TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 66: December 1991



part 4/5



The Everwinking Eye: Ed once again reminds us that Mulmaster is an unpleasant place filled with untrustworthy folk from top to bottom. Neither the law nor the common folk are on your side as a wandering adventurer, and accepting missions from random patrons in taverns without any vetting will get you screwed over in multiple ways both long and short term. This is illustrated with two adventure outlines that like his Dungeon ones, you really do not want to follow as written, albeit this time that's intentional on his part. If you want to adventure here, keeping the majority of your cash hidden where the government can't get at it, being ready to skip town whenever the heat gets too high and come back with a new identity would be a very good idea. When the law is arbitrary and corrupt, following it is neither virtue or protection. Another reminder that the Realms isn't all nice, and there are plenty of challenges for even the highest level adventurers out there, including ones no amount of force will solve. If the majority of a country is evil, no amount of deposing the rulers will improve things much, but indiscriminate genocide is a quick path to your own alignment shifting to evil too. It'd take generations of subtle systematic changes to improve things. Do you have what it takes to go for immortality, then keep the ennui away long enough to accomplish something like that? Will you still wind up taking several missions from people in taverns along the way because you need some quick cash? Man, being a self-directed hero rather than some chosen one following a predestined path is hard work. It's no wonder most groups give up and go back to a new set of starting level characters even before the system breaks down from having too much XP.



Into The Dark: A second column in a row devoted to fantasy westerns?! That really does illustrate just how badly the genre has collapsed in the past 30 years, if once you could assemble this many from a niche subset of the genre, while now, you're hard pressed to find more than one or two examples a year as a whole, despite special effects being considerably better and cheaper to do. Time for another look at the distant past to see if any of it is worth having nostalgia over.

The Valley of Gwangi pits cowboys vs dinosaurs, which is a cool sounding pitch that instantly gets the attention. It has a lot in common with King Kong, including some of the production staff, although that includes the creatures being more interesting than the human elements. Overall, it gets a recommendation for the cool factor. I wonder if this one will ever get a remake like Kong has so many times.

Westworld has recently got another TV adaption, so it's tales of virtual reality western obviously still have resonance for modern day audiences, if more for the VR part than the western part. James gives it a so-so result, as Michael Crichton is a better novelist than director, so the ideas might be good, but the pacing doesn't really work when adapting his own work to the screen. If it seemed slow to him, it'd probably seem even more so to modern audiences used to films edited digitally. You can probably skip this and go straight to the newer version without regrets.

Outland also got reviewed by the ARES guys, who gave it a very positive review in issue 10. James also gives it a favourable result in terms of acting and special effects, but is not nearly so enamoured of the overall degree of bleakness and cynicism in the writing. Stories like this may be true to real life, where illegal drugs remain a hugely profitable business despite decades of fighting against them and plenty of casualties amongst both users & law enforcement, but do we really want to see that in our entertainment? The family friendly TSR upper management definitely do not.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 66: December 1991



part 5/5



The Living Galaxy: So far, most of what Roger has covered here has been topics that work better in sci-fi games than D&D. Not this time, as he's talking about treasure. Now that's definitely an area where D&D goes into more detail about what stuff you can get for beating each particular creature, how useful & valuable it is, and how much of it you can carry than pretty much all other RPG's put together. Without being linked to a magically enforced objective gold standard, what is considered valuable will vary widely in sci-fi campaigns, depending on tech level and hardness of the science. If you've got replicators, for instance, value of material things due to scarcity pretty much goes out of the window (until they come up with gold-pressed latinum or whatever that can't be replicated for handwavey reasons) and the most important thing becomes your energy reserves and information. Even in less advanced ones, the bulk of a thing and it's value can have very little correlation and fluctuate wildly from place to place. And no matter the tech level, some things will have sentimental value, so people will be willing to pay above the market value for the original even if a copy would be just as good in practical terms, or be illegal, so the extra cost is hazard pay for creating it and getting it to the buyer surreptitiously. It's a good reminder of how complex and largely illusory the economy actually is. Without an objective financial standard, what will your character choose to value once they have enough to survive comfortably indefinitely? (As any group capable of extended space travel pretty much has to have) That's going to affect what adventures you go on quite a bit.



