TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 24: Jul/Aug 1990



part 5/5



Dungeon Adventures Index: We only have three adventures this issue, which is a touch disappointing, as it's not as if any of them are extra large ones that would justify that. Chalk it up to needing to increase the amount of advertising before they can afford to increase the page count correspondingly. In the meantime, we also have a second index of the adventures so far. They've got enough now that it fills 2 pages, so it doesn't feel completely insubstantial like the first time, but it's still sorted in primarily in alphabetical order rather than by level or system/setting, so it's most useful for people who have already read the magazines and know what they're looking for rather than someone new who needs a prefab adventure for the right level and group composition quickly and wants to know where to find it. A slight improvement on the first one, but they've still got a long way to go to reach modern standards of easy sorting and searchability.



An issue where it feels like they're pushing up against the limits of what the D&D ruleset can do, be it in genre or scope, resulting in adventures that are interesting reads, but might be tricky to run. It once again makes me wish that they'd at least tried to be a multi-system magazine in the way Dragon & Polyhedron did; even if in practice D&D stuff would wind up being the majority, it'd still have resulted in more variety and opened people's eyes to other games that might have done the kind of playstyle they want to play better than trying to squeeze it into classes, levels and advancement by killing. Oh for the alternate history that could have been. But no point crying over it. On with the real history to see how they try to keep things interesting next time.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 55: Sep/Oct 1990



part 1/5



36 pages. Clyde Caldwell and his girlfriend once again rock the barbarian cosplay on the cover. I guess this is actually the first time, and the full color version in Dragon 172 is next year, but at this point, what even is linear time? So straight away, here's another thing that started off small and then moved onto wider scale release. Let's see if anything else is of long-term significance inside.



Games In A Classroom: Before we get to the table of contents, here's a little profile/promotional piece on John Wheeler & Peter Rice, who run workshops on how to be a better GM at conventions. They've been doing it for a good decade now, but still make sure to freshen up their routine each year, figure out what they can improve and keep it from getting boring for them as well as any repeat members of the audience. Like roleplaying itself, doing them is about putting on a show for a very selective audience, involving a combination of prepared material and improvisation, and the feedback from the audience is what really makes it fun for them. Quite valid. Some people do it for the worldbuilding, some do it for the storytelling, and some for the pleasure of social interaction. I wonder how long they kept it up. The odds that they're still both doing these today seem low, but not non-existent given human lifespans.



Notes From HQ: Growing the RPGA continues to be hard work. The results of the third membership drive are in. It brought in three times as many as the second, but that's still only 100 people. They're going to try again next year and hope recruiting fatigue won't set in. They're also continuing the quick pace of competitions in general, this time sending out a call for new monsters. Those are relatively easy to create, so It's likely we'll see a decent number of entires for that one. They also continue to have a sense of humour about themselves, with Jean taking having a roast thrown for her at a recent convention in good spirit. Even with all the difficulties they face keeping things running smoothly, it's still better than a regular day job doing something you hate.



Letters: The first letter is from Iceland. Like many far-flung countries, he worries that he might be the only RPGA member there, and this means no conventions or ability to participate in tournaments, earn points, and all that fun stuff the network is supposed to enable. He's not actually that alone and they can send him a list to prove it. Reykjavik does actually have enough gamers for you to set up an official RPGA club and run sanctioned tournaments, it's just a matter of making at least 10 of them aware of each other and co-ordinating their schedules to get them in the same room at the same time. We believe in you! Do it well and we'll be able to add a regional co-ordinator for another country.

