TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 33: Jan/Feb 1992



part 3/5



The Siege of Kratys Freehold: Ooh, another mass combat adventure. Good to see them at least trying to push that subsystem more. (while also offering a simplified system for people who don't own the needed supplement) They also thank playtesters in the intro, which is also a good sign. Also pleasing is the writer connecting it to a previous adventure of his from a few issues ago. As they said in the letters page, you're welcome to use bits of worldbuilding from your own campaigns and see if you can get people intrigued enough that they send in letters asking for more. If a writer builds that kind of fanbase, they're much more likely to be hired officially like Wolf just was.

But enough context. Tarran Kratys is a soldier who's been fighting orcs for quite a few years, working his way up the ranks and making many enemies in the process. It's been a bad summer, with lots of wildfires, disease, crop failure, etc, so the orc tribes decide it's a perfect time to gang up and get revenge. The PC's happen to be passing by shortly before things get serious and get hired as extra protection. This sets you up for a weeklong timeline of things that'll happen unless the PC's do something to change it, culminating in the full on assault of orcs & ogres that will result in the keep's downfall. As with the last adventure, this will not go well for players who've got into the habit of sitting around waiting for the next plot beat on the railroad to come to them, and will strongly reward using the time you have between events to come up with all sorts of inventive defences or scout the area and take the fight to them. They have the numbers, but you should have the magical advantage, so make sure you use it. A well placed sleep spell can not only take out the dozen or so orcs it affects, but more, say, if you cast it when they're just reaching the top of the siege ladders so they fall on the ones below. This should not only provide a couple of session's worth of fun, but also has plenty of reusable setting material, although like the previous one by the same author, some of the specific details may well need changing to fit the geography of your campaign due to the size of area covered. Definitely going to be watching out to see if there's any more adventures set in Volkrad in the future.



This is one time Bill Cosby doesn't want high ratings, a message by the American Heart Association? Ooookay. There'll definitely be more times in the future when he'll wish fewer people were paying attention.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 33: Jan/Feb 1992



part 4/5



Dark Days in Welldale: Willie Walsh has been doing this long and successfully enough that apparently he now has imitators, as we once again head off to a whimsical halfling village beset by small-scale but still dangerous foes. The well of Welldale used to grant wishes, but it dried up recently, one of their number disappeared mysteriously, and now they think they've been cursed for being too greedy with their wishes. They've actually got completely the wrong end of the stick, but the danger they're in is very real, as instead of a trickster leprechaun, they've got an infestation of meenlocks settling in and expanding their tunnel network underneath the village. You'll need to put up with all the comic relief NPC's with very silly alliterative names long enough to either trap them when they emerge, or figure out how to shrink yourselves down to hunt them in their lair. You might or might not be aided in this by the original "wish-granter", a particularly powerful variant faerie dragon which was granting the halfling's requests for his own amusement, but wandered off when he got bored. Whether he even shows up is heavily based on random roll, so the difficulty of this adventure can vary widely from one group to another by luck and if they're the kind of over-serious adventurers he'd rather prank than help.

This all seems somewhat irritating, as it overplays the comedy and hinges on the people you're helping being ignorant, superstitious and lacking in common sense. If you help them once you'll wind up having to help them again, because apparently they're just too dumb to survive on their own. To be honest, I'd really rather not. I can see what they're trying to do here, trying to make a small-scale adventure that's also a re-usable setting like several others we've seen before, but it takes a much better hand than this to thread the needle between humour and playability successfully, plus definite diminishing returns due to the derivative elements. I'm going to pass this time.



Alicorn: The short adventure to make up page count this issue is still a 4 pager, which means it doesn't get the side treks header. A goblin chief delved the wrong dungeon and picked up some cursed treasure that infected him with a wasting disease. His second in command actually shows some loyalty and initiative, (unusual for goblins, admittedly) and decided to hunt for a unicorn horn to cure him. They shot it with an arrow of wounding, but it got away. Now you need to find it before they do and save it. Since it's losing HP by the hour, this is one where you can't afford to pull 15 minute workdays if you want to win. It also means you can lose the adventure but still survive in several different ways, by being too slow, going in completely the wrong direction, or by killing all the goblins without bothering to listen to them, thus missing the initial exposition and not finding out about the unicorn part of the adventure in the first place. Seems like a decent little low level adventure for if you want to keep your players from getting too cocky, but don't want to TPK them straight away if they mess up, forcing you to roll up a whole new set of characters. It probably won't last you a full session, so best to use it when travelling between larger missions, and have something to do next already prepared in your head if you want the campaign as a whole to keep running smoothly.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 33: Jan/Feb 1992



