TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 73: July 1992



part 2/5



Take My Advice: Summer rolls around again, the number of conventions reaches it's peak, and we have the requisite advice column on how to get the most out of your time there. Remember that in the real world encumbrance isn't tracked in neat weight classes, but every extra pound will gradually increase your exhaustion at the end of the day, particularly if you use a bag rather than a decently ergonomic backpack. Most convention tournaments don't let you build your own characters using supplements, so there's no point bringing more than the corebooks anyway. Speaking of tournaments, better to know which ones you're playing in in advance and turn up on time rather than trying to sign up on the day, particularly in large conventions where the popular options get snapped up fast, and you risk double-booking if you enter multi-round tournaments without knowing when all the subsequent instalments are. Don't fill all your time with tournaments, leave some time for wandering around, browsing the stalls & listening to the seminars. Make sure you eat a balanced diet, for nonstop hotdogs & soda from the concessions stands will not be kind to your bowels, waistline or budget. Another of those articles that shows up every year or two with slightly different flavours each time, growing increasingly specialised towards the RPGA experience, because by this point they're their own little subculture amid the larger one of regular convention-goers. It's important to get the new arrivals up to speed, but gets increasingly repetitive for the long-runners.



Experience Preferred pt 2: The first instalment of this adventure was only mildly silly, with most of the humour in the hands of the players. The second one sees them sent from Olympus to a parallel prime material world, where things escalate to moderate silliness. Everything is subtly off, with some things that are recognisable analogues that make for serious battles like the giant and dragon, and some that are just plain silly like encountering an irascible food critic and a bunch of elves performing Hamlet. At the end of it they take another interdimensional portal and wind up in Kansas, which definitely bodes ill for the next instalment. What inverted Oz-related jokes do they have in store for us? After reading this, I'm not particularly enthusiastic to find out, but I guess I'll have to do so anyway. Tune in next month for the climactic finale! Cheeses need time to mature, and this is definitely getting more cheesy as time goes by.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 73: July 1992



part 3/5



Starting From Scratch: After a whole bunch of stuff that's quite RPGA specific, here's one of those ultra generic single page articles that could appear in nearly any publication in any era. Don't just roll up a character and pick a class, think about what they look like, their history, likes & dislikes, why they've become an adventurer, etc. Seen it before, frequently in much greater detail. The kind of thing that makes me emit a resounding meh and move on quickly.



The Living Galaxy: Roger is also continuing to be generic, but in much greater detail and with plenty of reference materials for further reading. What do the PC's know about their homeworld, how does the DM decide all this and how much detail do they go into creating it's geography, history, political factions, etc, particularly if they'll be spending most of their time starfaring so it might not even be relevant to the plot. Do you make it all up yourself and give them a big infodump that they probably won't read, do you hash it out in session zero, do you leave it vague and give them freedom to come up with big chunks of it when it becomes relevant in actual play? For ease of play, it's best to make things mostly earthlike with a few big differences, even if that does risk planet of the hats style worldbuilding. Whether newly colonised or with millions of years of history, there should be some interesting conflicts taking place that would make for good plot hooks. Decide what overall tone you want to set, the hardness of the science, effectiveness and integrity of law enforcement. Give plenty of literary examples of each type of campaign you're suggesting. Put next to the previous article, it finely illustrates the difference between being formulaic and rehashed in a professional way vs an amateur one. The pro has a lot more tricks up their sleeve, some of which will hopefully be fresh to the audience, and executes them in a more reliable way. You're still probably engaging in a cycle of doing a bit of investigation & exploring, then some killing things & taking their stuff in actual play, but you should be doing it with a bit more style and efficiency.



Bestiary: In most other editions, Bahamut & Tiamat appear in the corebook or a significant supplement. 2e hated allowing direct interactions with deities, so they only put simplified avatar versions in Monster Mythology, and shuffled the full statblocks off to Polyhedron where hardly anyone will see them. Like regular dragons, the stats have been substantially boosted from their 1e incarnations, but the basic details of their personalities and surroundings remains pretty familiar. So this is a particularly odd footnote in D&D history as a whole, reminding us of some of the political wrangling behind the scenes in what was kept in and left out, and who was against these changes and gave them at least a limited release despite opposition. Which is probably more interesting than actual play stories involving these two, since so few campaigns get to the stage where you can legitimately challenge them in a fight, and who wants to fill their campaign with railroading & deus ex machina?

