, with a wilderness bit and then a dungeon bit, but with a plot framing of "tee hee, kidnapping and rape is funny when it's woman on man." Which is a bit gross, really. I'm somewhat surprised that got through their code of conduct, and it looks even worse in hindsight. I guess Roger's already caused one sexism flamewar by being a condescending dumbass while thinking he's being helpful and progressive, and there's no-one higher up who's any better or paying attention enough to deal with his blind spots. It's all rather unfortunate. Somehow I really don't think I'll be using this one.



The Kappa of Pachee Bridge: Another single-monster trickster encounter, this time for Oriental Adventures. This time, precisely what it is isn't a spoiler, as it's been hanging around the village for years being a nuisance, but only recently started eating people again. As usual the PC's are asked for help. The catch is that they can't just kill it, as even a Kappa currently in disfavor with the celestial bureaucracy has a pretty nasty death curse if you do. An excellent example of privilege in the form of in-groups who the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups who the law binds but does not protect (ie, the whole of humanity, who are nothing but straw dogs in the eyes of heaven) So the easiest approach is to use trickery, as despite millennia of lifetime, it's still reckless and emotional, and has several folklorish weaknesses for players to capitalise upon. However, that won't get you honor points the way beating it (but not killing it) in a fair fight and then forcing it to swear an oath will. All depends on your party composition, level and alignment leanings. A pretty flexible adventure that'll reward roleplayers over hack-and-slash players, and feels like the original story while changing just enough that players who've read the source material can't just cheat their way through. That's the kind of thing I approve of.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 5: May/Jun 1987



part 4/5



The Trouble with Mylvin Wimbly: The somewhat comedic trickery continues to build, with another very different take on the idea. The PC's wake up to find someone's stolen the wizard's spellbook in the night. In the process of trying to follow the thief, they will likely blunder across all manner of traps and wandering monsters. When they do finally catch up, they find the thief is a bedraggled half-starving halfing who's no threat at all in combat, that you're obviously expected to take pity on despite all the hassle he's put them through. If you do, he'll glom onto your party and be loyal and helpful but comedically incompetent. No good deed goes unpunished does it. This one could be not just annoying in the moment, but also provide long-term irritation for your party for the rest of the campaign. If you liked the D&D cartoon and want your games to be more like that, you might consider this. Otherwise, stay far far away.



The Eyes of Evil: Oh crap it's a beholder get in the van! Yup, it's time for a genuinely high level encounter, with a powerful monster that uses it's powers intelligently, and is using them to gather minions around itself. No particular comedy here, although there's very much the danger of some of the party being mind-controlled and turning against one-another, which can get humorous in actual play. While still fairly short, this is brutal enough that it might last you more than one session, and uses a pretty decent variety of monsters, some of which don't appear very often in adventures. Good luck, because you'll need it with all those save or die rolls. No objection to this in terms of quality, but only use it if both your characters and their players are tough and emotionally mature enough to handle this kind of lethality and respond with appropriate tactics. Otherwise there may be tears before bedtime.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 5: May/Jun 1987



part 5/5



Hirward's Task: After all these little adventures, it's a relief that they still include one 20 pager designed to take multiple sessions. As the cover showed, an out of control air elemental has driven a wizard out of his home. He hires the PC's in a tavern, as is standard adventurer operating procedure, and sends them to sort it out, preferably with a minimum of killing and taking of stuff, which is very much not standard adventurer procedure. For once, a quest that actually makes sense, as even though he's much higher level than them, without his spell book, his spell selection is highly limited and irreplaceable. What does not make sense is him then sweeping out dramatically without telling them the details of the monsters and traps he has guarding his place, but I guess it's hard to break the habit of a lifetime. His home is like this too. a whole load of surviving servants holed up in various rooms around the dungeon complex and communicating poorly with each other and the PC's, making the problem much worse. If he'd spent a little less time on magical research, and a little more on emergency evacuation procedures and safety protocols then this mess would have been solved easily without needing to ask for help from random murderhobos. Why is it that whenever wizards replicate modern technology with magic, they always go for cool gadgetry and superficial pop-culture references rather than practical modern health and safety regulations? Anyway, logical deconstruction of adventure tropes aside, they did manage to fit nearly 100 room descriptions into 20 pages, so there's plenty of use to be got out of this. All the better for the contrast with the other adventures this issue.