part 5/5



Mad Gyoji: When this magazine started, you got an OA adventure nearly every issue, but the quantity rapidly dropped off once we hit the 90's and this is the first we've had in a full year, and the final one until the 3e era revival. How quickly fashions change. Unfortunately one unwelcome way they're changing in which the OA modules were ahead of their time is the average degree of of linearity. This is not an exception, as while it's not a complete railroad like most current Polyhedron ones, it definitely feels like it was written as a story first, and an adventure second, with a plot heavily based on asian folklore that you'll only find out all the backstory too if you do things in the specific way the author intended. The eponymous Mad Gyoji is a Wu Jen who's cursed a village elder with a wasting disease. He has perfectly good reasons for this in his own mind, but is not inclined to explain them to anyone, so the PC's are asked for help in curing it and hopefully finding out why this whole mess started in the first place. This does indeed involve taking the rather rickety bridge on the cover, as trying to take the water route will conveniently seriously piss off the local nature spirits and get you in a fight above your ECL, making it much more likely you'll do the encounters on the island in the right order. If you pay attention to the little details that you're supposed too, the backstory is actually pretty interesting and tragic, reminding us of the complicated problems fantastical racism can result in, with some neat looking setpieces and a dramatic redemption arc if you do all the right things in response. The problem is that all of this lining up properly seems …… not great with the average group of murderhobos without a lot of DM prompting. So this is pretty good as a story to read, but only mediocre as an actual adventure, due to having a lot of baked in assumptions of what the players should be doing without spelling it out to them. If they don't think like the writer, it'll be a bit of a damp squib for all involved.



Bud's Holiday Scrapbook: Unusually, we finish off with a bunch of photos from their christmas party, giving us a rare glimpse at the Dragon & Dungeon (but not Polyhedron, which seems to be a slightly more distant department) staff at repose. They're not getting up to any particularly wild hijinks, but when your day job is gaming, what exactly is cutting loose anyway? Work, play, it's all sitting at the computer typing either way. The hairstyles are already noticeably less dated than the 80's ones, but still distinguishable from the modern day. Slightly surprised it went in here rather than Dragon, but I guess they needed to make the page counts line up or something.



This time, it seems like the contrast is between adventures that work best if you look past the obvious route and do your own thing, and ones that fall apart if you don't follow the paths. Using both types interchangeably with the same group seems likely to confuse and irritate, so it's a reminder that you need to curate the adventures you choose to fit your playstyle. On I press again, to see if the next one will have anything worth adding to my repertoire.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 68: February 1992



part 1/5



30 pages. When travelling through the voids of space, every pound of encumbrance makes a difference, so miniaturising your weapons and then making up the power difference with hypertech or magic makes a lot of sense. Robes make slightly less sense in zero g, but many settings have artificial gravity anyway, so you don't have to constantly worry about awkward little day-to-day differences from reality like how to cook or go to the toilet when everything is floating. Let's find out if what's inside makes sense and is fun to use.



Fresh Air: We start off with a bit of basic generic advice reminding us just how many plot hooks festivals have to offer. There's a lot of logistics that goes into creating them, and that means lots of jobs available if you're looking for some quick cash. If you're an unscrupulous type, it's also a perfect opportunity for larceny, between large things being moved around between people who might not know each other, and lots of punters who might well be drunk or otherwise chemically impaired. Guarding against this of course adds more jobs, and is also something PC's are likely to have the skillset for. Even clerics get involved, as most of the more popular religions actually have whole cycles of holy days which are really just excuses for different types of party. Decent enough in quality of writing, but nothing groundbreaking. Still, after a year of lockdown where nearly all the usual deviations from the days passing have been missing, the importance of festivals and why we need them seems more obvious than ever. Coming up with a few for your own campaign world would definitely add to their verisimilitude.



Notes From HQ: The emphasis on contests continues, with another one straight away. This time it's Torg that you're being encouraged to get into and come up with cool new magic items for. Which genre will they draw upon and how will they be useful to storm knights trying to stabilise the world? Could be interesting, and it's good to see them trying to get RPGA'ers to experiment with more new systems and settings. The rest of the editorial is another tedious reminder of their bureaucratic procedures. If you want TSR staff to attend your convention as special guests, you need to notify them well in advance, and be willing to pay for accommodation & expenses at the very least. They're not made of money, and have their regular jobs to do, so any particular person can only do so many conventions in a year. Facilitating other people's fun is a serious business. Oh for immortality and a time machine so you can do everything you want without worrying about rushing to fit it all in.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 68: February 1992