The Ultimate Contest: They've been doing competitions a lot this year. They must be running out of ideas, because now they get meta and ask the readers to submit ideas for more types of competition that they could do next year. A lot of them will probably be repetitive variations on a theme, but hopefully there'll be enough good ones in there to keep variety up for another year or two before they have to either reuse ideas or scale back on competitions as a whole to focus on something else.



1992 Games Decathalon: While the previous competition and all the lesser competitions that will be created as a result of it are open to all members, the Decathlons are a little more exclusive, as you need to be part of a registered club to participate. Given how few clubs there still are worldwide, if yours is organised enough to participate in all 10 of these events over the course of the year, you've already got pretty decent odds of winning, so no excuses. (except possibly not wanting to participate in the latest obnoxious Fluffyquest instalments, now in both AD&D and Boot Hill flavours.) Will enough enter to make the competition genuinely competitive, or will one wind up dominating the whole year simply by default? Keep on tuning in to find out!



Another issue with a few good articles, a few bad ones, and a whole lot of formulaic average ones. Asking for competition ideas in particular feels like the people in the office are getting a little stuck in a rut and they know it. Will they be able to add any new members of staff or a particularly enthusiastic volunteer to shake things up next year? Tune in tomorrow for the next step towards completing this journey through history.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 67: January 1992



part 1/5



38 pages. Back to the bad old habits of demon summoning again? That's a lot of sigils inscribed, so i hope you got them all correct. Otherwise there may still be havoc caused, but it won't be the precise kind you were hoping for. Let's head inside, see how much mess there is for your PC's to clean up this time.



Those australian co-ordinators are paying off, because the convention listing includes ones in both Sydney and Canberra. Since they're pretty close together, if you live in SW australia, it wouldn't be hard to visit both and get earn a bit more XP.



Notes From HQ: Apparently, this year it's the 25th anniversary of Gen Con. So they're going to go all out on competitions and prizes, with many of the winnings having a 25 theme like 25 months of subscription extension. Since they're expecting it to be busy, they once again recommend you get your game registrations and hotel bookings in now if you want to get your first picks of events. More judge registrations are also strongly encouraged, because then there'll also probably be fewer disappointed people not getting to play in the tournaments they'd prefer. Good to see them trying to avoid the mistakes of last year. What's somewhat less welcome is that it's also the 10th anniversary of the Fluffyquest series, so there's going to be a whole load of fluffy content coming up to irritate me. The popularity of these obnoxious gag adventures amongst the RPGA staff continues to be utterly baffling to me. What do they see in them? I guess that shows that this year will continue to be a very mixed bag in terms of quality, some of it due to editor tastes rather than limited submissions to choose from.



Letters: Steven Schend writes in to remind us that they don't know what's going to happen in Marvel comics next any more than you do. All they can do is read them when they come out and stat out any new arrivals accordingly, which means a delay time of several months before it appears in here or Dragon. So please stop asking us for spoilers! It's a pain being a small third party licensee. However, they're open for suggestions on any other kinds of Marvel articles and products they could add to the line. Don't hesitate to send them in.

The other letter is also from official staff, showing it must be a slow month for mail. The west coast regional co-ordinator shows off all the growth they've made in the last year, while also talking about areas that still need work, like doing any Buck Rogers articles or tournament adventures at all. (Ha, you'll be waiting in vain for a long time for that.) Join one of the clubs if there's already one in your area, or start your own, the company's great!

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 67: January 1992



part 2/5



The Living City: Raven's Bluff is nowhere near as genre-savvy as say, Ankh-Morpork, and so the thieves guild actually needs to work for their money instead of just collecting insurance. This is actually good for employment rates, as it means you have to employ guards to stop them and they also have to actually put in a decent night's work if you live in a high crime neighbourhood. The Sigil of the Silent Night are our example business this month, providing a wide range of home protection services to those with the means to pay for them. From basic fighters doing a beat that passes by each protected house several times a night, to exceedingly expensive bespoke magical protections that are cast every evening when you close up shop and then dispelled in the morning (they need to work on a way to automate that switching on and off, because it seems pretty labor intensive for their wizards) they have something to suit nearly any budget, with it easily costing several thousand GP per night if you go for all the magical mod-cons at once. Once again we see that while magic might be well-known in the realms, it's still not common enough for the lower classes to be able to afford it, leading to lots of inequality in terms of quality of life. The adage that it takes a thief to catch a thief holds true here, with the boss being a high level rogue gone straight who uses his sneaky skills to randomly check on his guards and make sure they're doing a good job. The staff wizards also get lengthy profiles detailing their histories and the various magical tricks they each bring to the company, making this considerably longer than most articles here. More than most, this definitely looks like you could get a lot of repeated use out of it both as an employer and antagonists, as what PC's don't have cause to steal stuff from rich people sometimes? It gives you a clear path of how they could upgrade their security in response to theft so repeated attempts scale with your PC's powers. And if the PC's need to protect their own belongings, you can get a good idea of how much it'll cost them. (which may drive them to find other methods, depending on how stingy they are) I give my full approval to this one.



