TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 44: November 1988



part 1/5



40 pages. How many nuyen for that sword, chummer? A curiously cyberpunk looking cover, especially considering Shadowrun hasn't even been released yet. Looking at the credits, it's by Tim Bradstreet, which explains everything. I guess his art style was just naturally like that, and the writing eventually caught up to give it a proper place in gaming history. Well, that's an interesting turnup for the books even before we've got properly started. Let's see if anything else is conspicuously ahead of it's time in here.



Notes From HQ: For a second year in a row, things actually went smoothly at Gen Con, which they're very happy about. Somehow Polyhedron managed to win both best professional gaming magazine and best amateur gaming magazine, which obviously they're even happier about, although it does raise questions about the nebulousness of the qualifying factors for each of those categories and if that loophole ought to be closed for future years. As with every year so far, there were both more attendees, and more different tournament games to choose from, making for increasingly difficult choices if you wanted to play everything. An unusually large number of the modules are familiar names to me, and will be republished as official ones on sale to the general public in the next year or two. Hopefully this means they were good, rather than the publishers being lazy. An equally large number of familiar names get their fair share of the credit for putting in a ton of unpaid work in to organise all this. It all seems pretty positive overall. Just don't forget the hard-earned lessons of a couple of years ago, otherwise you'll once again find yourselves dealing with the same problems.



Letters: The first letter is a rather long one by one of their regional directors defending the decision to keep the precise details of their scoring system secret. You proved you couldn't be trusted to know all the details without lawyering them. This is your own fault. Well, maybe not you personally, but you know what I mean. In any case, you'll just have to trust us. Why would we mess around and play favourites with the scoring anyway?

The second complains about people going to conventions as a group and then all signing up to the same game as a group, crowding out any other players who also have to play with them with in-jokes. This is why randomisation of groups is helpful, especially in multi-round competitive tournaments where there's lots of them all playing the same modules at once. It prevents nepotism and forces you to actually talk to new people. Might be a bit more stressful, but more fun in the long run.

Finally, we have another letter of generalised praise, and request for info on their current publishing guidelines. Both need repeating regularly to keep things running smoothly.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 44: November 1988



part 2/5



The "Other" Game: Another promotional article for Top Secret/S. I., really playing up the idea that it's not just their spy game, it's their all-purpose generic modern day action game. Whether you want gritty, cinematic or pulp, we have modules for that! Buy them so we can justify making more different genre variants and adventure modules. It's a hard life for their designers of other systems trying to get out of the shadow of D&D, but they keep on trying. After all, if they didn't, they'd have to try and shoehorn everything into the D&D system and that works even worse. Will the public save them from overproducing D&D settings? In hindsight that's a big fat nah, but it's good to see them going down fighting. Nothing much else to say here.



A Few Monsters: Vince Garcia continues to be a frequent contributor to all their periodicals, with another collection of monsters. It's not as if we have a shortage of them, but they're less common here than the other two, so let's see if there's any good reason for them to be in here specifically.

Draggers are a good old gotcha monster like Trappers, Cloakers and Piercers, floating slightly underground and then trying to suck people into their maw and submerge to digest them. If you don't have earth manipulating magic to chase after them they present a challenge considerably in excess of their hit dice. Much more old school and ruthless design than I was expecting.

Greater Sea Hags are pretty similar to regular ones, only they also have wizard spells equal to their hit dice. The kind of thing that would be covered by giving them actual class levels in 3e, instead of having to make up a new monster just to give a specific NPC more customisation and flexibility. Meh.

Living City Ravens have human level intelligence, powers of prophecy, and if you mess with them they can inflict a death curse on you. Just like Ravenloft ravens then. Gothic stuff gets everywhere in D&D worlds. Whatever happened to niche protection? I suppose corvids get everywhere in the real world too, so it's just realistic. Results of being intelligent, social and highly adaptable. Best to give them plenty of respect rather than try to fight unless you want a long-term ironic punishment hanging over your head.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 44: November 1988



part 3/5



With Great Power: This column is still filling out characters from the MX series timeline. The daughters of Spiderman & Doctor Doom, both of which have inherited their parents powers, but with somewhat different personalities. Steve Barton, the new Moon Knight, who's also a lot better at ranged weapons than his predecessor thanks to his dad's training. And the bizarre amnesiac offspring/melding of Cloak & Dagger known only as Twilight, who switches sex and race with the rising and setting of the sun. Thats …… something alright. So yeah, if you want some somewhat cringy Ranma 1/2 style 80's trans representation, apparently Marvel did that too. The whole thing is definitely starting to look like one of their periodic attempts to pass the mantle onto more diverse legacy characters, only to revert to the regular ones after a little while because it didn't sell. How many times have they done that over the years? I guess we'd better keep going, see how long they keep this delve into alternate future possibilities up before getting bored and reverting to the eternal rolling present of regular comic time.



