TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 37: Sep/Oct 1992



part 1/5



76 pages. A murky, low contrast image that reminds us that a swamp is not the most glamorous of adventure locations, but you've got to take the rough with the smooth if you want to be a successful adventurer. Can they deal with the trolls and escape without all their adventuring gear being ruined by the damp and mold, seriously cutting into any profits to replace them? At least they're not carrying smartphones, which are particularly vulnerable to this kind of terrain. Let's find out why they ventured there in the first place, and what the potential rewards are.



Editorial: They may get more than enough adventure submissions to keep Dungeon running smoothly on a bimonthly schedule, but apparently they still don't get enough letters for Barbara's liking. (And those they do tend to be pretty repetitive in terms of topics, going from previous issues.) What people say they want in terms of settings is not the same as the demographics of the submissions either. In the hopes of getting a bit more feedback from the silent majority, they've finally got around to doing a survey. Rate a whole bunch of settings, terrains & themes from 1-5, plus some basic demographic details. The answers will determine what they're more likely to publish in the future. You know the drill by now. As usual for TSR, they are neither particularly exhaustive in number or scientific in type of questions asked, so exactly how useful it'll be to them long term is questionable. Still, at least it means they have an easy topic for another editorial in a few months time once the results are in. One less thing to worry about.



Letters: The letters page is indeed pretty anaemic, backing up Barbara's complaints in the editorial. First is one complaining that the whale in issue 34 isn't scientifically accurate, but a conglomerated mess of characteristics from several different real world species. Expecting scientific accuracy in D&D is a mug's game, but Wolfgang will accept the scolding with good grace this time and try to do better in future.

The only other one is yet another in favour of variety in their adventures. Doing nothing but settingless dungeoncrawls with monsters that attack on sight and no opportunities for roleplaying would get tedious very fast. D&D should draw influences from other things if it wants to avoid getting stagnant. Definitely a lesson certain future edition books that feel like a closed loop of doing nothing but updating things from previous editions need to be reminded of.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 37: Sep/Oct 1992



part 2/5



Serpents of the Sands: Snakes without badgers or mushrooms? Haven't you ever heard of foreplay? Looks like the Yuan-ti have decided to diversify from their usual tropical jungles to desert terrain as well. A previous adventuring party took some of their valuable magic items, and now they want revenge. After a lengthy bit of infiltration and scheming the players play no part in and will probably never find out the precise details of, but are fully written out anyway to show how clever the writer is, they kill their target, (with considerable collateral damage in the process) steal their stuff back, and make their escape. Presuming the heroes act in a suitably heroic manner in the immediate crisis, they'll be sent in pursuit, to face a dungeon with nice wheelchair accessible ramps between levels and lots of reptile themed monsters, capping things off with a yuan-ti/medusa hybrid with all the best powers of both. It puts the yuan-ti's powers to good use, particularly their polymorphing powers, which have all sorts of utility tricks a less clever DM might forget. It's a fairly interesting read, but a bit too enamoured of expositing on details that won't be relevant to the adventure at the expense of ones that might, and the dungeon design is rather more linear than I would prefer as well. It's still entirely usable, and as usual, even a below par adventure for Dungeon offers much more freedom, worldbuilding and interesting challenges than the average Polyhedron one, but it still feels like it could have been improved quite a bit with another editing pass. A pretty middling start to the proceedings.

 

[Ancalagon]