Horse Play: Boot Hill gets another article that's relatively short and old-school in style. A single page table for randomly determining the stats and quirks of any horses you come across? Whether you're going shopping or trying to rope a wild mustang to tame yourself, this seems like a decent little time saver for the GM, so they can roll up several quickly and have the player choose between them. So much easier than having to come up with everything yourself in a point buy system. Don't know why they don't do more of them.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 67: January 1992



part 3/5



Monsters - by Network Members: Another of last year's many contests pays off. New monster submissions are the kind of thing they get a decent amount of anyway, so hopefully they had enough to be selective about the quality. Let's see how these hold up in terms of inventiveness and mechanical balance.

Telexian Vine has apparently escaped from Neelix's homeworld and infested yours. With hypnotic scent, dangerously addictive fruit, and the ability to absorb & use any spells known by people it eats, you can quite see why he'd prefer to be a cook on other planets instead.

Moss is the kind of thing that adventurers routinely underestimate, despite being common all around the world in many interesting forms. Not Greg Detwiler though, who gives us three different flavours of monstrous moss that are able to supplement their diet with meat by creating an organic pit and digesting anything that falls in. Yet another reason probing ahead with a ten foot pole can be a lifesaver.

Armor Boars are giant pigs with porcupine level thick spiky hair to boost their offence and defence capabilities even further. Missile weapons or polearms are strongly recommended, as non reach weapons will get you punctured with every strike. Hope you remembered to pack accordingly.

Death Ox (not to be confused with death sheep, which appeared in Dragon recently) are relatives of gorgons who simply kill you with their gaze instead of turning you to stone. Like many real things with extremely effective natural defences like skunks, they're actually pretty placid, and the trick is knowing not to mess with them rather than picking a fight you're really not equipped to deal with.

Phase Jelly is another goopy old school dungeon filler. It'll reach out of the wall, change your phase as well, and pull you in to be digested. Unless you have constant magical detection active or a large party, this is very unlikely to be spotted and escaped. Another reason to have a whole load of hirelings or mindless undead and send them ahead to trigger the dangers if you suspect you're facing that sort of place.

Skum are the only one of these that'll make it into general circulation long-term. Aboleth's amphibious minions created by mutating humans, they're not that bright, but opposable thumbs and the ability to walk on land make them useful servants for the psychic fishies nonetheless, and the ability to alter you so any kids you have will be more skum adds extra lovecraftian horror to their depiction. Can you reverse engineer the genetic manipulation to give them a chance at a better life, or will you resort to the solution the US government applied to Innsmouth?

Dawnspirits are glowy balls of light from the upper planes. They're generically stalwart and true and will help anyone of similar alignment who asks nicely. Yeah, like we haven't seen that before many times with different stats. They really need to get some better creature designs if they want to make those regions adventurable.

Dragites are small mole-like humanoids that are general dragon fanboys, dying their fur to the color of any dragon in the vicinity and generally obeying their every whim. They're terrible in a fight, but decent at mining, creating traps and generally being helpful to their masters. Kobolds will take all their stuff in the 3e changeover.

Giant Mosquitos are another fairly mundane monster that comes in several interesting variants given their gender dimorphism and very different life cycle stages. As in reality, the females of the species are considerably more deadly than the male, so leave your petty human prejudices and sense of chivalry at home unless you want to suffer terminal dehydration from their proboscis.

 

[(un)reason]

Double post. Stupid glitching internet connection.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 67: January 1992



part 4/5



In another of their attempts to avoid last year's judge shortage, the central two pages give a clear form detailing the Gen Con tournament schedule as it currently stands and encouraging you to apply. Which out of these 27 adventure options will you try with your 12 potential timeslots? (A)D&D has more than everything else put together, and WEG & GDW are TSR's closest competitors in popularity with the RPGA. Let's hope they continue to post something like this each year so I can analyse how other games come in & fall out of fashion.



