TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 80: February 1993



part 4/5



The Living Galaxy: Roger decides to take a more lengthy look at a specific topic. What happens when your PC's land on a less technologically advanced planet? If you're playing it anything like D&D, a whole load of killing and taking of stuff. But there are a whole lot of subtleties that could come into play. They could be spiritually advanced beings who've evolved past the need for obvious technology, quite capable of crushing you psychically if you step out of line. They could be smarter than you, but limited by the resources on their planet or their own physiology - an underwater civilisation is never going to unlock the fire tech tree, for example, but they can take advantage of visitors to leapfrog the bits they can't do alone. Even if they came from the stars, a civilisation might slip back to barbarism due to lacking crucial resources or war; a newly terraformed planet in particular is going to be short on oil, coal and similar nonrenewable power sources, and even missing certain rare earth elements could make computers irreplaceable when they break down and cause a long term decline & loss of knowledge. There's also the weirder scenarios where they're kept in a state of artificial technological stasis by some other force like a zoo, and interfering with the planet will make those overlords angry. Basically, watch lots of Star Trek, as it has examples of all of these, and the protagonists usually try to engage in an ethical manner rather than rapacious violence, even if the right course of action isn't always clear. If they can keep on finding new worlds to explore and new ethical dilemmas to struggle with over more than 50 years now, you can definitely do the same with your own campaign, particularly if you aren't limited to wrapping each challenge up in 45 minutes, but can make it an arc for a whole season. This is all pretty useful stuff. Sometimes, the obvious sources are the best, as that's how they got big and lasted. Trying to be more hipster than thou all the time can be a serious impediment to actually getting things done.



Hey Rocky: As is often the case, we have a bit of basic roleplaying advice, this time aimed at judges for their tournament games. Read the modules before you play them! Check the stats, think about what tactics the NPC's would use, how to roleplay them, which bits are important and which are merely flavour. Don't just turn up on the day and read each individual encounter as the players get to it, making each scene completely disconnected and without any kind of intelligent interaction between the PC's and NPC's. That just creates a vicious cycle where the tournament writers intentionally make their adventures even more short and linear to make sure they're idiot proof, on the premise that consistently mediocre gaming is better than an adventure that could be good or bad depending on which GM you get this time, and is definitely much easier to score for. This must be a fairly common problem for them, and shows why their adventures have wound up the way they have, with the desire for standardisation being more important than actually having fun, and downplaying the open-ended improvisational element that really distinguishes RPG's from computer or board games. It's a good reminder of why tournament gaming is really not my scene. I want that detailed consistent worldbuilding and long-term progression they just can't provide, try as they might with the Raven's Bluff articles.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 80: February 1993



part 5/5



Into The Dark: Ooh, James decides to go big this month, with a set of kaiju movies. Rubber suits, stop-motion and budding CGI, oh my. What combination of monsters will he choose, and how cheesy will the plots & effects be?

Godzilla Raids Again gets a medium score, that's mainly an excuse to rant about how dumbed down the english dub/ edit is compared to watching the original japanese with subtitles. Hollywood ought to have a bit more respect for their audience. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Godzilla vs Megalon does not do nearly so well. By this point the series had become very formulaic indeed, with dumb writing and bad comedy like the kaiju hi-fiving each other. How do you maintain any sense of tension about the outcome under conditions like that?

Gamera vs Guiron gets an even worse score. It wants to be light-hearted family friendly entertainment, but some of the jokes are weirdly dark, and seem designed to give your kids nightmares. Whether it's different cultural standards or merely being written by someone who doesn't get the finer details of human interaction, it leaves James unsettled and only interested in watching it with a little MST3K help.

Yongary - Monster from the Deep is a Korean knock-off of the giant monster formula. The acting isn't too bad, but the special effects are very obviously fake and it's very formulaically written indeed. It did not do well enough to get slews of sequels, so you can visit Seoul and feel much safer than you would in Tokyo.