Dungeon Issue 37: Sep/Oct 1992



part 2/5



Serpents of the Sands: Snakes without badgers or mushrooms? Haven't you ever heard of foreplay? Looks like the Yuan-ti have decided to diversify from their usual tropical jungles to desert terrain as well. A previous adventuring party took some of their valuable magic items, and now they want revenge. After a lengthy bit of infiltration and scheming the players play no part in and will probably never find out the precise details of, but are fully written out anyway to show how clever the writer is, they kill their target, (with considerable collateral damage in the process) steal their stuff back, and make their escape. Presuming the heroes act in a suitably heroic manner in the immediate crisis, they'll be sent in pursuit, to face a dungeon with nice wheelchair accessible ramps between levels and lots of reptile themed monsters, capping things off with a yuan-ti/medusa hybrid with all the best powers of both. It puts the yuan-ti's powers to good use, particularly their polymorphing powers, which have all sorts of utility tricks a less clever DM might forget. It's a fairly interesting read, but a bit too enamoured of expositing on details that won't be relevant to the adventure at the expense of ones that might, and the dungeon design is rather more linear than I would prefer as well. It's still entirely usable, and as usual, even a below par adventure for Dungeon offers much more freedom, worldbuilding and interesting challenges than the average Polyhedron one, but it still feels like it could have been improved quite a bit with another editing pass. A pretty middling start to the proceedings.

having run this adventure - well over 20 years ago - this matches my memory of it - the start was very messy, but it made for a fun challenging dungeon.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 37: Sep/Oct 1992



part 3/5



A Wizard's Fate: An adventure where a wizard only just died, and the PC's are sent in to deal with the power vacuum and find out what happened? We've seen that idea before. (issue 28) Thankfully, the specifics are completely different. That was a high level one where the wizard's ambition outstripped his reach. This is a low level one where he was redeemed by the power of love, trying to get out of being evil and be a better person, and was assassinated by his imp familiar, for the 9 hells are notoriously unforgiving of deal-breakers. Now the imp is holding said girlfriend in the dungeon underneath the tower and enjoying his relative freedom to be an inventively sadistic little pain in the ass, while trying to cause enough misery down here to earn a promotion when he gets home. He'll use his invisibility, shapeshifting, poison and other various tricks to make your life considerably more difficult while you're facing the various static challenges throughout the dungeon. Sounds pretty fun to DM, as you have a decent selection of powers, but they're not very strong ones, so you're free to play it smart but fair and not have to pull your punches to keep the PC's alive. Plus if you defeat him, he won't be killed permanently, so having him appear again further along the road in a more powerful baatezu form with a grudge is a very good option for an extended campaign. It's good to get those kinds of plot hooks going in the early levels so you have something to call back too later. So this isn't the biggest or most spectacular adventure, but it's a solid low level one that's easy to build upon and make your later adventures better. Well worth using.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 37: Sep/Oct 1992



part 4/5



The White Boar of Kilfay: WIllie Walsh continues to be their most prolific adventure writer, with another celtic inspired one that reminds us wild boar were actually one of the scariest real world animals of centuries past, requiring whole teams of hunters with dogs and specialised spears to have good odds of winning the fight. Not that this is devoid of supernatural elements either. The eponymous boar came from the darkest depths of the forest, and slew both a human & an elf from separate hunting parties before escaping. Both sides now hold a grudge and want to be the ones that get revenge, further complicating things politically. Perhaps a multiracial team of adventurers bringing it back and sharing the meat would be the best way to satisfy everyone's sense of honour? So you get blindfolded & led through the elven portion of the woods (as they're a reclusive paranoid lot, in tolkienish tradition) and sent into the depths which even they fear to tread, to face goblins, evil trees, giant spiders, crocodiles, the net using trolls from the cover and other creatures I won't spoil, and eventually catch up with the boar, gaining clues along the way as to the boar's location & nature from the more intelligent monsters if you bother to talk with them before attacking or search their stuff afterwards. There turn out to be some quite interesting twists in the plot that I won't spoil for you, as if they players knew them in advance they'd act completely differently and ruin them. It's interesting and full of flavour, but it shows even he isn't immune to the temptation to make things a bit more linear and tell a particular story rather than letting the dice fall as they may. Not his best work ever, but still head and shoulders above any of the genuinely railroady polyhedron adventures in both worldbuilding and flexibility. It's still well within the usable range of quality as long as you know your players haven't read it.