The other one is a rather lengthy one complaining about people running official tournament adventures at private clubs. Surely they should only be available at public conventions where anyone can join! Jean has to gently disabuse him of that notion. In a small hobby which is primarily advertised by word of mouth, the line between public and private event is pretty blurry to begin with. Plus as the previous letter demonstrated, if they didn't allow registered clubs to run tournament adventures, there'd be nowhere to play them at all in many countries. They're not going to add more bureaucracy on this matter that'd be pretty much unenforceable anyway.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 55: Sep/Oct 1990



part 2/5



Gaming With Computers: The RPGA has been keeping track of it's membership with a computer database for a good half a decade now, although not without it's share of teething troubles and glitches. Home computers grow more affordable and powerful by the year, meaning using them to assist your gaming becomes increasingly viable. So here's one of those reminders of how things that we take for granted now were a real struggle just a few decades ago, and gives us a better idea of what became possible when. Character sheets, adventure outlines, session recaps, maps, all become quicker and easier to do and much easier to copy, edit and revise once you have a decent computer program set up to handle them. Obviously it's not telling us anything new or particularly useful to modern gamers, as the specifics of what programs they used are laughably out of date, so it's only interesting as a historical artifact, but that's true of a lot of these articles. There'll probably be another in a few years time, given how rapidly they were progressing back then.



Bookwyrms: This column takes the time to promote all the books TSR publishes that don't fit into an established game line. The highly meta murder mystery Bimbos of the Death Sun. The post-apocalyptic western The Earth Remembers. Monkey Station, Aradath Mayhar's take on Planet of the Apes. Warsprite, Jeff Swycaffer's tale of two robots landing on earth that seems very suitable for a movie adaption. The far solar system mining exploits of Outbanker. Surprised how few of these I've actually read, which is another reminder how much non D&D stuff they tried that didn't sell particularly well, and so never got any follow-ups. Even once I've finished this seemingly endless journey through the more obscure parts of their output, there's still a load of standalone things to go back and check out if I can find them. (Not always easy, as if they're both decades out of print and obscure, it's quite possible no-one's even bothered to pirate them.) In a world as big as ours, you'll never run out of things to do if you've got a little imagination. It's just finding the time and resources to actually do them that's tricky.



Easy Money: The adventure this issue is another one heavily tied into Raven's Bluff, taking advantage of characters and places already statted out in the sourcebook to link things into the bigger picture. The circus is in town and they want more dancing bears. The PC's get hired to go capture as many of them as possible, with a particular bonus for capturing a golden one that's been seen in the hills near Raven's Bluff recently. There's no real sense of exploration though, as this is a linear adventure that eschews a map for having them experience exactly the same encounters in order wherever they wander. Your basic orc and worg attack ripped straight from The Hobbit. A pair of ghosts that'll bicker and heckle your characters with a Statler & Waldorf routine, and probably mop the floor with characters of the expected level if you try and fight them. An awful asian monk stereotype who will speak only in inscrutable koans with a heavy accent, and is also probably capable of beating the whole party single-handed if they lose patience with him. And the climactic encounter, where the golden bear turns out to be a werebear who will pretend to let himself be captured and use the journey back to subtly prank the characters. So with a premise built around animal cruelty, plus railroading, racism and bad comedy as toppings, this manages an impressive catalog of yikes that makes it an absolute nope from me. Surely in the Realms there are enough fully sentient weird creatures with interesting powers that could be persuaded to participate in a stage show that dancing bears would seem too trivial to bother with in the first place? This is gross and stupid in both premise and implementation. A failure on every level.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 55: Sep/Oct 1990



part 3/5



Another trio of new monsters follows to fill out your games. Chakchak are a specially bred caste of hobgoblin berserkers with axes instead of hands, intended to be an ultimate weapon in their endless battles against everyone else. Unfortunately, it turns out that the amount of time and effort expended to create them is not commensurate with their effectiveness against intelligent opponents who use magic and tactics, so they're not actually that common these days. The ability to open doors and dress yourself far outweighs a few extra points to hit and damage in the long run, even if it's not reflected in the XP total you get for defeating them.

Oortlings are a variant of Grey alien, small and feeble-bodied, but with huge brains bulging out of their heads. Unfortunately, these large brains made them an illithid delicacy, and so they've been enslaved and bred for docility over the centuries, making them not much help to anyone trying to take down the mind flayer empire. Which is a shame, as their ability to live in space and survive off comet ice (hence their name) is pretty handy. Can you free them and help them rebuild a civilisation of their own?

