TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 52: March 1990



part 5/5



The New Rogues Gallery: From sanitation, to sports. This column once again only details a single character, and that's basically an excuse to give us details on Deathball, Raven's Bluff's hardcore football variant, played by a mix of particularly masochistic PC classes and enslaved monsters. I strongly suspect that it's inspired by Games Workshop's Blood Bowl, and the easiest way to play it is to simply buy that and file the serial numbers off. So say hello to one of the biggest star players, Laemos the half-ogre, half-troll. His regeneration isn't as good as a full-blooded troll, but it's good enough to ensure he's never off the team due to injury, and his ogre side makes him able to gain pretty high levels in Fighter. He started off a slave, but over 20 years of excelling in the stadium, he won his freedom, decided to keep on doing the job because he enjoyed it, and is now one of the highest paid Deathballers in Raven's Bluff. Since it's not the most enlightened place, he still has to deal with hassle from wannabe heroes on the street who don't think someone of his heritage can be a member of polite society. (Gee, that's not still directly parallel to the experience of real life ethnic minority sports stars even now, is it? ) He takes great delight in knocking them out but not killing them to teach them a lesson. So it's all too easy for dumb PC's to wind up as his enemy. However, if they think before they fight and actually treat him well, he'll also return the favor. This is pretty interesting both as game material, and as an exaggerated commentary on real world social issues. As with the other Raven't Bluff material this issue it's less nice than usual, and gives you some genuinely dangerous adventure hooks to engage with. Will you get involved with Deathball for some quick cash, or campaign for improved player's rights or outright abolition. Either could become the focus for an extended campaign covering many levels.



Regional Directors: Following on from talking about their expanded european operations, they also list their current roster of regional directors, which has grown from half a dozen to 15 USA ones covering various states, plus people in Canada, Australia and Sweden. Still plenty of room for more though if you're offering. Nothing at all in Africa, Asia or South America? There's definitely things that could be done to fix that. Hopefully this list'll be even longer and more international in a few years time.



Bloodmoose & Company fight a cat necromancer who's kidnapped a rabbit princess. Won't someone think of the kittens?!



Less wacky than the previous issue, weirdly, but also somewhat more interesting, with plenty of unusual and thought-provoking articles, and signs that they're once again expanding and taking steps to solidify their structure. Can they overcome the bystander effect enough to find people willing to put in the work and build a local fanbase in every country around the world? Which ones still have hardly any gamers even in the present day? Let's carry on and see how many they've added next time they talk about this.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 22: Mar/Apr 1990



part 1/5



68 pages. A motley collection of gurning humanoids indicates that they are indeed in a comical mood this april, so at least one adventure inside is going to be on the ridiculous end of the spectrum. Let's see if they're guilty of just one or multiple counts of attempted comedy, and if the adventures manage to actually be amusing and/or playable.



Editorial: Fresh off Jim Ward's furor-provoking article in Dragon about the satanic panic, and why they removed devils & demons from 2e, Barbara puts her own two cents in on the topic here. Unsurprisingly, she's going to be sticking to the code of conduct like everyone else, and keeping everything reasonably family friendly. Personally, she'd prefer a little more sex, a little less violence, and a lot less adventurers meeting in a tavern. (which to be fair, they've been pretty good about not overdoing in here, but how many has she had to filter out to keep it that way?) Of course, this is D&D, so you need a certain amount of violence for the sake of XP accumulation, and villains that are sufficiently villainous as to be worth fighting. Even at it's nicest, D&D is never going to be Barney & Friends, (and thank god for that!) but as the biggest RPG company, and one who's buyers are largely kids, they do need to be mindful not to annoy the parents. Nothing hugely surprising here, but a reminder that their editorial direction is subject to interference from higher up in the company, and including certain things in your adventure will get your submission summarily rejected no matter how good the writing is. Hopefully most of the people motivated enough to write adventures are also smart enough to realise that, but I guess there's always a few that need it spelled out, especially as their standards get stricter and more specific over the years. This wasn't the last we heard of the topic in Dragon either. Let's see if they get any angry letters about being too bowdlerised in here or Polyhedron as well.



Letters: The first letter complains that they left out the precise stats of the wand of petrification. Pretty self-explanatory. You point it, they save or turn to stone. There's even an eponymous save category to use. Was that so hard to work out yourself?