part 2/5



Bestiary: Hearth Fiends are our only monster this month. William W. Connors reminds us that nearly anything can be corrupted by Ravenloft, and that includes the safety of a warm fireplace. They'll whisper from the flames and promise you nearly anything if you'll just keep on feeding them, Seymour. This usually ends tragically in the long run, as they lie liberally and they'll welch on the deal as soon as it's amusing and they secure another patsy. They're completely immune to nonmagical attacks, including normal water, so they're an out of context problem for the superstitious and ignorant peasants of most domains. Even adventurers might be tricked by their ability to jump into another fire and think they've killed it, only for the cycle to start all over again. Unless you have the logistic power to give every home a continual light spell and central heating, this is one recurring villain that'll be very hard to stamp out permanently. Both mechanically interesting and nicely atmospheric, this is one monster that definitely gets my approval.



Iron Hands, Captive Hearts: We haven't had a rogues gallery in a few months. They take a break from Raven's Bluff material for a little adventure in a galaxy far far away. Zhen Mirat is a force sensitive albino pirate captain who uses his mental powers to reinforce his dominance over his crew, have a good time and pluck info that'll lead to new scores from the minds of other cantina patrons. He seems thoroughly despicable and a decent challenge for your heroes to take down. Like any pirate captain worth their salt, he has several similarly unpleasant, but not quite as bright lackeys to order around, a nice ship called the Fatal Vision to travel the spaceways in, and an angry nemesis that he's blackmailing, who will be very eager to get revenge if the PC's can free his kidnapped wife & kids. This is all quite entertainingly written and filled with plot hooks, and the main question on if you'll want to use it is whether using villains who are both mind & literal rapists will add to the satisfaction of your players beating them, or be triggering for them and something they want to avoid entirely in their escapism. Vaguely surprised they can include that openly here as well given the TSR code of conduct, but I guess Star Wars already gets away with rather more incest and gruesome amputations than most family friendly franchises, so what's a little more unpleasantness to drive you to more dramatic roleplaying scenes?

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 68: February 1992



part 3/5



Hero: The adventure this issue is weirdly also a little bit … rapey. The evil wizard Rahn Dom ( :groans: ) has kidnapped Princess Michelle of the Skittledom kingdom, and is going to force her to marry him. As extra insurance, he's cursed her so if she isn't married by her 21st birthday, the whole kingdom will be destroyed in a massive volcanic eruption. This is tomorrow, so you have to not only fight through his evil minions and free her while still fresh from the fight before the end of the night, :Bonnie Tyler intensifies: but also engage in a shotgun wedding with one of the PC's to save the day. ( So both the cleric and at least one other male PC need to survive to the end, as they specifically make the point that only het pairings count. ) This is an adventure that once again indulges in some of the worst habits of current tournament adventures, being both linear and jokey, and using the jokes to slip a load of old-fashioned sexist bollocks in. A lot of the encounters are 80's pop song references, the naming conventions are puntacular, and the whole thing looks like it would be rather disruptive if run in a regular campaign where you have to deal with the long-term consequences of a sudden unexpected marriage. About the only good thing about it is that at least the challenges are genuinely difficult, with quite interesting combats, enemies that use decent tactics and a real emphasis on tracking how much time each encounter takes, so the time limit aspect of the adventure feels like a genuine issue. In that respect it's closer to the early 80's meatgrinders where most groups won't make it all the way through than the 90's railroads where they spoonfeed you all the solutions. It doesn't overtake the dancing bear one as the absolute worst thing they've ever done, but it's still very dated and well below the mark that I'd consider using.



The Living Galaxy: Roger reminds us that sci-fi should be at least somewhat rooted in actual science, and gives us a ton of reading to do, spending a full 4 pages on recommending various non-fiction books that try to present the science in an engaging way. Stephen Hawking, Issac Asimov, Ben Bova, William Corliss, there are a fair few recognisable names here, some of which have also done good fiction, but also plenty more I have no idea about. Many of them are somewhat dated at the time of writing, which means they'll likely be even moreso now, and quite possibly out of print as well, as hard science books need to go through a lot more editions and revisions to stay relevant and useful than fiction. That makes this not particularly useful now, as knowledge of extrasolar planets in particular has advanced enormously in the past 30 years, and mainly interesting as a curiosity, revealing the state of his personal knowledge and influences at the time. Another one you can probably skip without feeling you've missed anything unless you're very specifically a Roger Moore fanboy.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 68: February 1992