War's Tide Rising: The adventure this issue is another subject Dungeon hasn't touched at all, despite their increased drawing on supplements in recent issues. A mass combat scenario! Put on your boots, we're going back to our wargaming roots. The PC's are hired by a typically traitorous Mr Johnson to protect a village from a conquering army. Of course, there's a whole load of political stuff and shifting loyalties going on in the army itself to exploit, so it's not just a case of rolling a few rounds of Battlesystem stats and seeing who wins. It is shorter than most of these adventures though, at a mere 6 pages long, it feels like one of the filler quests in Dungeon for when you have a fraction of a session free. Still, it's not a railroad, and it's trying something different, so I'll give this middling marks rather than a outright fail. Just needs a bit of extra DM work to fully flesh out all the action and make it exciting.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 44: November 1988



part 4/5



Playing the Alien: Another decidedly less-travelled path here, as they float the idea of playing a giant rugose cone in Call of Cthulhu rather than the typical humans investigating the maddening secrets of the universe. What is it like for the Great Race of Yith when they bodyswap with humans, what are their goals when they do, and how do they relate to the people around them. You're a time-travelling near immortal intelligence who's aware of the vast bleakness of the universe and already knows how the future is going to turn out on a cosmic scale, but you still need to make sure you're not killed unexpectedly, keep your body in good condition, learn the local geography & customs and form social structures in the era you're in to gather temporal power and comfort. There's definitely interesting storytelling to be had in that premise, and there have been several games built entirely around variants of it, such as Nephilim, Immortal: the invisible war, and a substantial fraction of White Wolf's splats. Ok, so they usually have to water down their alienness and amorality to make them palatable as PC's, but you can probably make it work in this setting too. So this is a pretty interesting little article with some nice bits of new crunch. It might not fit entirely on a thematic level, but games are what you make of them. If you're having fun, who's to say you're doing it wrong. Take a look at human society from the outside and remind yourself how bizarre and maddening it would seem to someone viewing it freshly.



The Big Con (and me): Skip once again gives us his perspective on the Gen Con experience. As usual, this involves a lot of behind the scenes chaos and the staff playfully tormenting one-another as they try to hit all their myriad deadlines. Thankfully this year they had more than enough selfless volunteers to get on top of the paperwork, so the usual last minute scramble was avoided. They did have to face a new problem though, when convoying them around, the following car ran a stop sign to keep up with the leading one, which resulted in an embarrassing (but ultimately harmless, due to the whiteness of all involved) traffic cop encounter. When they got to the convention, they actually managed to get everything set up well before they were due to start, and remembered to bring a decent camera as well. This means they also have several pages of photos, which are properly scanned, also showing how much they've increased their production values in the last year. As with the editorial, It's all pretty positive, while not being polished and airbrushed to the point of unreality. There's always going to be minor setbacks, and you look more relatable by not cutting them out. Let's hope next year can strike the same kind of balance.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 44: November 1988



part 5/5



The Living City: The Raven's Bluff location detailed this issue is an open air farmer's market. Not an obvious place for adventurers to tarry long, so they put plenty of effort into filling it with plot hooks. A half-elven elf supremacist who will be overly obsequious to any full-blooded elves passing by, but then get bitter, creepy & stalky if snubbed. An exceedingly misogynistic thief (but also an exceedingly good cabinet maker who could easily make a decent living from just his cover job) who's backstory is cribbed from Greek tragedy. A bored young mage with a much older husband who will eagerly join any adventuring party with an interesting plot lead & plan to accomplish it, then get cold feet from all the bloodshed and go back to him after a bit. And the owners of the place, who are relatively mundane by comparison but still have full stats and detailed personality quirks. Like all the best Realms articles, it's dense with quirky information that you can use in all sorts of different ways, and any one group will probably only scratch the surface of, but really helps in making it feel like a big, complex world filled with moral ambiguities and minor problems to fix. Much more interesting and handy than it needs to be, which definitely deserves praise. Ed Greenwood has taught them well.



New Rogues Gallery: Former RPGA boss Kim Eastland returns to Polyhedron as a normal contributor, with some Gamma World material. You've seen the modules for sale based on his home campaign, now read about the characters that originally played through those plotlines. Well, this is certainly more historically significant than D&D characters sent in by some random player. Let's see how well written they are.

Boris the Bear is not the same Boris the Bear that got a comic in the wake of Turtlemania. That one was a mean-spirited parody of the mutant animal genre, while this one plays things completely straight, which is particularly weird because this is Gamma World. He adopts the trappings of an arthurian knight, and strives to be a fair and chivalrous hero at all times. In a wacky postapocalyptic world this kind of exaggerated seriousness is inherently funny in itself. He seems very usable in other people's campaigns.