MagiStars are another even stranger spelljammer creature, intelligent stars attached to the edge of a crystal sphere. There are normally 8 of them per solar system, each embodying one of the schools of magic, and able to use any spell from that school at will. This immense but idiosyncratically limited power could be turned to all sorts of ends if you could negotiate with them and offer them something they want in return, plus all of them can serve as gates into the phlogiston for spelljammers. Since they're enormous, immobile and pretty much unkillable, they're definitely intended more as a plot device than a monster to fight. If the regular sages on your world are stumped by a big problem, there are worse options than seeking their immortal wisdom.



The New Rogues Gallery: The new characters this issue are the Iron Maidens, an obvious pop culture reference that's a good excuse for an all female adventuring party. Unfortunately, they're down from the original 7 to only three members at the moment, due to treachery from the Mr Johnson of a recent mission. Many groups would retire after a setback that severe, but I guess the ladies are not for turning. There's Kiera, the relatively sensible fighter founder of the party, Lyrissa, the troublemaking thief/fighter who's constantly overspending, overdrinking & engaging in petty theft to make up for her financial incompetence, and has managed to make a personal enemy of Fzoul Chembryl due to one of her heists, and Tiralia, a flirtatious wizard who's wound up stuck at 8' 2" tall due to a magical glitch. (but hey, there are enough guys into that kind of thing that it doesn't hinder her love life.) They'd better pick up a new cleric soon if they want to last much longer as a group. They're quirky and unstable enough that they could work both as antagonists/rivals despite their overall good alignments, or join up with your party for a big adventure, which makes this considerably more useful than the parties where all the characters are generically good, the team is well-balanced and everyone gets on with each other. If they're going to be doing mostly good adventuring parties here, this is one of the better examples of how to make something that can actually get used by other groups.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 55: Sep/Oct 1990



part 4/5



The Living Galaxy: Roger finishes off his A-Z of satellite types, giving us a quite interesting ecology of large and small satellites of various functions, many useful to to people down on the ground, but some only in relation to other satellites, repairing & refuelling, or sabotaging and deceiving. Like venturing to the depths of the sea, or other planes of existence, there's rich possibilities for adventure up here, as the environment is very different from what we're used too, but there's still plenty of goals to strive for, competition for the resources available, and hazards to avoid. My only complaint once again is that it's all completely system free at a point where we most need mechanical help, due to things working so differently, and frequently unintuitively in free fall. Has anyone stepped up and produced a game that handles this well that would also integrate with human scale RPG action, or is it a nice idea that has yet to be properly exploited?



The Everwinking Eye: Ed gives us some more details on the village of Maskyr's eye and the surrounding environment to make it feel like a living place. The locals might seem taciturn and provincial, but they're more than prepared to deal with troublemakers both human and monstrous. Plenty of attention is given to the local temples, since they're one of the things wandering adventurers are most likely to need to use. The normally quiet town centre becomes a hub of activity several times a year when dwarves visit from the mountains with lots to trade, with all the lodgings rapidly getting filled by people from the surrounding settlements eager to grab a good deal. There's plenty of more open-ended plot hooks in the surrounding area too, legends of monsters past, and maybe ones that still lurk there in the present. It's all very useful for a DM looking for ways to make your character's treks interesting.

The Current Clack is somewhat less so, and reminds us of the Realms' glut of archmages with nothing better to do than be a nuisance. Be it seeking godhood, or pranking people by teleporting them into compromising positions without their clothes, they're there, they're probably too powerful for your group to fight, and they have all sorts of custom magic items that would be nice if you can get your hands on them. Use with caution.