Side Treks - Their Master's Voice: As usual, the side trek is a single encounter built around an amusing gimmick. An obnoxious enchanter has raised a pair of leucrotta from babies, and uses their mimicry skills to complement his own mindfuckery & illusions. They provide the distraction and lure PC's away from camp, and he sneaks in and takes their stuff while it's unguarded, using sleep spells and similar tricks if they were smart enough to leave someone behind. They'll probably betray him eventually, but in the meantime it's a pretty effective trick. So this is particularly notable because the enemies aren't trying to kill the PC's, and could well succeed in their plans without ruining the campaign. Will you take the loss and head on with your main objective, or develop a serious grudge and scour the whole area for the culprits? If you do, the next conflict will be much more serious, as unsurprisingly, they've trapped their lair in case of pursuit. Let's hope the PC's aren't blinded by rage and able to play this as smartly as their opponents. A fairly interesting use of a less common class & monster that gives them sensible goals, this seems like a good one to use after a big adventure when the PC's are headed back to town and heavily loaded down with treasure, and maybe a little less cautious than they would be on the outward journey. Can't let them get complacent, can we?

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 37: Sep/Oct 1992



part 5/5



The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb: After getting a letter a couple of issues ago where they suggested they ought to step up their artwork and use the illustrations to help with puzzle setting in a similar way to the Tomb of Horrors, it looks like we have an adventure that took this advice very literally, coming up with something that's very similar in general, just with the specific details changed. What happened to the lost cult of the mud sorcerers? Why did they go from a thriving villainous organisation to virtually nonexistent 700 years ago, and what lurks in their heavily guarded tomb complexes? If you dare venture within, get ready for the kind of adventure that's best approached in a slow and paranoid manner, for there's several traps that'll kill you automatically if you take the wrong approach. (although they're still fairer in general than the original ToH, and there are at least a few regular combat encounters in between to break the tension.) Many of the obvious ways of short-circuiting the dungeon have been anticipated and countermeasures prepared, so don't think you can scry & teleport your way through this one. The general theme of earth & water based magic is stuck too pretty well, giving all the encounters a nicely consistent flavour even as they vary the types of tricks these elements are used for. Thankfully, despite the sadism, it's also very generous with the treasure (although watch out for cursed/trapped items, as they don't skimp on the ingenuity in that area either) so if you've got the brains to make it through, the rewards will be all the more satisfying. A good challenge for your high level characters that's got plenty of flavour and is designed to be easy to expand upon, this could keep your campaign going for a while after hitting name level and feeling the temptations of retirement. Then you can hit them with the real Tomb of Horrors & Labyrinth of Madness and see if they've built up enough skill and paranoia to survive that, or they'll fall before an adventure that genuinely doesn't pull it's punches.



Lots of adventures where the monsters use their brains this time, so the PC's need to be similarly inventive with their powers if they want to keep up and survive. The level of linearity continues to creep up compared to the adventures of 5 years ago, but there's still more than enough which give you complete freedom to filter that out if you want too. Let's get through another couple of polyhedrons and find out if they have anything special prepared for christmas this year.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 76: October 1992



part 1/5



38 pages. October rolls around, and we have the traditional vampire noble of indeterminate title with a luxurious mansion on the cover, facing a somewhat less well-dressed set of adventurers. Will they be able to resist dangers both overt and subtle to avoid becoming his next set of minions? Good thing we don't need an invitation to head inside and find out.



Convention names continue to have some spicy puns, with Chilli Con Carnage down in Texas, Concoction in New Jersey, and Constitution in Virginia, which is what you'll need a high score in if you want to travel between all of these in quick succession.



With Great Power: Straight away, this column is in theme, talking about how to combine superheroics with horror. You might think that power removes reasons to be afraid, but a good GM can always scale up the threat to fit the protagonists. Plus there's the possibilities of your powers stopping working, or worse going out of control and becoming problems in themselves. The X-men's whole premise in particular is heavily built around having weird and hard to control powers and being hated & feared by the general public no matter how much they try to do good with them. If you wind up in space or another dimension over the course of your adventures, you could be out of your element and have to deal with the isolation and diminishing resources while you try to find your way home. If you prefer your horror a little more schlocky, there's always being captured by a maniacal villain and chained to some kind of imaginative death trap. (which happens to have a subtle but convenient weakness you can use to escape) A good reminder that superheroes can be combined with nearly any other genre, if limited in depth as usual due to the small page count. Indeed, regular diversions into other playstyles is what can keep a long-running campaign interesting to it's players and prevent burnout. Don't let arbitrary man-made concepts like genre become a straitjacket to your creativity.



