TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 28: Mar/Apr 1991



part 5/5



Visitors from Above: The second Spelljammer adventure in here is once again aimed at getting people in a standard fantasy campaign up into wildspace, rather than accommodating people already up there. This is a pattern that would hit diminishing returns very quickly if repeated, especially if there's nothing up there to keep your game going once you make the transition. Even more repetitively, it's also set in the Forgotten Realms, although the default vicinity is Neverwinter rather than Raven's Bluff. Once again, a spaceship suffers a calamity and crashlands spectacularly. The PC's are in the vicinity and obviously investigate. Also once again, there are survivors of the crash making trouble and you have to defeat them to get your hands on the ship. Once you have it, you can make it spaceworthy with a little tinkering and get into new cosmic vistas of adventure, presuming the DM can write those themselves. The difference is that this is longer and more railroady, with several NPC's that'll push you in the right direction in an over-obvious way and then prevent you from enjoying all the fruits of your labours if you follow everything they say, plus a bit of annoying comedy. Overall, not an improvement on the first attempt, leaving me a little irked. You'll need to come up with more variation than this if you want to make wildspace a viable long-term setting.



Still plenty of good adventures overall in this one, but it was particularly easy to see the patterns and formulas they were using, which is a little worrisome. It's definitely easier to run out of new ideas for adventures than it is general magazine articles, particularly with their general reluctance to do multi-parters at this point. Let's see if next issue repeats ideas, and if so, from how recently.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 59: May 1991



part 1/5



36 pages. A dimetrodon waits in ambush in a swamp for some astronauts from a crashed spaceship. Let's hope their ray guns are still functional, otherwise their stay on the planet is likely to be a short one. Another day, another world to explore and analyse.



Bookwyrms: This column promotes their burgeoning Dragonlance novels, packed with more than one multi-book series being written concurrently by various authors. The Elven Nations trilogy, where you get to see what intolerant jackasses Krynnish elves are close-up. And the Meetings Sextet, (giggedy) where you get to see how the heroes of the lance met first, and in what order & combinations. That's a lot of backstory building up to a big event we've already seen. Let's hope they have someone on the ball keeping track of continuity with all these different authors working togethahahaha who am I kidding? They can't even keep track of how many moons Krynn is supposed to have, let alone more subtle timeline details. They're going to churn them out until it hits diminishing returns, and they have no choice but to advance the timeline and introduce a new generation. They really could have done with a stricter line developer. Even Ed Greenwood, who's much better at keeping track of little details, calling back to them and building on them in further articles & books is still no Kevin Feige in terms of managing others playing in the same world. So this is more cautionary tale than nostalgic callback for me. Some of their past practices really don't need to be brought back.



Notes From HQ: Once again, they're planning on making Gen Con bigger and better than ever before. Over three dozen official tournaments to choose from over various systems. The person who scores the most points overall across the three days (probably entering in every time slot available) wins a trip to Gen Con Europe, which means even more opportunities to gain XP! Hope you've been working on your constitution score. They also continue their onslaught of competitions to drive engagement. This time it's potions. What weird concoctions will we see in a few month's time? Seems like things are running pretty smoothly here, despite doubling the amount they have to write and edit.



Letters: There's only one letter this time, complaining about creating new rankings for players. No matter how many you create, a persistent congoer will eventually be able to make up the points, and the more you add, the more the RPGA systems favour a few whales who have the free time and money to do so over people who might score well in one or two tournaments, but can't manage the same degree of quantity. All the same issues MMO's struggle with today. If someone has an insurmountable lead, it can be demotivating to others and the hobby as a whole shrinks in response. They accept that eventually, they're going to have to change their system again, but not for a few years, since every time they do it's a whole load of hassle, and besides, it'll take that long for people to max out the new rankings anyway. No point rushing these things, especially pre internet where communications take months to filter through the worldwide system even if it is an emergency.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 59: May 1991



part 2/5



On the Warpath: Boot Hill manages to get another article, and in doing so, manages to remind us precisely why it went way out of style, with a detailed timeline of native american genocide & forced relocation and their failed attempts to fight back from 1834 to 1895. They're still trying to blithely treat them like equal sides in a fantasy game, and even more than then, this isn't flying as more minorities are given voices by social media and remind us that this is was a pretty one-sided series of taking stuff and breaking treaties that happened to their ancestors and still has a real impact on their living conditions today. Can you really still play cowboys as the cool, rootin-tootin heroes of the story after reading about all that? Would you want to game with people who would? This is a short sharp dose of reality amid the more fantastical stuff, and reminds us that even the early 90's are a long away away in terms of political attitudes. The TSR code of conduct keeps blatant sexism & racism out of their products, but the overall staff demographics are still strongly white & male and some perspectives are still more default than others.