Roll 'Em!: The winners of the d24 table contest are all very much on the silly side. The old canard of what happened to your homework. Deus ex Machina ways to end a Paranoia game. The ultra-basic idea of what hour of the day it is. The only one that's somewhat useful for a serious game is the random spaceship malfunction table, and even that has some silly results on it. This is much less useful for actual play than it could have been.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 55: Sep/Oct 1990



part 5/5



The Living City: One of the many modern amenities Raven's Bluff lacks is any sort of social security net. If you find yourself homeless or extensively in debt without any family or friends to bail you out, the closest thing to mercy you can hope for is a stint at a victorian era style workhouse. (which is still several centuries more modern a concept than their technology in some other areas) Unsurprisingly, overseeing this job attracts the kind of Lawful Evil douchebags who enjoy wielding power over others, and will do their best to ensure that once you fall into the system, it's very hard to get out. The work is menial stuff that would pay poorly even if you were an independent contractor, if you want anything better than gruel to eat, you can pay for it at inflated prices at the company store, and even the most minor infraction will result in fines being added onto your debt. About the only mercy is that their ursurers haven't really got the hang of compound interest, (after all, D&D worlds are mostly inflation free, looking at equipment prices over time and edition changes) which would make large debts grow faster than you could ever hope to pay them anyway. But even so, it's not a pleasant place. If the PC's wind up there, it's because they seriously screwed up, or were scammed/framed, and they probably won't want to stick around and pay off their debts the long way. Fortunately, this job also doesn't attract the most competent of people, and if you have a few levels, it won't be too hard to sneak out or beat up the overseer and escape even without all your equipment. This won't be the end of the story though, as he has a magical item that helps him track escapees, and if you escaped violently you can expect the city guard to be on the hunt for you as well. Might be a good idea to skip town if things go that far. Good thing the Realms is a big place with plenty of other detailed locations to head too. There's definitely plenty of scope for adventures involving this, but your players may not be happy about getting involved with them. Still, unless they're ambitious enough to do the truly epic and heroic quest of getting workhouses abolished and instituting a more progressive system of unemployment benefits and pensions in their place, (or even an UBI, which seems more possible there than here with powerful enough persistent conjuration effects) it's not as if the system will be going anywhere. If you're going to stick to easy targets like orc hordes and dragons, don't be surprised if the world continues to have problems when you get home.



Wolff & Byrd's secretary finds vampires and werewolves considerably better-mannered and easier to deal with than the demands of regular human Karens. Now there's something that hasn't changed over the decades.



Another step forward in terms of the degree of focus on Raven's Bluff and the Forgotten Realms in general. Even more than Dragon or Dungeon, it looks like from here on out, there'll be more Realmsian material than everything else put together, between the regular columns and the interactive tournament stuff. Another thing that eventually, the rest of the D&D universe will catch up with as all the other settings fall away, and only the biggest remains. I guess they really are ahead of the curve after all. Let's see if they maintain that over the whole decade, and how many less successful experiments that didn't catch on they'll try along the way.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 25: Sep/Oct 1990



part 1/5



65 pages. A knight holding a black rose on the cover? Isn't that Lord Soth's schtick? Are they going to have some Dragonlance material in here, or is it going to be some other jilted incel who thinks he's a chivalrous nice guy when they're really not. What kind of drama will the players be dragged into, and how much choice will they have in terms of outcomes? Let's head on, and hope they've kept to their general policy of being much less railroady than Polyhedron.



Editorial: Ooh. They're actually trying out a non-D&D adventure in here! The editorial is about their newest set of experimentation with system and format in the attempt to improve readability and sustain interest. Let us know which bits are good and which are bad so we can continue to refine them. And obviously, if you want to see more non D&D adventures in the future, send them in, because they can't publish what they don't have even if the audience demand is there. Well, this is an interesting turnup even if I already know it doesn't stick long-term. I look forward to seeing if they'll manage a few more before reverting to homogeny and exactly how people respond in the letters page as well.



Letters: The first letter asks if they plan to do a best of Dungeon any time soon? Nope. Since they ditched Gary, they've not been too keen on retrospectives. Who's got time for nostalgia when you're in one of the most productive eras for worldbuilding?

The second thinks it would be a good idea to have a regular section devoted to DM tips and tricks. That idea keeps on popping up, and yet they refuse to bite …… yet. Maybe it's tonight, Maybe tomorrow night, Next week, Next month Next year. We've only time to fear.

Third grumbles that their new cover stock is less water-resistant than the old one. What is this cost-cutting nonsense?! They don't have any clever editorial retort for that one.

Fourth praises the cunning goblins of Tallow's Deep. Their players were suitably chastened when put up against them. That'll tech them to plan their delves a little more carefully.