Notes From HQ: The first half of the editorial is the now-familiar complaint about tardy and sloppy form-filling. If you want to get XP for your adventures, you need to get this bit right. Like paying your taxes, it's just something you have to learn to deal with if you want to live in a society. (and you need to be even better at bureaucracy if you want to cheat on them successfully.) The second half continues their constant churn of contests. Fluffy's birthday card competition has a winner, although somewhat disappointingly, they only describe it rather than showing us a photo. The new contest is much more interesting than that bit of cheese, as they're looking for ultrapowerful magical artifacts, the kind of macguffins that can cause the rise or fall of empires and a whole campaign can revolve around. The winner will be mostly determined by the quality of the backstory, not the specific powers, so get to writing. Sounds pretty promising as a premise to me. People are suckers for a good end of the world threat.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 76: October 1992



part 2/5



Letters: The first letter thinks that Raven's Bluff has too many merchants with class levels, and that dungeons with lots of traps are just the worst both to design and play through. That's both Sigil and the Tomb of Horrors out as well then. Good luck finding a group who agrees with your preferences.

The second is from the winner of this year's Glathricon award for outstanding gaming. He's stunned and grateful to get publicly praised in this way. Not sure what the criteria were, but hopefully it was a meaningful competition, and not something decided by nepotism. In any case, the RPGA approve of things like this, and thoroughly encourage other conventions to have their own equivalents. Gives them an easy way to fill page count and get to know people better, if nothing else.



Babette: A second contest gets resolved this month, reminding us how busy they've been on that front. In issue 70 they asked us what magical powers the sword wielded by the female barbarian on the front has. The results range in power from the ridiculously dangerous Sword of Babette Maelstrom, capable casting several spells at 45th level and inflicting 200d100 points of damage once per year (and not much less time OOC to roll all that damage ), to the Sword of Underwear Snatching, which seems like it would only be of use in a very particular type of campaign now served better by Black Tokyo d20. It's another good example of how Polyhedron gets relatively little editorial oversight compared to their other departments, allowing things that are both mechanically unbalanced and pushing at their code of conduct to slip through. In the middle of these extremes, there are plenty of more reasonable entries though, offering various plusses, often with additional ones against dragons or some other specific monster, and more than a few with personalities of their own. So this article definitely falls into the category of use with caution, as much of it is interestingly bad and there's no balancing for level unless you do so as a DM.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 76: October 1992



part 3/5



The Valley of Death: As the cover shows, we're once again venturing into a gothic land terrorised by undead. However, the big bad isn't a vampire, but a lich with several vampire lieutenants. Vampires being the egotists they are, they want to be in charge, and will happily turn on him if they think they've got a chance of winning, preferably in a plausibly deniable way like giving help to passing adventurers, as failing in open rebellion would be hazardous to their unlife. So this is an adventure that could go quite differently depending on how you interact with the monsters on the way, as despite being mostly undead, some of them can still be talked too, and might be found in different places at different times of day. The map has just one path through the encounters overall, but there are a fair number of optional offshoots along it that you might or might not engage with, changing the amount of danger you face, and treasure you could gain from the adventure as a whole. It allows for a decent amount of roleplaying, solving the puzzles in the rooms in different ways, includes a fair number of interesting new or customised monsters and only has a few irritating joke references for NPC names. It's still a linear tournament adventure, but as linear tournament adventures go, it's one of the better ones. I can both see myself using it as is and stealing the individual elements to use elsewhere.