part 4/5



Everwinking Eye: Ed gives another couple of Mulmaster adventure ideas that serve to illustrate the degree of constant paranoia you need to live in if you want to flourish there. There's a constant churn of both "legitimate" traders and organised crime jockeying for money & influence, and the boundaries between them are pretty blurry since the laws are so bad & inconsistently enforced that you pretty much have to break them to get ahead. You'd think such a high stakes environment would be bad for the mental health, but there's always a few people who actually find the thrill addictive, and can't deal with the boredom of living elsewhere. Plus leaving can also be difficult because once you've made a few allies and enemies, things can snowball and you keep on being threatened or offered large amounts of money for one more job, which turns out to not be the last one after all. They'll even attempt to make the rest of the world as unpleasant and dangerous as their home, as one of the other plot ideas shows them doing with Cormyr. The right kind of abusive relationship can not only be sustainable over many decades, but also get passed on down the generations, as the real world has shown many times. That becomes even more true when you can add magical mind control to your list of tools. This is why you actually need heroes to foil evil, because staying away and waiting for them to collapse from their own counterproductive decisions can be a long wait with a lot of collateral damage. Hopefully some of you will get something from these complicated and intractable challenges.



With Great Power: Dale talks about a problem very specific to the FASERIP system. Since it was released 8 years ago, there's been a distinct rise in superheroes that don't fit it's mold, that have much darker adventures and no problem with killing their enemies. What we to do with all this grim and gritty realism? Do we ignore it and keep playing the same we always have, and see sales drop as we fall ever further behind the times? Or do we change the system so a murder doesn't drain all your karma and make character advancement near impossible? Since he's feeling in a nice mood, he'll give you several different options so you can dial the amount of punishment for killing up and down to suit your campaign. None of them are as permissive as D&D, where you're actually rewarded for it instead. They may be adding a lot more boxes for you to play in, but they still don't really want you to think out of the box entirely and throw in everything from any genre at once. That would be messy. This is mainly interesting as another historical landmark. The whole grim and gritty thing is going to get a lot bigger over the next couple of decades, and things only start going back in a more optimistic direction once the MCU comes along. (and even now it's still a far cry from the old 4 color antics.) We probably won't be seeing much of it here because they lose the licence and stop covering non D&D stuff long before then, but that's a whole other dissertations worth of reading and analysis for someone to do if they feel like it.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 68: February 1992



part 5/5



Into The Dark: James decides to take a trip into our collective subconsciouses with a bunch of dream themed movies. Since nearly everyone does that every night, there's no shortage of material to draw upon for inspiration. This is one theme that could easily be dragged out over several months if he felt like it. But this is also a theme which can be a particular struggle to transform into a good story, between the abrupt and sometimes nonsensical transitions and the need for good special effects to evoke the proper atmosphere. I have no doubt there'll be some turkeys in this collection.

Dreamscape sees government agents venturing into other people's dreams to save the USA from nuclear apocalypse. It was decent enough when it came out, but now seems very dated with the fall of the soviet union and dramatic change in geopolitics.

Nightwish gets a mediocre result overall. It at least manages to be surprising, throwing a full kitchen sink of weirdness from various genres at our dreaming protagonists, but it fails to stick the ending.

Project: Nightmare is only successfully dreamlike in that it bored James to sleep repeatedly trying to sit through it. The kind of flop the studios sat on for years and then pushed out on home video in an attempt to at least make a little money. It could have stayed in the vaults and no-one would have particularly cared.

A Nightmare of Elm Street sees James baffled as to why this became a household name franchise. The first one is cheap and shoddy in writing, acting, editing & special effects and the sequels rapidly turn Freddie from frightening a into wise-cracking pantomime villain. I suspect that, counterintuitively is the reason. After all, look at the competition. Neither Vorhees or Myers are nearly as distinctive or fun to play, and who else has the staying power to join their ranks?

Dreams (now there's an ungoogleable title in the modern era) is a collection of short films by Akira Kurosawa, all inspired by his own dreams, obviously. The quality of the stories is pretty variable, but they're all beautifully shot, and packing 8 into 2 hours means even the boring bits don't outstay their welcome. It's easily both the highest quality and most authentically dreamlike of this selection.



A lot of very dated stuff this issue, be it the attitudes, the science, or the systems. It is at least dated in fairly interesting ways this time around, but still, there's not much stuff here I'd actually consider reviving and using. Once again, let's move onto issue 69. Nice. Lets see if there's any sexy stuff within, and preferably not in a rapey way.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 69: March 1992



part 1/5



36 pages. A scantily clad warrior maiden riding a … giant cyborg squirrel? That's a new combination for me. I strongly suspect Gamma World is involved, as that's their only current game that really supports this character concept, although Spelljammer might manage at a squeeze. (though giant hamsters are more their thing) Let's see if this issue manages to scale the heights, or falls at the first hurdle.