To top off the in-adventure whimsy this issue, we finish with an advert for Snarfquest. Not a setting many players will want to draw on for their adventure building.



Curious that the pivot towards more and shorter adventures has also come with a tendency towards the lighthearted and goofy. I guess the shorter they are, the less writers have to worry about consequences, so they have more room to put in jokes and leave the fallout to people who actually run them in ongoing campaigns. Still, at least it means we're never going to see Expedition to Chateau de Fluffyville, the 12 part adventure path taking us from 1st to 20th level. For that we should be thankful. Let's see if they'll continue in this direction next issue, or try out something completely different.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 6: Jul/Aug 1987



part 1/5



68 pages. It's a little easier to distinguish these Tortles by their headgear and choice of weapon than certain teenage sewer-dwellers who were recently introduced to our TV screens. But will they have the time and energy to give them clearly distinct personalities as well? Well, it's certainly an interesting question to start this issue on. Let's see how well the adventures in here have stood the test of time.



Editorial: Roger reminds us that even though Dungeon might currently be D&D exclusive, that shouldn't stop you from converting the adventures to other systems. Just turn a mind flayer into a psychic alien, a ghost into a man wearing a very convincing animatronic outfit who hates meddling kids, and a dire wolf into a regular one that'll still be really dangerous because you're in a system without levels and exponentially escalating hit points. It's hardly rocket science. True, but there are still subtler baked in assumptions that won't be removed by converting it, like the need for enough treasure and monsters over an adventure to give you a certain amount of XP in systems where that's simply not an issue. It would be nice to have more adventures for other systems that are built from the ground up to work with the system, not against it.



Letters: They might have enough adventures in the slush pile now, but apparently they have an absence of letters this time around. The only one is once again from the highly verbose David Carl Argall, reminding them to put grids or hexes on all their maps so it's easy to tell distances and travel times. This is AD&D, not some theatre of the mind game. Yeah, don't forget the basics in your pursuit of more sophisticated storytelling. It tends to backfire in the long run.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 6: Jul/Aug 1987



part 2/5



After the Storm: A second underwater adventure already? Mildly surprising, but still preferable to yet another vampire one. As they're still in the mood for a greater number of shorter adventures, this is somewhat less ambitious than the previous one, with less travelling and politicking, although it does have an interesting sting in the tail if they make the wrong choices during the adventure. It's your basic sunken ship scenario, taken down by a recent storm with a whole load of treasure on it, and salvage rights go to anyone who's got the skills to get down there and bring it up alive. As with the last one, they take pains to remind you that you not only need some way of breathing down there, but also have to adopt appropriate methods of fighting and communicating unless you want to be at a major disadvantage against aquatic monsters. This is still 1e, after all, and environmental hazards are as important as the monsters. If you can't figure that out you've got no chance in extraplanar adventures a few levels later. This is sufficiently different enough from the last underwater adventure that I don't think we're hitting diminishing returns yet, and I've got no problem with it as an adventure in itself either. There's still vast quantities of unexplored ground of many different terrains to discover down there.



White Death: The second adventure this issue is also a return to a previous idea with a different spin, as we get another dragon-focussed adventure. Last time, it was a big, badass red dragon with a substantial lair, while this time, it's just a moderately powerful white one with a few interesting personality quirks. No way this is lasting more than a session unless the PC's get completely lost in the arctic wastes on the way there. And that's about as much as I can say without giving away the twists and making it easy. Perfectly serviceable mid-level filler.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 6: Jul/Aug 1987



part 3/5



Bristanam's Cairn: You never know what you'll find under a big rock? In D&D? I'm gonna take a pretty confident guess at undead for 500 Alex. Ah, but what type, that's the important thing. In a high level adventure like this, you have a pretty wide choice, possibly including hordes of lower level ones as well as singular big bads. Plus whether they're just monsters put there by a spellcaster as a guardian, or have some tragic backstory that keeps them going from beyond the grave. This one definitely falls into the tragic backstory variety, with a ghost, a death knight and a living man trapped in a sysyphean cycle of unpleasantness, unable to escape unless the PC's do something to break the deadlock. It's all very Ravenloftish, and if that were a setting at this point, would probably be a small domain there. It's fairly atmospheric, while not as long and intractable as a full-size domain of dread scenario. I quite like this one.