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 73: July 1992



part 4/5



Into the Dark: Another fairly commonplace theme from James this month. Time to look back half a century for a bit of pulp action. A rich vein of inspiration for making movies out of, but many unfortunately follow their inspiration in being cheaply made and implausibly plotted. Which ones will work and which are best forgotten?

Doc Savage's 1975 movie outing gets thoroughly slated. Cheesy and grating, he gets the feeling the filmmakers have no respect for the source material and are taking the piss throughout. Batman '66 was at least sincere with it's cornball humour. Plus listening to this much John Philip Sousa in one go is just cruel and unusual punishment. No thanks.

Buckaroo Banzai, on the other hand, perfectly encapsulates the feeling of picking up a pulp serial in the middle despite not being based on a particular one. The cast is excellent, the humour fascinatingly oddball, and the plot audacious. It's just a shame it never got any follow-ups, even if it would ruin the central joke long-term.

King of the Rocket Men is our token serial from back in the day. It's actually pretty decent for the time, although the effects are simple and the acting sometime wooden. Still, the story is exciting, and was popular enough to inspire a whole load of imitators, so maybe it's worth checking out.

The Rocketeer is obviously one of those. It's a little disneyfied, but that just means it has clear heroes & villains and is suitable for the whole family. A good one to introduce your kids with before getting to the more convoluted and ambiguous examples of the genre.

Dollman has the same name as a pulp character, which is why James rented it in the first place, but turns out to be completely unrelated. He is not impressed, finding a 13 inch cop from another world cleaning up the bronx just too silly to stomach, particularly with the crappy effects and attempts at grimdark seriousness. As is often the case, the direct to video sequel is even worse. Don't know why film companies keep throwing good money after bad.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 73: July 1992



part 5/5



The Living City: Since the letters were complaining about too many Raven's Bluff businesses, we don't have one this month, instead filling the space with a collection of items that have histories tying them into the Realms, but are perfectly capable of being used generically as well. Not that we don't have plenty of them from Dragon, so doing this every month would get stale even faster than new setting details, but it's good to mix things up now and then. Let's see if these are the kind of things adventurers would risk their lives over.

Heavy Water has all the quenchiness of several gallons of regular water in a single mouthful. Very handy if you're going on an extended desert adventure, and if enchanted by a cleric, also has concentrated undead scouring power. Get all those tombs extra clean! :teeth ting:

The Helm of Asps gives you medusa hair. This does not include turning people to stone, but save or die poison with every attack is nothing to sneeze at either. Some monsters really are overkill, aren't they.

Morgrim's Tapestry depicts a brave knight that will step out of the tapestry and protect your home from unwelcome intruders. Probably doesn't have the strength to beat a whole adventuring party, but it's loud and clanky so it'll at least alert everyone else in the building and ruin any rogue's plans at a sneaky burglary.

A Ring of Nine Lives saves your life every time you're dropped to 0, with the expected number of total charges. It doesn't heal you though, so if you're in a pitched combat those can go down very rapidly in quick succession. An angry beholder could wipe out all of them in one round if you're very unlucky.

The Ring of Scrying Globes creates magical bubbles that let you not only scry nearly anywhere, but also cast spells through it on whatever you're seeing. The kind of thing that's pretty powerful on it's own, but absolutely game-breaking in the hands of an archmage, letting you perform selective scry & fry's or mind control anywhere in the world at no risk to yourself unless you're dealing with another spellcaster similarly powerful & paranoid. It has it's limitations, but this is the kind of macguffin that can comfortably drive a whole plot and make an enemy seem unbeatable. Good luck finding it before Manshoon or some other FR bigwig. These are all pretty interesting and do more than just add more plusses onto your preexisting abilities so they seem quite capable of spicing up a game.



An 1889 Crystal Sphere: The cover image turns out to be connected to this article, a Spelljammer/Space:1889 crossover. What happens if your D&D characters stumble across earth, only a little more technologically advanced than usual in an odd direction. Both have Crystal Spheres & Phlogiston, so the cosmologies mesh pretty seamlessly. But the rules systems are pretty different, so here's 5 pages of both way conversion notes, mildly favoring converting from 1889 to AD&D, since that's the more popular and complicated system. As usual when you convert a skill-based system into a class/level one, you can often wind up with characters that are impossible if rolled up natively and played from 1st level, but they encourage you to prioritise cool over strict adherence to the RAW and roll with it. There's class/level limits for the three different types of martian, plus plenty of new types of armor & weaponry, so there's a decent amount of stuff to plunder even if you've never played Space:1889 at all. A pretty neat article that also serves to introduce a new game to the RPGA in general, and hopefully get a few more people playing it. Will we see it in the lists of official point-earning tournaments in future years? This is one I wouldn't mind seeing a few follow-ups for.