Everwinking Eye shortens it's title, as many columns do after a while. This time, Ed talks about the places you can have fun in Mulmaster. Being dominated by evil doesn't mean people don't need to blow off steam, merely that the ways they do so are a little more … extreme. The low class places are plagued by outbursts of brawling, while the more salubrious ones are well-hidden and invite only. In the middle, there's a moderate number of dancehalls where you're free to wear your most outrageous outfits and dance to music that's as loud as they can get without electronic amplification. While there's a fair number of establishments talked about, details on each one are pretty cursory, and I get the feeling that this is one where he's constrained by the TSR code of conduct in describing precisely what kind of festivities take place within them. You'll have to use your own imagination if you want things to get beyond PG rating in your own campaign. It's somewhat disappointing, as is the fact that they don't reveal what the creature on the cover was, or what it's plans might be now it's killed the wizard who summoned it and escaped. You could dial back the vagueness a little more while still leaving us with plenty of freedom on how to use these adventure seeds.



Into The Dark: James doesn't have a particularly strong theme this month, choosing things more by the absence of dungeons or dragons. They might be easy to write adventures for, but they do get repetitive as stories, so you can understand why he might need a break. Let's find out what replaces them, and if they're worthy of building an entire game around in turn.

Edward Scissorhands is one of the most timely films James has covered yet. It's a Tim Burton film. If you like what he does, you'll love it. If you don't you won't. Plenty of people will find the fairytale atmosphere where the person who initially seems like a monster is actually kind and gentle, while the suburban people he has to deal with are distinctly less so very relatable. Now if only he wasn't recycling the same tricks with diminishing returns and working with exactly the same actors 30 years later.

Biggles does that annoying thing where the movie creators think a pure WW1 pulp adventure wouldn't be relatable to modern audiences, so they introduce a time-travelling PoV character from the 80's. This does not improve matters, and the extremely 80's soundtrack even further hurts it's case. The kind of thing that feels dated even before fashions actually change, and much more now than contemporaries like Indiana Jones which did play their pulp adventure revival theme completely straight. Stick to the original comics.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen manages to be meta far more effectively, blurring the boundary between story and reality with the Baron's exaggerations in the retelling. It apparently had a troubled production, which is visible in some of the joins, but it's still an entertaining ride. Hopefully you can replicate the atmosphere in your own game without the lengthy grinds to a halt, overspending and bickering behind the scenes.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 67: January 1992



part 5/5



Broken Photocopiers: The promotional article this time is surprisingly interesting, as it covers something they never mentioned in Dragon. In part of Gamma World 4e's attempts to make the system more balanced and functional for a long term game, they've turned identifying ancient tech from something largely determined by GM fiat and player descriptive ability to it's own minigame where you make rolls and move around a flowchart until you either figure it out, give up due to time constraints or break it with your tinkering. Certain classes obviously gain bonuses on these rolls as they level up, letting them figure out increasingly tricky tech like computers more quickly and effectively. Making things other than combat more complex than basic pass/fail rolls to emphasise that they're important to the game and it's themes is the kind of thing I strongly approve of, and I'm just slightly irritated that I didn't find out about this first time around. Maybe I should give the various editions of gamma world a deeper delve at some point, see what I think about them in detail.



The Living Galaxy: Roger rounds out his talk on treasure with lots of examples and reference works. Top Secret, Gamma World & Star Frontiers all have supplements devoted to equipment/treasure, and of course AD&D has multiple. You could play for years without exhausting the things on those random tables. If that's not enough, there are vast numbers of sci-fi novels where the high tech stuff is critical to the plot and would be very desirable in reality. Plus no matter what the tech level, social rewards are always going to be relevant, if possibly more ephemeral than cold hard cash. As with many previous instalments, this is a message that can be boiled down into a single sentence, and then a whole lot of padding. It's not bad, but it does outstay it's welcome. The flaw in being senior editor for their periodicals is that when he writes for them, the other ones aren't editing him as strictly as they could. This page count could definitely be used in a more efficient way.



Amazing Stories gets a completely straight advert of the sort they'd do in their bigger magazines, not even a promotional article. That's slightly jarring to see in here, and another sign of gradual creeping commercialism. Will that disqualify them from entering as best amateur magazine this year, or can they skate by because it's still one TSR department promoting another for free?