The House of the Brothers: The last adventure was quite forward-looking, in anticipating the tropes that would be codified and done to death in Ravenloft. In contrast, this one looks backward, to the very first D&D adventures and tries to make something that would fit in seamlessly. Yup, this is basically G4: House of the Fog Giant brothers. (not to be confused with G36: House of tha Bruthas, the D&D/Wu-Tang Clan crossover adventure.) If you thought the G part of the GDQ adventure path needed more meat, this is exactly what you're looking for. As befits the nature of fog, they're a little smarter and sneakier than the original giant races, while still being no slouches in terms of damage output and toughness either. It's not a perfect imitation of the originals in writing style - they've definitely become less densely formatted and more interested in the personality and history of their monsters since then, but it's on the right level in terms of overall challenge. Definitely one for bookmarking for the next time you go down that particular nostalgia well and want to give your players a little more than they expect.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 6: Jul/Aug 1987



part 4/5



Dragon regular the no-SASE ogre shows up for the first time in Dungeon. I'm sure it will not be his last appearance here either.



Forbidden Mountain: Two of the most frequently reprinted articles in Dragon were the ones on Tesseracts, and their potential in introducing 4-dimensional dungeons to your game. I'm not surprised at all that people would submit weird space-bending adventures here at some point. Since they haven't talked about it in this magazine before, and it's been a few years, they first have to spend several pages explaining the basics for newbies, which means the actual adventure is pretty short, and feels more like a showcase for the map than a finished product. Once your players get over the fact that they're not dealing with regular mappable space they'll get through it pretty quickly, as long as they avoid a couple of horrible instant death traps. So this is pretty cool as an article for inspiring you to make your own dungeons a little more weird and wondrous, but not that impressive an adventure. They really could benefit from including a regular column on adventure design in here, not just prefab ones, so they can teach lessons like this without feeling obliged to create a full adventure to go with it.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 6: Jul/Aug 1987



part 5/5



Tortles of the Purple Sage - part 1: Yay! Our first multi-part adventure! Hopefully this'll be less of a railroad than the multi-parters in Polyhedron, which definitely suffer due to the limitations of their tournament origins. It's not standalone in other ways either, as it's the first adventure heavily tied to one setting, to the point where it'd take a whole load of extra work to use in any other one, and references a whole load of basic & expert set modules which cover adjacent areas of the Known World. It's Tortle mating season, and the PC's are hired to protect them on their journey to their ancestral spawning grounds, which are hundreds of miles upriver like real world salmon, and also recently conquered. The future of the Tortle race depends on you! Well, that's definitely a pretty unique adventure premise, simultaneously epic and whimsical.

Once you have your mission, you have a lot of freedom in your route. Depending on where in the Known World you start, it'll probably take several months of travel to get there, during which the Expert set rules for wandering monsters and getting lost in various terrains will get a serious workout, and you might well stumble across whole other small adventures on the way. (like many of the ones included in the last couple of issues) So this isn't so much a singular adventure, as a whole campaign arc giving you a reason to set out on a grand adventure, and encounter all sorts of weird and wonderful things along the way, while still having a long-term objective to keep you pushing onwards rather than just wandering randomly in search of treasure and things to kill. It's very different from anything else they've published so far, but also pretty damn awesome. It manages to combine the best aspects of an escort mission and a wide-open sandbox, with tons of distinctive flavour, and introduces ideas that will influence future modules down the line in Mystara and Red Steel. I very strongly approve of this, and hope it won't be a complete one-off in terms of style and design quality.



The Manual of the Planes advert reminds you not to neglect dental hygiene, no matter what universe you're in. Sure, you don't need it on the astral plane, but it's still a bad idea to get out of the habit, and who knows how quickly abyssal bacteria will give you cavities.



Probably their strongest issue since the 1st one, as although they're starting to cycle through repeating themes for adventures, they chose a good set of individual adventures, which did some interestingly envelope-pushing things, and had a bit more continuity with outside products rather than being purely standalone. With a year under their belt, they're starting to get more confident. Let's see if they have any special presents to offer for their 1st birthday, or It'll take a considerably bigger number before they decide to do any envelope-pushing and retrospectives.