The Living City: This column also deals with some unpleasant day-to-day realities, talking about a Raven's Bluff slaughterhouse and butcher shop. Unless your PC's are vegetarians, (a principle that will be sorely tested when you're on a lengthy adventure and running out of supplies) hunt everything themselves, or are powerful enough to magic up their food, they're going to be regular customers to something like this. They don't have any magitech to make the actual butchery any more humane, (and one of the owners is a sadist who likes it that way) but they do have a magical freezer to help with storage. (which would be a threat to the dedicated icehouse a few issues ago if they decided to focus more on that aspect of their business) They also stick strictly to selling mammalian meat, so as not to compete with a nearby poultry vendor that hasn't got a full write-up yet. (but may in the future, hint hint) There is a subplot about a vampire lurking beneath the abattoir and feeding off the waste blood from the animals, but as it's been able to cut way down on killing people thanks to that, it's pretty low priority for the average adventurer. So this is mainly interesting on a socio-economic level, showing what modern amenities they do & don't have in this world, and the bounds of where they're competing with their rivals due to overlap of remits. You want to make a profit, but you can't sell everything to every market, so it pays to specialise. These kinds of worldbuilding details are fascinating, and I just hope that other RPGA writers are paying attention and will create something consistent that builds further on them in response.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 59: May 1991



part 3/5



The New Rogues Gallery: A particularly interesting foray into unfamiliar systems for this column, as they detail a group of smugglers for the Star Wars d6 system. A half human/half orlac, and three new alien species that don't appear in the movies at all. Like many a petty criminal, they really just want to make a profit and have a little fun on the side, but when you've got a huge expansionist evil empire breathing down your neck, I guess you've got to do a bit of heroics just by default to stay alive and free, so they wound up joining the rebellion forces. This is in keeping with the general tone of the WEG star wars books, where they focussed much more of the everyday folks in a weird universe just trying to survive than the space wizards and heroes journey stuff. You're not going to go from farmboy to psychic master pilot in a matter of hours, so scale your ambitions accordingly. As long as you can accept that, it does seem to support a fair bit of flexibility, with the new aliens including a bird-person, a shapeshifter, and an intelligent giant ant. Are you going to join them on their journeys? Will enough people in the RPGA do so for them to run tournament adventures in that system? It did pretty well with the general public, so hopefully this won't be a one-off appearance in the newszine.



The Living Galaxy: Roger continues with fairly generic worldbuilding advice with a sci-fi flavour that's actually useful for most campaigns. Originality is hard, so if you want to make lots of planets for your setting, it's much easier to steal from existing planets and change them just enough to make them interesting to adventure in. (usually by decreasing the lethality and increasing the amount of life.) Make it martian, but the air is just about thick enough to breathe with the aid of a respirator. Europan, but the sea is close enough under the ice for you to dig to it. Earth-like, but with saturnesque rings rather than one basic moon. It's all a pretty strong reminder that to make space adventures work, you need to either soft-pedal the challenges, or provide the PC's with hypertech that we don't even have a theoretical path to creating in the real world, because otherwise the vast distances and hostile environments will either kill your PC's in seconds, or have them die of old age before they even get to another solar system. While you can make interesting adventures in an ultra-hard sci-fi setting, they won't be much like D&D ones, and you'll have to fastforward through large stretches of time even more than in D&D wilderness exploration missions. It does seem pretty challenging, which is why most settings don't even try. Oh well. When it comes to storytelling, It's better to fail in an interesting way than succeed in a boring one. That's another lesson suitable for any genre.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 59: May 1991