Second complains that they haven't done any Dragonlance adventures yet. Yeah, the fight to find decent adventures for their less generic settings continues to be a tough one. They've finally included one this issue. You're welcome to try and add some more.

Third complains that the big monster in Ancient Blood was too tough for the intended level. It's a paper tiger. If you're smart, you'll see right through it. What you though was a mistake was entirely intentional, just from a different perspective than you thought.

4th is from Venezuela and encourages them to do more weird and experimental adventures. They're in favour of that, but within certain strict limits, as they pointed out in the editorial. Psionic adventures, for example, definitely won't see any coverage until the new edition has rules for it. (and even then probably not many, going by the way stuff in supplements is usually treated) Anything straying so far from standard D&D that they'd spend more time on how the rules have changed than the actual adventure definitely won't make the cut.

The final three are on the opposing problems of group size. Two struggle to find people to play with, and need a bit of help, while the third has a massive group that makes the balance on many published adventures go a bit skewed, as scaling is not linear to either the average class level or total party levels. Ironically, you may want to go back to the old Gygaxian adventures, which did assume a larger party bolstered by hirelings. Another example of how more rigid frameworks actually break more easily that'll become even more exaggerated in subsequent editions.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 22: Mar/Apr 1990



part 2/5



The Dark Forest: One area of real world weirdness that D&D underplays if anything is the vast variety of fungi. There are a few fungal creatures in the books, some quite deadly, but nothing that really replicates the sheer depth and variety of their lifecycles and chemicals they can produce. Myconids come closest, and are particularly interesting because they're relatively nonaggressive, but still alien enough that it's easy to come into conflict with them simply due to misunderstandings or differences in priorities. The PC's are hired by an alchemist to go down into the underdark to get hold of a particular type of fungus he really wants for his research. They need to explore the caverns, deal with the Myconids that manage it one way or another, plus the various fungal creatures that just live down there, and some invading Flinds just to top the cherry off. By default, you're supposed to side with the Myconids against the Flinds, thus winning their trust and actually getting them to help you find the specific fungus you're looking for, but wholesale slaughter is still an option. It's a dungeon crawl, but one with more opportunity for social solutions than usual, and even a mass combat battle if you take the right route. A cleric will also definitely be appreciated more than usual, as you might end up with a nasty fungal infection even if you get through the more obvious dangers. Nothing mind-blowing here, but it's a pretty competent starter that uses some less common monsters and gives you plenty of choice in how to deal with them. Would go down well fried with a nice slice of bacon.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 22: Mar/Apr 1990



part 3/5



The Leopard Men: David Howery once again takes us to warmer climates than most of their writers with another jungle-based adventure. The titular Leopard Men are serving as an obstacle to your friendly local colonialist's ambition to open up trading routes across the continent. The PC's get hired to kill them, and, as is the traditional way of your people, you can take their stuff too as an extra incentive. So you have to head into the swamp, and deal with both the mundane threats of the terrain, the Leopard Men's patrol parties (which will alert the others if you're not fast and careful taking them down, making the rest of your job that much harder) and several other tribes of humans and humanoids, some of which can be persuaded to switch sides if it looks like you've got decent odds of winning, as they're not particularly fond of their neighbours either. It's all pretty old-school, made particularly obvious by the fact that the leopard men's skills at sneaking, climbing and unarmed combat are represented by Monk and Assassin class levels, conspicuously removed from the new edition. It's not going to win any awards for political correctness these days, but it's still a pretty decent adventure, that shows some research was done with some really odd new undead obviously drawn from actual african myth. I can see myself using it without any difficulties.



Tomb it may Concern: Despite the pun title, this is also a serious adventure. It's another experiment, a one-on-one adventure rather than the solo ones that're designed to be played entirely without a DM like the last few. The PC takes on the role of a paladin afflicted with amnesia in the middle of a dungeon-crawl. You gradually remember who you are, why you're there and what cool powers you have over the course of the adventure, hopefully in time to use them to save your ass from the many undead that inhabit this tomb. It seems designed as a good way for a DM to introduce complete newbies to roleplaying by giving them a character who's considerably less fragile than a 1st level one, but not dumping all the statistical complexity on them in one go. Even more than the purely solo missions, it does seem like it'd be a bit of a pain to use in an established campaign, but as a one-shot, it's pretty good, with some interesting monster variants and a cool new magic item that you'll hopefully pick up in the adventure and make good use of. Another variant on their usual format I'd have no objection to them repeating. (although overusing the amnesia plotline bit would get old pretty quickly. )