Cody Matrix is a cyborg with an absolute ton of unique modifications, giving him a truly Inspector Gadget level of flexibility. He believes he's just a robot, but is actually the true heir to a kingdom overthrown and taken over by a dictator. If his memory returns and people see the birthmark on the small part of his body that is still human, they'll rally behind him. So this seems to be projecting high fantasy tropes onto Gamma World, seeing how they work for building a long-term campaign in a different milieu. It's less kitchen sink gonzo and more the humour of juxtaposing just a few clashing ideas. I wonder how people will react to that.



Another pretty good issue overall, with plenty of variety in both game systems and approaches to playing them. After a lot of hard work to get things running smoothly, they finally have both good staff and a decent number of submissions to choose from. Hopefully they can keep that up for a good few years before diminishing returns and being caught up in the general downfall of TSR. Let's head on into 1989 and see how the RPGA deals with the changing of the editions and it's effects on organised large scale play.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 14: Nov/Dec 1988



part 1/5



72 pages: Rats! But will they be foiled again? Looks like we have a lycanthropic infestation this time around. Better stock up on the silver and magic weapons, otherwise we'll definitely be in big trouble. Let's see just how contagious the fun is in this issue.



Editorial: We have an actual theme this issue! I've been saying they ought to do more of that. Not just the one set of shapeshifters on the cover, but a whole selection of intriguing and deceitful challenges. Not for amateurs who haven't progressed beyond pure hack and slash, but if you have, or if you've been meaning to make that leap but haven't been sure how to go about it, this is the issue for you! That's pretty pleasing to see. I've always been in favour of the greater depth and perspective you can get by devoting a whole issue to a topic. Let's hope they managed to do so while keeping the quality up, and will get a positive enough reception to repeat the idea.



Letters: Our first letter continues the support for solo modules. It's not just good for people without groups, it's also for people who usually DM and need a chance to blow off some steam. Don't underestimate the size of that market.

The more whimsical Willie Walsh adventures generate thoroughly split opinions in the second letter. Still, overall, plenty of fun was had. More combat-light and playful adventures are definitely a niche that needs filling.

Third someone asking if they can send in planar adventures. Yes Please! Just make sure it's consistent with the stuff in the manual of planes and they'll be very happy to fill in a few of these.

Next, someone pointing out the joke when you stick their magazine names together. You must not be a subscriber from issue 1. This may yet wear thin over the years.

Fifth, more praise for them doing small, setting heavy but combat-light adventures that wouldn't merit a standalone module. They're handy and easy to slot into a campaign. Keep on including them.

Another person telling them not to be put off including lots of variety because a few people get stroppy when everything isn't catered to their personal tastes. They're not the kind of people you want in your gaming group anyway, so better to weed them out before even getting to that stage. Much more fun for everyone else.

A reminder that low level adventures are actually one of the hardest to design in a challenging but fair way. Give credit to the people who can without fudging things to ensure the PC's survive.

Another reminder, that if adventures include things not in the corebooks, they at least need to tell us where they are located to make them runnable by non hardcore gamers. This is one they adopt unreservedly. Can't collect 'em all and be the very best like no-one ever was if you don't have a good source for what all means to work from.

Finally, we have some more defence of wacky illustrations and solo adventures. A little light relief makes the more serious adventures have more impact by contrast, so you really need both to make either work their best.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 14: Nov/Dec 1988



part 2/5



Masqueraider: We start things off with an adventure that seems pretty straightforward at first. Something's been eating the local's herd animals, and the farmers are obviously rather unhappy about this. So they have a bounty out for anyone who kills it. This means you have to traipse around the countryside for a bit and run into a bunch of other mundane challenges before you find out what it is and why it's so hard to catch. Turns out to be a hungry Protein Polymorph. Cunning and able to disguise itself to stalk prey and escape if the fight goes against it, but still basically an animal. So there's no particularly deep plot here, just your basic hunt the tiger mission and bit of general worldbuilding that's given a specific place on the Forgotten Realms map, but is easy enough to plop down in any temperate land. Useful, but not going to be topping any best of lists any time soon. I have no strong feelings about it either way.



A Question of Balance: Nigel Findley continues to be a very frequent contributor here. This is a bit more lighthearted than most of his adventures, as he pokes at the 4th wall in this little story of a hapless extradimensional traveller from Earth about to be burned at the stake for being a demon ( a doubly ridiculous premise to anyone with knowledge (the planes) as actual demons are both fire resistant and have teleport without error at will) Hopefully the PC's will be both compassionate and smart enough to see the flaws in their logic (even if it's not on their sheets) to intervene and follow the plot hooks to get him back to his own world. In the process they wind up having to fight a creature that might not taxonomically be a demon, but is functionally indistinguishable from one. A reminder that even though they have pinned the AD&D cosmology down a fair bit, there's still a massive extended multiverse out there and you shouldn't feel bound by the creatures and locations in the great wheel. After all, the official designers will tear it down and radically change it from edition to edition. Is it really worth holding yourself to higher standards than them? Pretty decent overall.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 14: Nov/Dec 1988