part 4/5



A New World to Conquer: Our second promotional article this issue is for Dark Sun. The desert world where everything is psionic and arcane magic is destroying the ecosystem. Can you free the city-states from the cruel grip of the sorcerer-kings and make it a better place, or will you merely struggle to survive between all the social and environmental hazards? Your equipment is limited, but your basic ability scores are jacked way up, everyone starts at 3rd level, and the enemies are similarly scary in response. It's easily the biggest departure from regular D&D rules and setting assumptions they've done so far, as well as the highest production values they've tried, with the concept art by Brom playing an integral part in it's development rather than being commissioned after they'd already done all the writing. Unsurprisingly, Jim Ward is involved, which makes perfect sense, as Dark Sun is a merger of the AD&D and Gamma World aesthetics with a less comical veneer, and he always was one of the biggest twinks on staff. With sample NPC stats and a new monster, the Psi-Shadow, this lets you know exactly what you're in for if you buy this, although I don't think even they knew how convoluted and metaplotty it'd wind up in the supplements at this point. (the full details of what, why, and how common sorcerer-kings were definitely seems to have been added on after the initial writing) It's a pretty good teaser, making it clear that they're trying to push the limits of what you can do with the D&D system, and produce something completely distinct from the 4 fairly generic worlds they're currently supporting. Their ambition may exceed their reach sometimes, but they're putting out both far more quantity and variety of material than WotC now, on much more specific subjects. Who's going to be nostalgic for generic mishmash supplements like Tasha's Cauldron in 25 years time? Give us new settings that do something different and relevant to the modern day.



A Friend In Need: The adventure this issue is a whimsical one with nonstandard pregen PC's. Take on the roles of a Sprite, Sylph, Swanmay, Centaur, Werebear, & a regular elf just for good measure and save the woodland creatures from some fairytale cliches given interesting combinations. A handsome prince is searching for his bride. The (evil) sorceress with a magic mirror offers to help him in his search, secretly intending to use a love potion to make him fall in love with her instead. On the journey, he meets a dryad and falls in love with her instead. By amazing co-incidence, her tree gets struck by lightning and she passes out. The prince takes her away from her tree to get medical attention (not realising this just makes matters worse.) The evil sorceress pulls a sleeping beauty routine on both of them, and the PC's have to rescue them in a hurry. (with obligatory waking with a kiss) It's frequently silly, and the influences are very obvious, but it is willing to subvert expectations and give you some freedom in how you solve the challenges, so it's definitely not the worst they've ever done in here. Like the one where you played as magic items, the set of nonstandard PC's definitely strengthens the adventure as a whole, and while it could be played in a regular campaign, it'd lose a fair bit of it's charm without them. That means it's probably not one I'd wind up using under normal circumstances, but I don't have any particular animosity to it either, unlike some of their so-called humorous adventures which are just annoying to read.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 59: May 1991



part 5/5



With Great Power: It's this column's turn to do a competition. They give four sets of stats, and ask the readers to come up with backstories for them. The magical cowboy Desperado, able to generate horse, six-shooter and lasso out of thin air. Kaleidoscope, a rainbow-generating flashy teleporter. Mongrel, your basic beast-person powerset of undefined gender. And Sidestep, who's basically a human Displacer Beast, always appearing to be a few feet from her real location. Will people go for the obvious stereotypes for their personalities and history, or manage to throw some interesting curveballs that intrigue the editors better. Tune in several months later to find out!



Into The Dark: This column goes even further back than last time in it's pursuit of decent fantasy films, with two of them originally released in 1962. Without CGI and green screening being common things yet, making a fantasy film is expensive compared to more grounded genres, as you have to actually make all the sets, or at least, elaborate matte paintings. Finding ones that have both decent budget and writing was not an easy task. Let's see what he's dug up, and if I've heard of any of them before.

Carnival of Souls is that increasingly rare concoction, a horror movie where the supernatural details genuinely seem to be all in the protagonist's head. A flop on initial release, it's gradually built a cult fanbase since then, and James is quite pleased to see it appear on home video. Yes, the production values might not match up to modern stuff, but the low-fi special effects work well with the black and white film to make it all seem more detached from reality. There's a reason people still use black and white to make things nostalgic and/or creepy today.

The Navigator gets a fairly positive review for it's interesting reverse wizard of oz story, where a group of people from the 14th century go on a quest to modern day earth to save their village from the plague. The challenges are a bit easier and the resolution neater than James would prefer, but I guess that's a general problem with it being a movie rather than a series. There's only so much challenge you can fit into a single sitting.