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 22: Mar/Apr 1990



part 4/5



Unchained: Oh no. We finally have a Dragonlance specific adventure and it's a tinker gnome heavy one. :shakes head, purses lips: I'm not surprised, but I am very disappointed in you. I suppose it could be worse. It's not Gully Dwarves at least. During the War of the Lance, a priest of Takhisis commissioned the gnomes to build a giant mechanical dragon for the war effort. Tinker gnomes being what they are, the project suffered from feature creep and wasn't even finished by the time the war was over. :Cough:ty years later, (a couple of decades by default, but obviously whenever your campaign is set) they decide they've probably done more work than they can get paid for and activate the thing. It gets out of control and massively destructive hijinks ensue.

This is where the PC's come in. Guess who has to fix things as usual. Of course, before you get to the real danger, you first have to wade through a whole ton of tinker gnome dialogue, getting exposition in their distinctive brand of endless run-on sentences. (Do not even attempt running this adventure as a DM if you can't handle improvising that.) Then the PC's have to deal with the hazards of Mount Nevermind, all the various "conveniences" the gnomes fill their everyday life with, and decide which bits of experimental equipment they're going to take with them to fight the dragon. (including an Iron Man suit considerably less reliable than Tony Stark's, a very hard to steer steam-powered car, and a harpoon gun the size of a siege weapon) They then have to follow the trail of devastation to solve the problem for good. Along the way, they'll meet the priest who started this in the first place, stripped of his powers by Takhisis for his incompetence and driven insane by several decades of dealing with the gnome version of middle management and tech support. If they don't kill him straight away and unpick his ramblings, they'll gain valuable clues on how to defeat the dragon. The final battle has several dramatic ways of defeating the dragon more effectively than just trading blows until someone runs out of hit points, and actually looks like it would be pretty cool to play in the hands of the right DM. So this is goofy and cartoony, but the right sort of goofy and cartoony, in a way that's consistent with other writing in the same setting. I have no desire to run it, but I can see how other people might, and that it would probably work as intended in their hands. Plus it's amusing to read as a commentary on real life development hell. Anyone who"s worked in TV or computer games will be able to relate to that.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 22: Mar/Apr 1990



part 5/5



Rank Amateurs: Now if the previous adventure was a little niche and goofy, this one takes it up a few levels more in both aspects. It's a humanoid specific one, as presented in GAZ10: Orcs of Thar, which was basically the D&D answer to Paranoia. Parties are large, kids are born in litters, which means life is cheap & interchangable, and culture is a warped mockery of the countries around them, imitating the form without really understanding the function. The PC's get ordered to open up diplomatic relations with an adjacent kingdom. Since their grasp of diplomacy is not the strongest, hijinks once again ensue. The basic elements aren't that different from a regular adventure, but it's written in a way that not only expects but encourages things to go off the rails at every opportunity. Friends that betray you, enemies that are surprisingly affable, bad puns in the names, and a generally cavalier attitude towards life and death. If you get emotionally attached to your characters here you're definitely doing it wrong. Of course, the big difference between this and the Polyhedron adventures also filled with bad jokes and terrible pun names is the much greater degree of freedom it offers, and level of respect it gives to the players. They can be chaotic and silly in a way that they choose, which is much more fun. Another one that's probably not going to be useful in a long-term campaign, but that really isn't the point. It's for when you're tired of responsibility and working together even in your escapism and need to blow off steam. As that, it's a rousing success.



An issue which shows their conflict between making adventures that are good for reading and good for playing particularly strongly, as they start with ones that are relatively normal, and then grow increasingly weird and niche as they go on, ending with one only a very small proportion of groups will have the right supplement to be able to play. By doing both, hopefully they've managed to keep the magazine useful both for people who play every week and who just buy it to read. (and maybe encourage you to buy more supplements as well) Let's see if they manage to get anything else particularly obscure or unique in next issue.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 53: May/Jun 1990



part 1/5



35 pages. An Ice House on the cover? That's curiously mundane to the point where it loops around and becomes intriguing again. Once again it looks like we'll be reminded of the logistics of living in a pre-modern city which lacks many conveniences we take for granted even with magic to tip the balance a little. Let's see if they've manage to squeeze in some useful plot hooks for adventurers amid the worldbuiding as usual.