An issue where the system specific crunchy stuff is quite interesting, but the generic articles are once again pretty dull and familiar, not telling me anything I haven't heard before. The foreshadowing of more incoming Fluffyquest material over the year also fills me with trepidation. It leaves me with the definite impression that many of the articles this year will be a slog. Oh well, back over to the adventures part of this journey, which increasingly feel like a vacation given the higher quality and lower frequency I'm seeing them at the moment. Where will they be taking us this year?

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 33: Jan/Feb 1992



part 1/5



80 pages. We haven't had any oriental adventures for over a year, but it looks like they're going to make up for that by putting this one on the cover, with a quite impressive dual-wielding oni guarding the way to an island. Let's find out why you want to get past him, and if there's a way to do it without fighting inside.


Editorial: Barbara is on holiday, so she delegates the editorial to new assistant Wolfgang Baur. Now there's a very familiar name who won't be staying at entry level for long, After several years as a freelancer, this is his first experience of the TSR offices in person, and he's finding out just how weird they all are. Don't worry, after several years of working in a full-time creative job that encourages you to indulge rather than repress your eccentricities, you'll look just as weird to the newbies too. Like any fresh newbie who's been working towards this for years, he's got a whole load of pet ideas that he'd very much like to see turned into actual published adventures. Send in more seafaring adventures that don't involve going underwater, more specific setting adventures, more stuff featuring gnomes, and fewer of overused cliches like railroading prophecies, absent-minded alchemists, and drow in general, both heroic & villainous. That's an interesting set of preferences. I note that it doesn't include his special love for ghouls, which is obviously important enough to him that he wants to do all the writing himself. Roger increasingly left the editorials to Dale in his later years, so I wonder if we'll see the same pattern here. In any case, this is another interesting little landmark along the road of gaming history.



Letters: The first letter wants more cardstock inserts, both creatures and structures, even if they aren't tied to any specific adventure. You never know when something might come in handy in a long-running campaign.

Second praises them for introducing him to lots of cool new worlds, and asks how interested they are in him returning the favor. As long as you can do so in self-contained, bite-sized chunks, they can also provide hints to your own campaign world. After all, it worked for Ed.

Third is from the author of The Wayward Wood, who's quite pleased to see his adventure in print, but as usual, spots a few errors too late to fix, some his and some the editor's. Perfection is an elusive goal, and grows moreso the more people are involved.

4th, 5th & 6th continue the debate on how many adventures should be in specific settings, with one wanting more, one less, and the third a good balance of both. A never ending battle with a lot of repetition on both sides.

Finally, someone who specifically loved their recent Ravenloft adventure, and wants more. Horror is a very popular genre. Maybe they should make an RPG that supports it better on a mechanical level, as it's very hard to keep D&D scary once you have a bit of XP built up.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 33: Jan/Feb 1992



part 2/5



That Island Charm: Ah yes, time for another shipwreck adventure. Always an easy way to keep people from wandering away from the plot, at least until flight, water breathing and teleportation become routinely usable powers by the whole party. A morkoth has mind-controlled a marid into patrolling the seas near it's lair and wrecking any ships that pass nearby, ensuring it has a steady supply of food. It keeps them all regularly charmed in a makeshift village until needed. You'll be washed up on the island and introduced to a friendly group of castaways, then need to figure out that something is very wrong and escape before it's too late. The way the people describe their surroundings doesn't match up to appearances, they're far too happy considering their situation, and if you just go along with everything they say, you'll soon find yourself taken to meet their boss and become a happy little drone as well. Better hope some of your PC's have high int scores so they can roll to break the charm frequently and then free the others before it's too late. This is one that won't go well for people used to following recent tournament railroads, in other words. For more paranoid ones who are used to looking every gift horse in the mouth and keeping their 10 foot poles at the ready, it doesn't look too hard, with plenty of opportunities to get away into the jungle and strike back at a time and place of their own choosing, and a couple of other escapees around the island that will be hostile and scared of the PC's at first, but can be won around if you can make it obvious you're in the same boat and not more mind-controlled minions. If you have enough countermagic to go around, you could resolve this in an entirely combat-free manner apart from the final boss, which is quite refreshing to see. (and since morkoths are purely aquatic, once you've freed the marid, you could skip even that fight altogether and just leave if you really wanted.) That's the kind of thing I approve of in adventures and don't see nearly enough of, particularly in D&D ones where combat is often the first and only option. Definitely wouldn't mind giving this one a spin.