part 3/5



Stranded on the Baron's Island: Stranded on a small island with a mystery to solve before you can leave? That's an idea they'll use several times in Ravenloft in somewhat darker form. Willie Walsh gives us an intriguingly multilayered detective story where the PC's initially think they just have to solve a simple jewel theft, and then find out that the whole scenario is not what it seems, and most of the other guests have their own secrets that they're trying to protect unrelated to the main plot. Some are minor and comical, and some are significant subplots that'll occupy a whole load of time and roleplaying fun if brought to light. It's basically a Poirot or Miss Marple story converted into a D&D plot. As such it definitely requires a fair bit of genre buy-in from the players to function, and a DM who can ham up the acting on all these characters. If you do meet those qualifications, it looks like great fun, with enough depth and twists to keep you going for quite a few sessions before exhausting the possibilities unless they get lucky and jump to the right solution straight away. It was definitely pretty entertaining to read in any case.



Gen Con is barely over, and they're already planning ahead to the next one. As with last year, they give Dungeon buyers in particular the opportunity to save money and get the best slots by filling in the early bird registration form.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 14: Nov/Dec 1988



part 4/5



Master of Puppets: :metallica intensifies: Ah joy. Time for an evil marionette episode. Another thing that they'd revisit in Ravenloft with a different spin and somewhat greater length. An evil monk/wizard stole a magic manual for the creation of constructs, and is putting it to uses that are not only evil, but aesthetically horrifying as well. There's no Dark Powers here to suck him into an ironic punishment for eternity, and worse, he'll get rewarded by Asmodeus if allowed to carry out his plans uninterrupted so you'd better foil him and fast. So you get to go through a dungeon filled with lots of interesting new puppet monsters, plus a couple of new magic items as well, making this one very plunderable for parts. (both in and out of game) It definitely has the evil funhouse spirit, with plenty of tricks and traps on top of the puppets, and a villain who's actively involved in supporting the monsters and taunting the PC's instead of lurking at the bottom. The PC's should thoroughly hate him by the end of this, making his defeat all the more satisfying. This gets my approval on multiple levels of design. Muahahahaha.



Phantasm's Chasm: As usual, we have a little encounter that seems chosen to make sure the amount of content matches the page count. The title is self-explanatory so hiding spoilers is pointless. A canyon is turned into a trap by a gang of humanoids led by a couple of illusionists. They'll use their spells intelligently to confuse the PC's and keep them at a disadvantage while the muscle attacks. Nicely in theme, but not as imaginative in the quality or quantity of tricks as the previous adventures this issue. Definitely filler overall.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 14: Nov/Dec 1988



part 5/5



The Wererats of Relfren: Another adventure that spoils the big secret in the title, so there's no point me trying to hide the twist. A group of wererats is gradually infecting and taking over an entire town. There's also a big festival coming up, which is probably what will attract the PC's there in the first place. So this is basically an Invasion of the Body-Snatchers adventure with a mousy theme, as the infected people switch loyalties to the wererat side even in their human form and become part of the conspiracy, and people who might have been trustworthy a few days could now be turned against you and revealing all your secrets and suspicions to the other wererats. If they aren't careful, some of the PC's might get infected as well, and then you'll be in an extra pretty pickle. Since it takes a few days to set in, you might even beat the adventure and still be infected, and have to deal with that as a party afterwards. There's plenty of detail in both the setting and the timeline, and even if the PC's didn't come in equipped to deal with lycanthropes, there's enough silver and wolfsbane to be found to give them a fighting chance, plus some NPC's that'll be very helpful if you get to them in time. So this is one that'll work best with proactive players, as every day you do nothing, the problem will get harder to solve, until eventually it'll take fleeing and calling in an army to take them down, which won't get you much XP or treasure personally. As usual with the cover adventures, it's probably the best one in the issue, and definitely the one with the most depth and flexibility. You can definitely play this one through several times and get completely different results with different groups, plus you can plunder it for setting parts and it's distinctive take on lycanthropy in general. Sounds pretty cool to me.



Sticking to a theme definitely resulted in an uptick of filler material compared to the last issue, but there's still several excellent adventures in here that give you plenty of freedom to solve the mystery in a way that your players choose. Once again, the adventures people are writing and submitting to Dungeon are far more the kind I'd enjoy playing or running than the Polyhedron attempts at mystery, which mostly turned into railroads that spoonfed you the clues to lead you from one scene to the next. Now if only they'd include a few non D&D modules in here to bring the variety up even more. Still, that's a relatively minor complaint in the overall scheme of things. Let's see if next year gives me more to bitch about.