Ultraman: Towards the Future sees James tackle a TV series rather than a film for a change. It's actually rather good. There's a reason this franchise has lasted as long as it has, and the human element is as important as the giant monsters he fights. Well worth having a dig through his various incarnations across the decades.



Bloodmoose & Company manage to get the time machine working with a decent amount of precision for a change.



A mildly above average issue overall, with the regular columns in particular being quite useful in their advice and managing to pick topics that aren't completely played out. Will they continue to delve into specific campaign worlds and themes next issue, or will it be another one aimed at welcoming newbies? Let's head into another springtime and see if the reception is bright or gloomy.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 81: March 1993



part 1/5



32 pages. Giant cyborg space fish! That seems like an interesting combination for an adventure, whether it's a spelljammer one, or an excursion to some other RPG. Will your characters get to pilot these odd conveyances, or risk becoming their dinner? Maybe both! Let's boldly go where only approximately 10,000 people have gone before.



The Third Degree: The reviews go fairly obscure this month, introducing us to the world of Hahlmabrea. A historically accurate world where … adventurers are licensed? :edgar allan poe squinting.jpg: Okay then. Sounds very fantasy heartbreaker to me. Character generation takes over an hour? Any race can be any class? Play is "simplified" by lots of derived stats calculated from the basic ones. Sounds very fantasy heartbreaker made by someone who's only played D&D indeed. Jeff likes it, but a quick google search shows that is not a common opinion, with others around here who absolutely hate it and rip the naughty word out of it. Despite his attempts to sell it, I think I'd pass if I did come across it second hand. All sounds very dated to me and it's not as if you can't do the licensed adventurers concept in another system.



Notes From HQ: Another issue, another round of grumbles and procedural changes. The main one is to think before calling their hotline for help. They have a lot to get done, and lots of distracting phone calls mean many of the things you're worried about will actually get finished slower. Errors in tournament scoring are better handled with letter or email than phone call, as a paper trail makes for easier bureaucracy than trying to understand accents from all over the world through a crackly phone line. Changes of address are important, don't hesitate to call with them ASAP though, as you don't want several months of stuff sent to your old one. On a more positive note, they're introducing a service for gamers to find other gamers in their area if they haven't got a group. Send them a token fee and they'll give you contact details for the 8 other RPGA members closest to you. Please do not abuse this privilege for purposes of stalking & sexual harassment, or it'll be taken away again. Another of those things that's considerably easier now, both finding people close to you with common interests on social media, and being able to bypass the problem of distance altogether and play online. It's good to see slow incremental progress, knowing it's going to stick and eventually be taken for granted. Makes you think that maybe the world isn't so bad after all.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 81: March 1993



part 2/5



Mess With Their Minds!: Roger Moore is extra busy and writes two articles this month, on top of still editing Dragon. Where does he get the energy? To make a horror game truly scary, you need to go above and beyond the rules, mess with the player's perceptions of reality. Make an abrupt time skip to reflect memory erasure, and then they have to find out what the hell they did in the intervening time & deal with the consequences. Have them find out they're not who they thought they were, but clones, robots or transformed animals created for some creepy purpose. Kill them horribly, and then they wake up and find out it was all just a dream…… OR WAS IT?! It's an interesting read, but also a reminder that TSR are rapidly increasing the amount of railroading in their adventures, transforming PC's into puppets, animals, undead, etc or making broad swathes of class features stop working without a chance to resist in the service of metaplot heavy stories that give you little freedom of choice, with Ravenloft being a particularly egregious offender. Consent and trigger warnings? In our horror gaming? I don't think so. This is dated in that very 90's way you'll either love or hate, and I wasn't a fan of even at the time. Use with caution, for too much jerking around and your group will simply stop playing with you altogether.