Bloodmoose & Company find themselves in medieval times, and that the rules of chivalry do not apply to anthromorphic animals. It's a hard life, being a metaphor.



Wolff & Byrd make a brief return, to remind us that just because the dead don't respond when you try to contact them, doesn't mean they can't hear you, and grow increasingly irritated that you aren't getting the hint.



A fairly decent mix of stuff that's aimed at new people who still haven't become jaded to repetition of the basics, and more advanced material that's still relevant to me. Their adventure choices continue to not really be to my tastes, but at least i have plenty of alternatives at this point, and the attempt to make player choices in tournaments tie into larger-scale metaplot looks like it'll be interesting in the future. Still plenty of reasons to carry on then. Let's head on into convention season and see if they've managed to solve last year's flakiness problem.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 36: Jul/Aug 1992



part 1/5



76 pages. Dragons iiiiinnn SPAAAACEEE!!!! I guess we do have another spelljammer adventure on the way. Hopefully not another one aimed at elevating the minds of landlubbers, as I think we're already decently catered for in that area. Let's see how far we can get from generic starting level dungeon-crawls this time.



Editorial: Since issue 2, they've had a fair share of adventures where the mystery is a big part of the fun, and investigation, finding clues & interviewing suspects is more important than the killing things & taking of stuff. Wolf decides to spend the editorial celebrating this idea. Challenge your players and their brains, not just their character's stats. This is 2e, where nonweapon proficiencies are still optional, and you're expected to actually roleplay your way through social situations, rather than pick between diplomacy, bluff & intimidate and let the dice determine how well you did overall. More adventures in this vein from the freelancers would be very welcome. The kind of editorial that lets you know which way the wind is blowing in the offices. They want to grow beyond their dungeon delving & dragon slaying origins, and make D&D a more general purpose RPG with lots of different detailed settings. Can they get people to play along? Well, they're not doing too badly so far. I guess I'll keep going and see if they drop mystery based adventures when they do the whole back to the dungeon thing with the edition change, or it happens earlier, later, or not at all.



Letters: First letter is particularly pleased by the trading cards in issue 34. In addition to making characters easy to look up, they also make good bookmarks. Another round of them would be very welcome.

Second complains about blatant spoilers in the adventure titles and maps. It makes keeping the true nature of the adversaries in more cerebral adventures difficult. They need to draw you in somehow. It's a tricky path to balance, but they'll try to be a bit more subtle.

Third reminds them not to discouraged by satanic panic idiots and keep on keeping on. Roleplaying is just another hobby so just keep on making good adventures for us to play.

4th is by future design head Chris Perkins. He'd like to see them do a best of, put better maps and illustrations in, and cover more terrains & cultures. In the meantime, he'll keep on submitting his own adventures here. Another example of persistence paying off.

5th wants to know about the statistics behind the magazine. Just how many adventures do they reject for each one they choose. It's not quite hundred to one, but not far off. Once again, you need to be persistent and patient if you want to become one of their regulars, because even if they accept you, your adventure could be waiting a long time in the slush pile.

6th is another one that really likes the trading cards and other inserts. Can they come up with any new ones to keep the variety up?

7th wishes they'd do more Spelljammer & Dark Sun adventures. Well, they're trying this issue. Send them in and increase the odds of the settings surviving long-term.

8th reminds people that not every adventure is, or indeed should be aimed at them. Even the one that aren't will hopefully expand your mind and let you understand what else you could try in the future.

Finally, another one asking what computer programs they use to make their maps, and if they could get hold of the original files. Sorry. Diesel still does them by hand. It'll still be a long time before you can get hold of issues online, and even longer before you can do so legally.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 36: Jul/Aug 1992