Fifth is a particularly long one continuing the debate for or against boxed text. Barbara is definitely getting fed up with this, so she calls time on the topic. Stop getting so worked up over procedural details at the expense of whether an adventure is actually fun to play.

Sixth takes umbrage at their statement that it's the type of games you play with RPG's that make them the tools of the devil or not, and therefore they're only going to publish adventures involving morally good characters. Good and Evil are no more real than God and the Devil. RPG's are just games. You shouldn't be dignifying the delusions of religious people with that much importance. Still, whether abstract morality is real or not, do as you would be done by remains a strong principle in real world practice, so try to be nice to your co-players even when you're slaughtering their characters in-game.

Seventh is some more orcish errata delivered in character. A little comedy makes the inconsistencies go down in the most delightful way.

Eighth wishes more adventures took account of the fact that many parties have a character that can talk to animals (or plants, or even weirder things. ) A smart druid or diviner could blow any mysteries right open. Yeah, if your players get that smart and paranoid, most written adventures will not go the usual way, and more linear ones will be amusingly short-circuited. If you're not equally cunning and able to improvise as a DM it can become a problem.

Ninth is a writer from Denmark who's looking for people to play with. Another potential growth market if they'd only network a little more.

10th is a Texan who also welcomes personal correspondence. The magazine is generally good, but it's the real world adventures we have as a result of it that really count.

11th is more errata on their illusionary adventures. It must have hidden itself all through the proofreading process.

12th is someone grumbling that all their players want to play fighty types, and this causes trouble with adventures that expect a well-balanced party. There's a lot of problems no amount of raw force can solve. Show them by example how much more effective a little magic can be.

13th a lengthy set of bullet points from someone who wants the magazine a little more idiot-proofed. Trouble is, if they do that, it adds a lot of repetition for more experienced readers if they have to see the same explanation of map keys and jargon every issue. We only have so much page count as it is.

Finally, a brazilian player who wants more wizard-centric adventures. Most of the other classes have had their turn to shine in solo or single-class adventures, but none have been aimed primarily at spellcasters. Barbara has no problem with that concept, hint hint, it's just a matter of someone submitting a good enough example to publish.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 25: Sep/Oct 1990



part 2/5



The Standing Stones of Sundown: So what was the point of those rings of standing circles many cultures made? In a D&D universe with plentiful magic, the question of how they were created without modern technology is less of an issue, but why becomes an even bigger one when there's all sorts of esoteric things they could be doing beyond tracking the cycle of the seasons. Of course, it wouldn't be a D&D adventure if it didn't involve something to fight, so they decide to go with this particular one being a result of a magical ritual to trap an ancient de*censored*, oh, I'm sorry, Tanar'ri that was too powerful for them to kill at the time. A modern day wizard messes with the stones, winds up releasing the fiend, and now it's terrorising the nearby village, partly to find a magical item that'll let it go back to the Abyss without being stuck for yet another 100 tedious years (as will happen if you kill it), and partly just for the fun of being free and getting to torment and kill again.

The result is a scenario that has strong slasher movie influence, as you're dealing with a monster that can appear and disappear at will, and will gradually work it's way through the cast of PC's and NPC's if not stopped, so you need to figure out what it is, it's goals and weaknesses, and how to lure it out, which will take exploring the area, talking to the NPC's and generally doing a fair bit of Buffy style research. There's a few darkly comedic moments to break the tension, it expects you to actually be smart and use divination magic rather than being ruined by those kind of tactics, and it has a short-term win condition (giving it the means to go home) that's actually a long term loss which will lead to the bad guy coming back to terrorise you again with friends later. It makes for a pretty cool read. It does make some assumptions about the nature of the cosmology that means it won't fit into every campaign though; that technology has actually changed meaningfully not just on this world but every world connected to the same set of planes over the past few thousand years, so a recently released demon would be genuinely surprised and sometimes blindsided by medieval technology. It definitely doesn't fit with the tone of most Planescape books, where low and high tech mix inconsistently, there's plenty of fallen empires where things were actually more advanced than now and experienced planar travellers are pretty jaded to whatever mix of science and magic they experience. But I guess you can't expect to make every adventure fit together into one massive campaign. At some point, you're just going to have to choose between mutually exclusive axioms and stick to one. It's not as if there aren't more than enough adventures to take you into the mid-teens just from this magazine by now.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 25: Sep/Oct 1990