The Everwinking Eye: The last few issues have been flitting between the various cities of the moonsea. This time, Ed decides to show us what the small town life is like up there with a visit to Glister. One of the furthest north outposts of civilisation, even the nonevil people need to pay tribute to Auril to reduce their odds of being frozen to death, making her temple easily the largest & wealthiest. Tymora & Tempus are the only competitors, which lets you know exactly what overall flavour the average personality is around here - violent and living for the day rather than planning for the future. Well, when you're surrounded by ruins of fallen civilisations and marauding monsters of many races could sweep through any time, it does concentrate the mind somewhat, you get your pleasures while you can. Definitely a place in need of a few more adventurers if you think you've got the right stuff. There are still a fair few trading caravans crossing the area, but they tend to be large and heavily armed, which is another employment opportunity for adventurers. If you get to the point where even the challenges here seem mundane, the Bloodstone lands and their ridiculous epic level modules await, or maybe you could delve beneath Anauroch's sands and face the Phaerimm. Even in places hostile to humanity, there's definitely plenty of life in the Realms. If only they could learn to get along with each other despite their differences and each occupy terrains that are optimal for their physiology. Nah, then there'd be no game. Ed continues to be the person best at balancing worldbuilding with gameability. No change here then.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 81: March 1993



part 3/5



In His Majesty's Spacial Service: Not to be confused with For Faerie, Queen & Country, which I seem to recall is coming out soon and will hopefully get at least a bit of coverage in here. As you could probably guess from the name, the adventure this issue is a typically lighthearted Spelljammer one. You accept an assignment from the Korvadan empire to protect a small mining outpost which recently hit Mithril. You get your own ship, helmed by a navigator called Noda (with a speech pattern I'm sure you've already figured out.) When they get there, they find they're already too late, everyone is gone or killed. A little investigation will reveal one of the corpses has had it's brain eaten. It was Willbender the mindflayer, (Aka Willy the Squid :groans: ) a well known pirate in these parts. When you track down his base and kick the ass of his minions, (he'll plane shift away as soon as it looks like they're losing) you find he's already sold all the surviving slaves to Neogi. Track them down, with several other space encounters along the way and defeat them, hopefully quickly enough that they can't kill their prisoners out of sheer spite when it becomes obvious they're losing and save the day. While this is still both linear and jokey, it does offer several genuine challenges, gives you opportunities for roleplaying and room for degrees of success or failure, as the enemies use intelligent tactics and the scenarios aren't just white room hacking until one side or the other is all dead. It's also not so short that fitting it all into one session seems trivial, which puts it up on the last few adventures in here as well. Tom Prusa seems to be a writer to watch, managing to slip some interesting things in while sticking to their current formulas. Hopefully we'll be seeing more of him in future issues.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 81: March 1993



part 4/5



Of Mechs And Manga: The gap between roleplayers and anime fans was never particularly wide, but it definitely got a lot narrower over the course of the 90's. Karen Boomgarden does her part to promote cultural crossover by talking about some of the popular giant mecha series out at the time. The perennially popular Gundam series in it's many incarnations. The slightly less successful, but still well-remembered Bubblegum Crisis. Plus Project Hades Zeroymer and Shurato: Legend of the Heavenly Sphere, which I've never heard of before, but she describes them interestingly enough that I'm definitely inclined to check them out. This replaces the usual movie reviews, which are absent this month for whatever reason. Another curious little look at the wider world surrounding them, reminding us that you can draw inspiration from all sorts of places. Giant mecha might not fit too well in D&D, but there are plenty of other RPGs that do support them mechanically and in setting, and you might want to try some of them out, maybe even in a tournament adventure, as it's a perfect situation for breaking out the battlemap & minis so you can see just how big and devastating your mecha (probably represented by a Transformer) is compared to the regular 15 or 25mm scale minis. Letting players go really big has all the more impact after a few meatgrinder dungeon crawls where one dumb move costs you your PC.