Tower of London sees Roger Corman try his hand at the Richard III story. Vincent Price hams it up impressively as usual, but the low budget does limit what they can do somewhat. Still, like all his films, there's enough energy there that it remains an interesting watch, and also like all of his films, it managed to make a profit. There are many far bigger directors with far worse records on that count.

Deathstalker gets thoroughly and viciously panned. Terrible writing, terrible continuity, terrible pacing and huge amounts of sexism. They can't even make the violence and nudity convincing. File pretty near the bottom of boringly bad.



Another issue that makes it clear just how hard TSR is working to come up with new ideas and add them to it's repertoire at this point. Some of it is formulaic, some of it is silly, and much of it won't stand the test of time, but if they'd only stuck with one idea, chances are, nothing'd be remembered at all.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 29: May/June 1991



part 1/5



80 pages. I know librarians can get a little irritable if you don't return books on time & in good condition, but this is a bit excessive. That's what you get for employing Baatezu staff. They may seem efficient and responsible workers, but there's always a catch. Let's see who's getting the bad end of the deal inside, and if there'll be any obvious loopholes that'll let the PC's escape unscathed.



Editorial: This is about their attempts to add more cool special features to the magazine, like the full boardgames Dragon occasionally carried. They had to turn a whole bunch of them down due to logistic reasons, although both including audio tracks to play at certain points in the adventure and a holographic cover will appear elsewhere in their product lines once the price points come down a little. They settled on a cut-out card map with rearrangeable rooms that lets you build new dungeon layouts with the same pieces quickly and easily. Just make sure you don't lose any of the pieces, or you could render the adventure unwinable. They look forward to seeing how people react to it, and remain open to further suggestions to spice up the presentation and build atmosphere. As long as they keep things interesting for themselves with experiments like this, hopefully they'll remain interesting to the readers as well.



Letters: The first letter is another far-flung gamer who struggles to get hold of books and other gamers. Any leads in Israel? As long as you're buying something legal, mail-order and Mastercard will be there for you.

Second, your usual bit of errata from a writer who only just realised their mistake after they'd already sent off the final draft.

3&4 are another round of opposing opinions, one wanting more adventures set in specific settings with concrete worldbuilding details, the other less, as it makes it harder to use them in your own campaign. Sticking entirely to either seems like a bad idea.

5th wants them to collect the new monsters, spells & items they've introduced over the years into books so more people can use them. It may take them a few years to assemble enough, but they will get around to it eventually.

6th is another who thinks system isn't important, it's the underlying ideas. Put them in whatever game form you want.

7th reminds us that atmosphere is as important as stats, particularly when it comes to horror. Awful things don't need to happen to their characters every encounter, but they need to feel the danger is real or they'll lose immersion.

8th is another generally happy with the magazine, although slightly more frequent solo adventures would be nice.

9th is completely the opposite, sulking over them including a marvel module and moving on from AD&D 1e. It's been 2 years since the new edition came out, and there's no great changes in the rules anyway. Get used to it.

Finally, praise for stepping up the number of handouts and other bits of clever formatting they're including. It really does make a difference.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 29: May/June 1991



part 2/5



The Tome of Magic gets a weirdly formatted 4 page advert that makes it quite clear that this is a high priority book for TSR. Lots of future books will reference the new spells and specialist wizard variants in here, so picking it up is highly advised.



Nymph's Reward: Ah, chronic backstabbing disorder. The downfall of any villainous organisation, no matter how large and powerful. Even if they share the same personality type, ideology and goals, everyone wanting to be on top is a quick path to enmity. This time, it's a covey of hags that bring about their own downfall by getting adventurers involved in their scheming. Two of them get sick of the third, and chuck her out, in the process "cursing" her to be trapped in the form of a beautiful nymph. She wants both revenge and to get her minions (who didn't believe her new form is her) back. Will the PC's fall for the request of a damsel in distress and gather the ingredients to break her curse? There's some hints right from the first meeting that things aren't entirely what they seem, but only very careful use of divination magic will give you definite proof of her perfidy. Besides, as long as you're hurting evil things, does it really matter if your employer is also evil? Just be prepared for when they assume their true form and engage in sudden but inevitable betrayal. (because being a maniacally cackling villain means not paying your employees and keeping them around even when they've proven to be reliable) This all feels firmly on the 80's cartoon end of the villainous spectrum, with unrealistic, exaggerated characterisations, and built around a sexist joke. (The worst thing you can do to a woman is to make her ugly (by her standards)) It's not completely unusable, and the worldbuilding is still better than most Polyhedron adventures, but this is one | think I'll pass on overall. There are both better sandboxes and funnier jokes out there.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 29: May/June 1991