Notes From HQ: Unlike a few years ago, they're now getting enough submissions that they're not constantly stressed about the slush pile running dry, or having to publish everything sent in, no matter how crap. However, just like Dungeon, they're still not getting the kinds of submissions they really want. More non D&D articles, and system-free ones that are useful for gamers of any system would be preferable, so they can broaden their playerbase, and cater to all kinds of gamers, not just D&D players. It's not that they dislike D&D, but even the most obsessive writer craves a little more variety after years of working full-time on something and they'd really like to fully support their Top Secret, Gamma World, Marvel Superheroes and Boot Hill gamelines as well in both the newszine and tournaments. Good luck with that. We already know in hindsight that while they may win some battles, this is a war they're going to lose in the long run, eventually winding up all D&D all the time just like Dragon. But in the meantime, there's hopefully a few obscure gems to unearth yet.



Letters: Ironically in light of the editorial, the first letter complains that they don't do enough D&D material. They means specifically basic D&D material as opposed to AD&D material, but this demonstrates that in a large and diverse society, even people only differing from the default by one or two intersections and still falling into a relatively common group can still easily wind up feeling marginalised. If you get sad every time we are not about me, you're going to be miserable most of your life.

The other letter continues the debate about letting non-members participate in RPGA tournaments, and what to do if they win prizes that only make sense if you're a member like free subscription extensions. This is why they want to get big enough that they can start being stricter about these things. It's much less hassle.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 53: May/Jun 1990



part 2/5



The Bard's Corner: This column doesn't have a song for us, instead doing a Marx brothers riff where a dragon intentionally mishears everything the valiant knight who's come to rescue the princess says, bombarding him with puns and malapropisms before revealing that the fair maiden wasn't kidnapped at all, she decided to live with him of her own free will, and probably isn't a maiden anymore either. (no kids on the way though, as it's still a few years before Council of Wyrms makes that an option) By the time they decide he's gone from amusing to boring and actually get around to killing him, death seems like a mercy. It's all very whimsical. If they got the submissions, it looks like they'd do this every issue just like Dragonmirth.



Torrand's Tribulations: Hmm. This is a turnup for the books. A 0th level adventure designed to take the PC's from regular joes to 1st level characters over the course of their challenges. While still not exactly common, they've definitely become more of a formalised thing over the years, with Dungeon Crawl Classics in particular making the 0th level meatgrinder funnels an integral part of their system design. Was this the first of it's kind, or can someone point to an even earlier one? Not that this is particularly meatgrindy, as this is another of their irritatingly whimsical, heavily scripted tournament adventures where you're given pregens with very on the nose names and led from one encounter to the next with very little freedom of choice, if anything even less than usual because you're all so underpowered. Despite being 0th level, the characters do have more hit points than a regular 1st level one, and many 2nd or 3rd level ones who rolled poorly too, so you won't be falling to a single unlucky hit like in a normal game. The PC's were originally the hirelings of a group of adventurers being trained by the eponymous Torrand, who does this sort of thing regularly. Their masters got killed, and now they have to pluck up their courage, think of clever uses for the mundane skills they picked up as blue-collar workers and do it themselves. Over the course of it, they'll encounter Torrand several times, sometimes in disguise, sometimes helping them subtly and sometimes testing them. Basically, this is an adventure designed both IC and OOC as training wheels for complete newbies. It feels more than a little patronising to those of us who started off by being thrown into sandboxes and expected to sink or swim, and managed to figure it out for ourselves. I can see how some people might find it useful, but this is another one I'll be passing on. When the whole point of tabletop RPG's compared to computer ones is the freedom of choice, why would I want to introduce someone with something so linear?