The Living Galaxy: Roger devotes another lengthy column to the idea of advanced spacefaring cultures coming into contact with less developed ones. Unsurprisingly, this involves exploitation more often than not. There's no point in crossing the vast voids of space unless there's something out there you want, or you're in love with the idea of endless expansion on an ideological level. Whether it's resources, cheap labor, freedom from all those inconvenient laws, taxes and health & safety regulations, strategic position in conflict with another interstellar power, or genuine desire to make the universe a better place and uplift everyone to being equals in the galactic federation, you're probably going to break a few eggs and cause a few extinctions in the pursuit of your goals. Things become more interesting if they aren't completely lopsided. There are plenty of stories where sci-fi meets magic, including some D&D adventures, or they could have made different advances along independent tech trees like in The High Crusade. As usual, he cites a wide range of sources, both RPG and literary, many of which I haven't heard of and really ought to check out sometime. Even 30 years later, it's surprising how many once popular books have fallen out of being regularly referenced. It's a vast world and an even vaster universe, and there are people out there who've forgotten more than you've ever learned. If you're arriving in a new place, it would make sense to pay attention to the people already there instead of stomping everywhere trying to impose your values & technology without checking if it'll work as expected & without messing the surroundings up. Even from a purely mercenary point of view it's not the way to maximum long-term profits.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 81: March 1993



part 5/5



The Living City: Instead of a location, we have a second short adventure in here, that's also primarily a logic puzzle. Curious way of crossing the streams, but not unwelcome. A corrupt member of the city guard stole a valuable magic item using his inside knowledge, and is now trying to skip town. The city guard have posted as many members as possible, but suspect that since he designed their procedures, he can also slip by them. You have 20 minutes (of both game and real time) to figure out the route he has to take to avoid all the regular patrols and be in the right place to foil his escape. Definitely not going to fill a whole session even with the combat at the end, but this seems like a decent little diversion to use in the middle of or in between other urban adventures where the AD&D rules for strictly tracking movement rates actually become significant. Plus you're facing an enemy who would rather flee than fight, and since you're working with the guard, you're supposed to subdue rather than kill, which also means you have to think about things very differently from when dungeon-crawling. This is an interesting break from formula that's much more flexible in the ways you can approach it than their linear tournament modules and will force your players to really think if they want to succeed, while not being the end of the campaign if they lose. A few more submissions like this would be very welcome.



Bloodmoose & Company once again reveal they've spent ages building up to another elaborate joke to finish an arc with. Time Travel, eh? It's all a big fix. Were they ever in any real danger at all?



With a lot of the regular features bumped off for an extra large double helping of adventures, this issue is interestingly non-formulaic overall, even if many of the individual articles follow familiar patterns. It all adds up to another pleasingly above average but not incredible issue. A magazine is stronger overall if it rotates it's features rather than having exactly the same ones in the same order every issue. Let's see which things they'll bring back next issue, and which order they'll format them in.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 40: Mar/Apr 1993



part 1/5



72 pages. Spelljammer has taken the place of the underwater adventures for the last year or so, but it looks like they're putting ships back in their traditional environment, to face the traditional marauding aquatic humanoids trying to sink them. Will this show us any new perspectives of the crushing watery depths, or will it be the same ideas as 5 years ago given a new coat of paint and more linear maps? Let's turn the pages, and try not to get them crinkly from reading in the bath.



Editorial: Unsurprisingly, nearly everyone else noticed their failure to update the years properly last issue, leading to a lot of letters and some very red faces in the office. They've improved the precautions to make sure it doesn't happen again. To distract from that, they spend the rest of the editorial giving prizes to a random selection of people who bothered to fill in the survey. Enjoy your year's free subscription. So despite the little editorial mistakes, the larger machine churns away uninterrupted. Nothing much to analyse here then.



Letters: First letter is from italy, and reminds all the people complaining about the price in the USA how good they have it. He has to pay several times as much for each issue due to international shipping, and then translate everything to use it. Respect to the hardcore dedication.

Second is from a GM who saw his party die horribly seeking the fountain of health. They still had a good time, and can't wait to roll up new characters & try again. That's how you know it's a proper old school experience.

Third is from regular adventure writer Leonard Wilson. He gives his hints on how to reliably get a module accepted. Learn the rules, accept editorial input, and write what you'd like to see other people sending into the magazine. All seems fairly common sense to me, but gamers do regularly dump their WIS stat for more superficially powerful builds.