Gaming at Game Stores: A little while back, they had letters about the ethics of officially registered clubs being able to run tournament adventures and get points. Now they're giving game stores the opportunity to run accredited games too if they jump through the right hoops, so you can play even more frequently as long as there's a few dozen enthusiastic people regularly attending your FLGS. You could run a new one every week if you really wanted, and that would really speed advancement along. A very interesting development that could have substantial long term effects if taken up. Who has fond memories of not only shopping, but also gaming at a store like this?



Notes From HQ: Ah yes, the AD&D trading cards. They were quite popular for a couple of years in the early 90's. It's no surprise that people in the RPGA would actually want to … trade them. So they're setting up a section specifically for that. Which probably means several pages an issue that give me nothing much to comment on, so that's mildly irritating. Somewhat more exciting is that they're going to try making a Living Gamma World setting, set in postapocalyptic Door County, Winconsin. After several years of Living Galaxy being a purely generic false start, I'm very much hoping they can get the submissions to pull that off. So straight away, it's not just business as usual here, but actively trying out new stuff and seeing if it'll catch on. Whether or not they succeed, that still makes things considerably more interesting for me than keeping the same columns every month, year in year out.



Letters: First letter is from someone who was sent a schedule that assumed they'd be judging at Gen Con when they weren't. They cancelled as soon as they got it and hope that won't stop them from judging in the future when they feel ready. Jean is inclined to be forgiving. Bureaucracy is an endless struggle so of course mistakes are going to be made.

Second letter wants the magazine bigger, and wonders why they only review movies that have been out for years. They doubled their output just last year. They'll need a few more readers before they can afford to expand again. As for Into the Dark, it was specifically billed as a video review column, not a general movie one. You don't like that, tough luck. Plenty of other publications you could buy to scratch that itch.

Third complains that the mail treats their front covers poorly. Yup. This is a persistent problem they can't do much about apart from making sure the outside 4 pages are mostly blank of critical info.

Finally, one complaining that much of the Living City stuff is cartoony, implausible and contradictory. How are we supposed to run a serious campaign using this?! Yup. I've complained about that too. It being generally quite lighthearted and full of high level characters is merely a matter of taste, a certain number of high level NPC's are needed to make sure that bloodthirsty hack and slashers don't ruin the shared world for everyone else, and it's obvious lots of readers do run their campaigns in quite a silly way, but lack of attention to continuity is a serious issue that they need to tighten up on if they want it to not fall apart long term. There's definite room for improvement in their current policies.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 69: March 1992



part 2/5



The Well of Dreams: Mmm. Time for a callback to old school ways with a magical well that has random effects on anyone who throws a coin into it, including some quite game-changing bonuses and penalties. More are good than bad, but there's enough annoying ones and distinctly mixed blessings that some of the party will regret it if they all have a go. (apart from the Wild Mage, as this is precisely the sort of item their power to control randomness will help with) Thankfully it only affects any particular individual once per year, so it won't lead to the kind of compound effects or temptation to keep drawing until you get a terrible result and die the deck of many things does. This seems like you could use it in a campaign without destroying it outright, and I would have absolutely no problem with doing so.



Sea of Fire: We recently had the final Oriental Adventure in Dungeon for this edition, showing how that gameline has hit diminishing returns after a decent number of sourcebooks & adventures and gradually faded away. But Polyhedron still has one last big two-parter to offer us before it too moves onto their profusion of newer settings. It's also mongolian influenced rather than the more familiar pseudo-chinese or japanese, which makes for a nice change. An evil Wu Jen steals a river, turning hundreds of miles downstream into a rapidly drying wasteland and threatening all the nomadic tribes in the area. They converge on the one remaining lake within a few hundred miles, speeding it's disappearance even further. The PC's are obviously among the many people traveling in the area and caught up, and get volunteered to trace the river to it's source and find out what happened. The result is a surprisingly epic adventure spanning weeks of in-game time which involves a fair bit of tracking food and water, because if you run out of supplies and don't have a cleric capable of conjuring more, you'll be in trouble. While the order of the encounters is pretty linear, you at least have a reasonable amount of freedom in how you solve them without ruining the overall plot - as long as you keep heading upriver you'll get to the goal eventually. So this is above average for a Polyhedron adventure because it's neither obnoxiously jokey or so railroaded it falls apart if the DM doesn't spoonfeed the correct solutions, as well as being a decent challenge both combat and wilderness wise, with real but not world-ending stakes for failure or giving up if used in an established campaign. This is once I actually wouldn't mind using if my players were headed in the right direction at the right level range.