part 3/5



Hellfire Hostages: So here we have a Marvel Superheroes adventure. We've had a few in polyhedron, but they've either been single-set slugfests or linear "mystery" adventures that involve very little actual player investigation. Once again, not being forced to wrap the whole adventure up in 4 hours or less works to Dungeon's advantage here. (although it's still hardly a multi-month epic) The Hellfire club is attacked by people calling themselves the United Front for Wakandan Liberation. Since Mutants aren't very popular in the Marvel Universe, the ones that run the club would rather not reveal their powers unless they absolutely have too to survive, so they'll let the hostage drama play out and hope some superheroes will show up to rescue them. Pretty soon it becomes obvious that the terrorists do know that their hostages are mutants and will threaten to reveal that knowledge as a bargaining chip. Which is where things get messy, and precisely what the PC's are doing at the time really matters. Will they save the day easily without ever discovering the politics behind what just happened? Will they find out and reveal it themselves, or leverage the secrets to their own advantage in future hellfire interactions? They could come out of this with powerful allies or enemies. It's nice to actually get offered choices that could have a long-term effect on how your campaign goes, rather than playing the game purely episodically and hitting the reset button at the end of each issue. A scenario that would be decent enough even if it was a D&D one using original characters, but gains a little extra because of the thrill of getting to see a different system in here and engage with fairly well-known official ones in a non-railroaded way. This is a very welcome bit of extra variety indeed.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 25: Sep/Oct 1990



part 4/5



Of Kings Unknown: Or The Ecology of the Moonmelon, as this is one of those small adventures that's really there as an excuse to introduce a new element to your game, and explore it's ramifications. What if there were a plant that mutated the offspring of creatures that ate it? Obviously whether it would be tolerated long-term would depend on the frequency of beneficial to detrimental mutations, but for r-selected species where there are plenty of spares, so you can let more than half your kids die straight after birth and still come out ahead, boosting the frequency of outliers in both directions works out as a net positive. As an example, they detail an orc tribe that has made consuming them part of their staple diet, and their leaders have all manner of quite effective mutations to make them stronger and smarter than the average orc. This means they have a better grasp of strategy as well as their individual skills, and will make good use of their follower's individual talents, while maintaining an active program of eugenics to weed out the weaker ones. A reminder that making each enemy you face an individual can be hard work, but there are definite rewards in doing so, particularly if they can survive more than a few rounds and actually be seen as a character rather than just another collection of stats. This is all reasonably interesting - even if some of it is basically just a toned down version of the old Hordling rules, they're making more effort to integrate it into the setting and make logical sense than Gary's old version. Plus it has been a long time since then, in a different magazine. These ideas'll be fresh to many people, and the core is strong enough to support many variants. I have no objection here, save wishing that the adventure part was a bit bigger.



Hrothgar's Resting Place: While the last adventure was a bit short, but made up for it by having some interesting ideas that you can expand on and use in other ways, this one is even shorter and not nearly so thought-provoking. The players find a diary talking about the final resting place of Hrothgar the barbarian, by one of his ex-adventuring companions. There's treasure in them thar caverns, particularly an intelligent magical sword that was his downfall in the first place. Surely one of you has a will strong enough to succeed where he failed, so off you trot. This leads to a pretty standard 4 page dungeon crawl which is mainly notable for using Caecilia, one of those basic D&D monsters I've never seen anyone talk about, as well as lots of other unintelligent giant animal types. A few minor jump scares and puzzles, but nothing particularly surprising, and the intelligent sword doesn't even get a properly fleshed out personality. Very much filler chosen to pad out the page count to the right size. It's certainly usable, but don't expect it to last you a full session unless you also pad out the wilderness bit getting there.