Fourth, a request for more unusual adventures in general. How else are we to stave off the ennui of the passing years and their eternal repetition?

Fifth, more psionics in general, not just restricted to Dark Sun. They're not flatly saying no, but you need to prove there's a demand.

Sixth, someone who's switched to GURPS, but still gets plenty of use out of Dungeon. It's the ideas that really count, and they can be used in nearly any system.

Seventh, another example of how to string multiple adventures together into a campaign. They didn't complete all of them, and others didn't go as expected, but that just makes the campaign as a whole more interesting. You've just got to roll with what the players do and make sure there's something interesting wherever they go.

Finally, a complaint that some villains use ridiculously overeffective tactics, while others don't exploit their powers and opportunity to prepare at all. No matter how smart you are, you can still be blindsided or get lazy. Fiends in particular are embodiments of vice, so compromising tactics and not using their mind-control and at-will teleportation powers to short-circuit a battle because of pride, wrath or sloth is entirely in character.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 40: Mar/Apr 1993]



part 2/5



Song of the Fens: We kick things off with a distinctly silly comedy of errors. A troll with an unusually good singing voice has moved into the swamp near an inn. The sheltered innkeeper's daughter falls in love with the singing without even seeing him, and asks the PC's to find the singer and set them up on a date. Will she still feel the same way after actually seeing his face? Can a troll find a human physically attractive either? Can they overcome the fact that he's very poorly socialised and prone to violence at the slightest offence, like most trolls. (when you have regeneration, dismemberment and being pushed off cliffs is just harmless foreplay, as many a looney tunes cartoon demonstrates) This seems like the kind of scenario where you're probably not going to get a happy ending for everyone unless you have extremely high social skills and possibly a little magic to grease the wheels, but it should be fun finding out, with opportunities for things to go off the rails at nearly every opportunity. Even when Dungeon does silly adventures, they give you much more freedom in how the wackiness plays out than Polyhedron. So I guess this is a decent enough april fool for the year, giving you plenty of opportunity to stretch your roleplaying muscles, while not precluding the option of things taking a sharp turn into tragedy. (But in a way that probably won't end the campaign.) Not for every group, but much more usable in a regular game than the latest instalment of the interminable pursuit of small, annoying canines through time, space and multiple genres.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 40: Mar/Apr 1993



part 3/5



Khamsa's Folly: Sometimes, getting to the end of the dungeon and getting a nice pile of magic items isn't the end of an adventure, but the start of it. If you pick up the wrong artifact, you can find yourself with a lot of unwanted attention, and the only way to stop it is to destroy the damn thing, which is another quest in itself. If you find yourself in possession of the Flail of the Desert Kings, prepare yourself to be dragged into a lengthy desert trek by a mysterious voice and ominous dreams, to a place with a single oasis and a whole load of weird terrain from the last time the Flail's owner pissed off the gods and got smitten. Get through these and you'll find a ruined temple half-buried by the sand, with all manner of horrible things within, mostly snake-related. (why'd it have to be snakes?) Will you be able to get control of the powers the artifact offers, keep your wits about you long enough to destroy it, or become another in a long line of megalomaniacal slaves who piss off the gods with hubristic acts, leaving the artifact behind to lure some other mug into the cycle? This is why PC's work in teams. One powerful person can fail a save and get into all sorts of messes, while a team of equals has a much better chance of getting out alive by covering each other's weak spots. This isn't going to win any awards for realistic worldbuilding & history, but it's an enjoyable enough bit of pulpy melodrama if you like that sort of thing. There's quite a few new spells & magic items in here, but they're not that easy to incorporate into your spellbook and put into regular rotation. I suppose that fits the pulp feel - Indiana Jones doesn't accumulate an ever growing list of awesome equipment despite all the enemies he defeats, but it is a bit irritating in a D&D game. I guess it keeps the campaign as a whole going longer before you get to a point where it's tricky to come up with decent challenges for your players.