Into The Dark: This column is shorter than usual, picking a particularly niche topic. Horror movies that also have meta elements, making the cinema itself a set for the killings. Well, if the movie is loud and long, you could kill someone in there and be hours gone before it ends and the ushers find the body if you're sneaky. There are definitely worse tactics if you're feeling homicidal. Of course, these are more likely to indulge in cheap shocks and gore than realistic ways of killing someone & getting away with it. Let's see just how cheesy these are.

Movie House Massacre is the kind of cheaply made movie that's bad in deeply baffling ways. Terrible jokes terribly delivered, incoherent chronology, a bizarre obsession with shots of people using vacuum cleaners, you don't know whether to blame the writer, director or the editor more for the way it turned out. Some movies would never have been good even if they did have the time and money to do as many takes as needed to get things perfect.

Drive-in Massacre is similarly technically inept, but it's weird choices are at least entertaining in a b-movie way, and the special effects people come up with some quite interestingly gruesome deaths. Coupled with better actors it's ideas might have actually become good. I guess we'll never know for sure.

Popcorn is the only one of these that's actually decent, even if it is filled with 50's B-movie references that I wouldn't get. Why is the slasher killing people in the theatre this time? Will they diversify out of the typical teenage girl targets? Don't skimp on the concessions if you plan to find out.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 76: October 1992



part 4/5



Bestiary is also in theme, with a motley collection of undead all submitted by different people. Probably been saving them up all year, just waiting for the stars to align again.

Ghost Dragons can only be permanently laid to rest by giving them an amount of treasure equal to the size of their original hoard. Since they'll probably have part of it already made up from previous people who crossed their path and tried to fight them, this makes them a particularly counterintuitive guardian which will let you come out with a net profit without fighting if you're rich enough. The kind of trick that only works once in a campaign, but can be a pretty cool twist the first time the players face it.

Scavenger Spirits are another of those monsters that's primarily there to lighten the coffers of over-endowed adventurers. After a lifetime of grave-robbing, they stick around and try to add to their collections from whoever passes by, invisibly filching from your pockets and hopefully not being noticed until later. Ironically, they can't steal from other dead people, but can encourage the living to take their stuff, at which point it becomes fair game. That's an interestingly quirky set of powers and limitations that makes them feel suitably folklorish.

Grave Watchers do the complete opposite, protecting graves and tombs from anyone who would try to rob them. If both exist in the same area, they're going to come into conflict pretty quickly.

Bloodstone Zombies retain their intelligence, and are actually even prettier than they were when alive, but become always chaotic evil homicidal maniacs who will infect other people whenever they get the chance and turn them into more bloodstone zombies. Basically the same idea as buffyverse vampires, they're too strong to be mooks until you're very high level, but lack the special powers that would make them truly scary as big bads. You can do a pretty effective monsters among us plot with them. This collection is a pretty good one overall, with lots of stuff that isn't just a straight-up fight, but can actually be spooky as well. That's what you ought to be doing with undead, not just throwing more waves of dumb enemies at the players.



The Living Galaxy: Dale talked about horror in relation to superheroes, Roger predictably does the same with sci-fi. As usual for him, there's lots of references, not all sci-fi themselves. They've got to plug Ravenloft, as it's their largest remotely relevant product, but he can also talk about Traveller & Dark Conspiracy, which do have a decent amount of sci-fi elements. In terms of movies that combine sci-fi & horror most successfully, he references The Thing, Alien, and A Space Odyssey, all of which go heavy on the isolation aspects of horror that happen when you're trapped with something dangerous, and can't trust the other people either. Even better are episodes of The Outer Limits & Twilight Zone, many of which pose some excellent "what if" questions with horrifying ramifications. There's a certain amount of redundancy here, both spend a lot more time on heroes being captured and put in over-elaborate and impractical deathtraps than modern writers would, which reminds us how that kind of cheesiness has gone out of fashion over the past 30 years. If I had to choose between them, Roger's is both longer and better written, so there's more useful info in there overall, but neither is particularly groundbreaking. Just more generic advice to fill page count with.