part 2/5



Asflag's Unintentional Emporium: Willie Walsh once again delivers something fairly lighthearted with plenty of opportunities for roleplaying on top of the dungeoncrawling. The Wizard Asflag met an unfortunate end when a magical experiment went wrong, and now the wards on his tower are starting to break down, letting all sorts of weirdness leak out. Who ya gonna call? The twist is that instead of lurking in the forbidding wilderness where this wouldn't disturb anyone, he's right in the middle of the city of Serin, which has turned into a boomtown of wizard's towers. You have to deal with both the bureaucracy of the legal authorities, which is at least less obnoxious than Westgate or Raven's Bluff, and the various other wizards of the city, who all want to get their hands on various magical items he possessed, preferably without getting into an open bidding war which will jack up the prices. Then there's the traps and monsters themselves, which are also on the more quirky side, with heavy Fiend Folio representation. The dungeon-crawling bit probably won't last you more than a couple of sessions, but the social bits before and afterwards can be dialled up or down quite a bit depending on the tastes of your group, and seem like rich grounds for starting petty feuds between the wizards and PC's that can come back and have long term repercussions on your campaign. Another one by him that mixes it's various elements to good effect and allows you plenty of freedom in how it plays out, plus giving you prefab setting details to speed your worldbuilding along. Just generally good all round.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 36: Jul/Aug 1992



part 3/5



Troll Bridge: They forget the side treks branding on this month's short adventure despite it being shorter than some of the ones that got it. The premise seems fairly simple and familiar. A troll has set up under a bridge and wants food or money to let people pass. Since they've already done that before, there's a twist this time. It's actually a gnome illusionist using his spells and a few physical props for the purposes of extortion. If you decide to seriously fight the troll despite it's ferocious appearance it won't take long to figure out that the maths aren't adding up. A bit of magic detection/dispelling will reveal the real culprit, who will lead you on a chase across a route with some more traps prepared to increase his odds of escape. If he gets away, he'll hold a grudge and become a recurring antagonist, putting further obstacles in their way while avoiding direct confrontation. It's amusing to have a villain who thinks small, and is using their considerable powers just to run a grift, and not even a particularly well-paid one at that, as you probably have to hang around for hours between groups of passers-by doing nothing. One of those encounters that isn't going to fill a whole session, but is easy enough to put in or between other larger adventures for a bit of light relief. Those are always handy.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 36: Jul/Aug 1992



part 4/5



Granite Mountain Prison: After a very common scenario indeed, we have one that steals it's inspiration from a somewhat lesser-known source - Brian Aldis's Helliconia trilogy. A great prison that's near impossible to escape from because the cells revolve slowly within the mountain, each only passing the main door once a year. The only way in and out of the cells until they complete a full cycle is a tiny hole for food and air. Without both magic and considerable cleverness you've got no hope of rescuing a guy who was framed for a murder and unjustly imprisoned in there. So this is the good kind of heist adventure, where they set you a seemingly impossible challenge, and expect you to scout the place out, come up with a plan and rise to the challenge. You could try shrinking, gaseous form or ethereality. Just make sure you've got enough uses to get both in and out again. You could charm a xorn or umber hulk and dig your way in. But don't try going through the front door, as the strongest guards & anti-magical precautions are there, obviously, and don't destroy the air elemental powering the ventilation system if you try to sneak in that way, because killing all the prisoners is the precise opposite of what you want to do unless you're considerably higher level than intended and can raise the body afterwards. There's plenty of detail on the guards and several other key inmates that might be handy due to having important powers or dubious loyalties, so there's plenty of opportunity for roleplaying amid the scheming, and ways you could still achieve your goal even if the initial break in doesn't go as smoothly as you'd like. This one definitely gets my approval, and seems like it could be used repeatedly in a campaign before wearing out it's welcome. Just don't let them find out about Elan, otherwise they'll remove the foodholes and it'll be even harder to rescue anyone.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 36: Jul/Aug 1992



part 5/5



The Sea of Sorrow: Steve Kurtz once again submits the cover adventure, a chunky 30-pager that could easily have been turned into a standalone module. It's not another introductory one too, although it does play heavily into D&D cliches in other ways. A Radiant Dragon is attacking an important shipping lane … IIIIIINNNN SPAAAACEEEEE!!!!! This is not good for business, so the Arcane are willing to pay quite considerable sums to the group that can kill it & take it's stuff, including a decent advance to upgrade your ship, as anyone who knows anything about radiant dragons knows they are not an easy target. Off you head through the phlogiston and arrive in the dark and mostly deserted crystal sphere you'll be spending most of the adventure in. Turns out the dragon has been corrupted by an evil artifact, which explains it's unusual degree of violence and weird colour scheme. Like his other big adventure, this climaxes with a load-bearing boss situation where either you or the dragon will probably wind up destroying it in the final battle, forcing you to flee as the place goes boom or die horribly in the implosion. Guess he really likes that cliche, which is a real pain when used in D&D as it prevents you from collecting a lot of the potential treasure.