part 3/5



Ex Libris: The cover story goes in the middle rather than at the end, due to the special cutout centrefold features. They use a gimmick I only recall seeing once before, in the final dungeon of Skyward Sword. You have a grid of rooms with a single blank space, and have to slide it around, rearranging the dungeon correspondingly to make it all the way through. This makes for a highly nonlinear experience where conventional mapping is useless, and you need to get to grips with the meta puzzle before you can hope to get through the internal challenges, which are also very varied from room to room, as each occupies it's own mini dimension with complete environmental control. Fortunately the plot is pretty different from it's Zelda imitator. The PC's are hired to search an abandoned temple of Oghma for any cool books or other treasure still remaining. It was abandoned for good reason, so this pisses off the rest of the church hierarchy, and you'll have to deal with a rival adventuring party hired to stop you, as well as the rather complex magical defences and multiple bound abishai as depicted earlier. There's plenty going on here to challenge you both physically and mentally. This feels quite different from most of their adventures because it was designed setpiece first by the TSR staff and then then the finer details & story were written afterwards. It's obviously had a lot more eyes on it and development work put in than usual, rather than being a story written by a single writer and then having the editing and artwork smarten it up afterwards. Getting the art department integrally involved in design work is really paying dividends in distinguishing Dark Sun from all their other worlds, and it's pleasing to see them applying the same lesson here on a smaller scale. A very interesting thing for them to try that I hope gets repeated in the future.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 29: May/June 1991



part 4/5



Side Treks: Through the Night. Our mini adventure this issue delights in subverting expectations. An inn having people killed in their beds, being found in the morning drained of all their fluids with everything else undisturbed? Any normal person would suspect a vampire, and put crosses and garlic around the place accordingly, and that's what the PC's will find when they arrive at the place, throwing them off the scent. Nope, it's a slithering tracker that's ventured out of the dungeon and likes it up here! Not actually quite as deadly on a mechanical level, but the ability to squeeze through the tiniest gap, paralyze people and keep them for later consumption is still pretty scary when treated cleverly. Imagine being aware but unable to move, with a bunch of other people, not knowing which one of you is going to be dinner this night. That's what awaits you if you all fail your saves repeatedly and don't have any contingencies prepared. It'll sneak in your rooms in the night, hit and run, and not kill until anyone who might be able to interrupt it while feeding is incapacitated. In the darkness and rain it's hard to tell what it is, and it can easily escape into the puddles and cracks in the ground. So this is a pretty effective horror scenario that's unlikely to result in a TPK even if you lose the encounter, (someone'll probably make their save to escape from paralysation during the day when it's asleep after a day or two), but could well kill some of the characters and put a real scare into the hearts of your players. Whoda thought a translucent blob could cause so much trouble. Muahahaha. This one definitely gets my seal of approval.



'Til Death do us Part: While the last adventure uses gothic trappings to subvert your expectations, this one plays them completely straight. A Banshee and a Ghost haunt an abandoned abbey in the woods of Myth Drannor. Due to her regular use of death scream even when no-one's visiting, all the plants within a few miles of it are dead and rotting, setting the stage in a suitably spooky way, and making it easy for any adventurers venturing near to spot. Like any insubstantial being with decent ranged attacks worth their salt, they'll use hit and run attacks, possession, and magical trickery to scare the players and wear them down as they explore the area rather than engage in a straight fight. There's a bound daemon in the abbey as well, so if it looks like they're losing the battle against the PC's & they're getting close to the treasure, they'll release it. This is probably less scary than the previous adventure, but considerably more deadly, between the repeated AoE save or die attacks and ageing ones that'll permanently mess you up unless you can afford Restoration. 2e undead are still not anything to treat lightly. The degree of backstory isn't as great as some of these, but it's still enough to get a handle on the ghosts as people, not just monsters, so you can roleplay them interestingly if you want. As long as your players can handle the lethality it looks pretty usable and flexible, so no objections here.