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 53: May/Jun 1990



part 3/5



American Steel: Gamma World once again goes to the giant mecha well, with another model of humanoid robot equipped with all manner of weaponry that the PC's could either have to fight, or find and use themselves (although it's unlikely to be in mint condition after several centuries unless the GM is feeling very generous.) The Dreadbot Mk I is a 10 meter tall humanoid that really needs two operators to function at full efficiency, but can just about get by with one expert pilot. Of course, if players try that, they'll probably cause a fair bit of unintentional destruction before they get the hang of it. Better hope they're not doing so in the middle of a (formerly) friendly town. Like a boat or spaceship, getting one of these may seem cool, but it comes with substantial expenses and makes you a target to a new class of enemies which are a challenge to your giant mecha. There's definitely plenty of fun to be had with this genre, otherwise they wouldn't keep on going back too it. Now if only they'd write a rules system that was better designed to support both human and mecha scale fights on a mechanical level. Then they wouldn't have to shoehorn it into the postapocalyptic survivalist weirdness.



The New Rogues Gallery: This column goes full "let me tell you about my characters", but in a particularly weird way, as it basically asks What if Frankenstein, but cosy slice-of-life story instead of gothic tragedy? A relationship between a wizard and his homunculus where they form an increasingly close relationship over the years, upgrading it from the original small impish form to a handsome one indistinguishable from human, but immortal, which then increasingly becomes a relationship of equals as it adapts to it's new body and mind. It ends bittersweetly, with the wizard dying of old age and setting the homunculus free, to seek out new companions, quite possibly your PC's. It's all exceedingly homoerotic, with loving description of the activities they get up too together, including cultivating their own unique brand of magical roses, which they then destroy all remaining specimens of in a pyre when the wizard dies. It's pretty much as close as they can get to gay representation in here as long as the TSR code of conduct prohibits anything explicit, which is pretty cool to see. As with many a slice-of-life fanfic, whether OC or using an existing property, the main problem with it is a lack of stakes or conflict. There's no real issues with or threat to their relationship other than the eventual one of human mortality, just one vignette of happy relationship after another. Which is interesting in one way simply because you don't see it very often in published media, but also boring in another. So this is simultaneously worth praising for breaking formula, while also illustrating why those formulas are necessary and become a thing in the first place. Life can be complicated like that sometimes.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 53: May/Jun 1990



part 4/5



The Living Galaxy: Roger zooms in now, and asks how you can make every city on a world unique, but still fitting with the overall character of a planet when there could be hundreds or thousands of them. Realistically, this is an impossible task. You could spend years worldbuilding and still feel like you've barely scratched the surface. Ultimately, if you ever want to actually get to gaming, you're going to have to cheat, sketching broad strokes and then making up details as the players choose to focus on something. The general advice is stuff I've read plenty of times before, but it's the specific examples that are interesting, drawing on a wide range or real world inspirations from different countries and time periods. If you want variety in your worldbuilding, it helps to have a broad range of real world experience to make sure you don't unconsciously put the same old default assumptions everywhere with a few stereotyped differences. Nothing too controversial here, good or bad.



The Skorpio: They find half a page free and decide to fill it with a new monster entry. Want a scorpion-esque humanoid in your campaign, but manscorpions are too deadly, between their HD, save or die attack every round and plentiful clerical abilities? Have a weaker, dumber variant which needs 3 minutes to recharge it's poison reservoirs before it can deliver another lethal sting, which in D&D combat means just one use per fight. Rather than a centaur body plan, they're bipedal, with humanoid hands, which makes doing some things easier, but without the brains, all they are is another marauding humanoid variant for mid levels, suitable for using once goblins and their relatives are no longer a threat unless in huge hordes. Pretty boring really. Another variant monster that doesn't really add anything new or clever to the game in either theme or mechanics.



Character Adjustments: The promotional piece this issue at least tries to be useful in itself rather than just selling you a recently released book. Jennel (nee Paul) Jaquays tells us about Central Casting: Heroes of Legend, a multisystem book advising you on how to create interesting characters in all sorts of RPG's. One they forgot to do, though was GURPs, which ironically is one of the easiest to make unique and flavourful characters in due to the finely grained point buy system. So along with the general advice on thinking about your character's personality, history, and other general connections to the world around them that we've all seen a million times before there's the quite specific advice on not spending all your points straight away to get high basic stats, but give them interesting skills, flaws, and social connections, quite possibly holding some back until after you've played the character for a session or two and have a better idea of how you want them to be. Definitely can't do that in D&D. A reminder that there are a whole variety of systems out there now, and some are definitely better at certain things than others. Your games will go better if you pick one that's good for the genre you want to play in, instead of trying to shoehorn everything into D&D because it's the most popular. Did any of you actually buy and make use of this back in the day?