Once again, this is easily the most linear adventure in here, with a lot of bits where if you try to do something unintended, you'll be forcibly pushed back on the path. (which is still better than the polyhedron adventures that don't even seem to consider what happens if you don't follow the intended path, or have exactly the same things happen in the same order no matter what route you try to take, admittedly) There is still some room for exploration and getting variable amounts of treasure, but this is primarily story-driven even when it has to push at the limits of the rules to achieve it, like trying to have multiple encounters with the dragon where neither side dies before the final confrontation. So this is one of those cases where the 2e writers' desire to tell interesting stories conflicts with a system designed for small scale battles & dungeon-crawling, mostly unchanged since 1974. I can't help feeling his writing would be better served by another system which does narrative-heavy stories more easily. But then of course we wouldn't be seeing it in this magazine. What an irritating circle to have to try and square.



Index to Issues 25-36: Another two years has passed, but instead of extending the index to three pages, they decide to do another small one only covering the recent issues, once again primarily sorted by alphabetical order rather than level or setting. This once again means it's mainly useful for people who already own and have read the issues, and simply need to jog their memory rather than someone coming in cold and trying to put a campaign arc together. This still needs work. But then again, until back issues are freely available online, they don't have much incentive to improve their indexing methods anyway.



A pretty good issue, although once again there's signs of creeping 2e linearity. But that's still only a minority here, and considerably less than in Polyhedron, which has long since embraced it as standard. It's becoming very obvious that the push to linear storytelling adventures full of metaplot came from inside the house without any research as to whether that's what the public really wanted or not. Still, that means as long as Dungeon is primarily supported by freelance submissions, there should still be plenty of adventures that give the players free reign to explore them in the way they choose. Time to go back to the chore of doing two of that, then another one of this.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 74: August 1992



part 1/5



36 pages. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a large ham like BRIAN BLESSED would own an equally impressive eagle. After all, he's played a hawkman before. Let's see who he's depicting in this issue, and just how loud & scenery-chewing they are.



Bestiary: Geran are the winner of the competition to name and stat a Dark Sun monster from issue 66. They're somewhat less aggressive than the picture indicates, but since Dark Sun is a deadly place, looking scary is a good defensive method. They have pretty decent telekinetic abilities, which compensates for their very asymmetrical hands. Like most humanoids at this point, they don't gain class levels, but have an idiosyncratic set of upgraded leader types with specific extra HD & powers. They can be both decent allies or enemies depending on how you treat them. It's easier to get over misunderstandings when everyone can talk mind to mind. (But when resources are scarce, you may still wind up having to fight over them anyway) I can see myself getting some use out of them.



Notes From HQ: Things seem to be going smoothly, so the editorial is relatively short. The number of clubs continues to increase, and enough of them are participating in the decathlon that it's actually a proper competition this year. If you keep it up they'll be able to expand it's scope even further next year. The competition this month is to design a piece of cyberware for any cyberpunk RPG of your choice. Like new magic items for D&D, that's a topic with enormous scope for expansion before hitting diminishing returns so hopefully the winners will be suitably interesting and useful. Which systems will the RPGA members favor, and will there be enough of them to run tournament adventures in them as well? I strongly suspect Shadowrun will wind up on top, as it did with the general public.



Letters: The first letter grumbles that the comics are a waste of space, but the Living content and the film reviews are quite useful. There's room for plenty more of those before they grow stale.

Second reminds us that you can split the Living City locations up between different places in your home campaign. Just because it's a kitchen sink with a ridiculous concentration of high level characters in close proximity in the official Realms, doesn't mean it has to be that way for you.

Finally, an anonymous writer distinctly unhappy with the general standard of tournament modules, although their main complaint is too many of them being pure hack & slash and terribly edited rather than my big peeves of railroading linearity and irritating whimsicality. They try to defend themselves, but can't deny that their quality control still needs work. It'd take a lot more volunteers to properly playtest & edit all their submissions before they're used with the quantity of tournaments they're trying to service. By contrast, Dungeon can just throw out over 90% of their submissions as they only need to settle on 4-6 every two months, which means they don't need to work as hard to edit the ones they like into shape because they're already mostly there, and they've got a bigger budget for drawing cool maps, artwork and other quality of life improvements in the layout. The exclusivity of the RPGA actually works against itself in this respect.