TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 84: June 1993



part 3/5



The Living City 2: The second location this month is one of the still small fraction of places run entirely by 0th level characters. Tragor's Tours & Souvenir Shop. But on a flavour level it's considerably more interesting than the last one, as it gives you a good overview of lots of other establishments mentioned in previous issues, and then adds four new tourist spots on top of that with their own minor mechanical quirks. Sleep in Ilmater's footsteps and you might be miraculously cured of various chronic ailments. Jump off the tower of luck and enjoy it's blessing for the next few days, but only from a very specific angle, otherwise you just go splat. Listen to the prophecies of the goat oracle, but don't try to find out who's behind the curtain. It all presents a picture of magical landmarks much more low-key, quirky and unreliable than the previous article. I guess you get what you pay for, as these tour guides are pretty cheap. More one for new arrivals to the city than a place you can form a relationship with and visit over and over again. Just wandering around and seeing the sights is nice for a bit, but you need an actual purpose if you're going to make an extended stay.



Living City Magic: We whiplash back from 0 level characters to high magic again with a trio of magic items tied into Raven's Bluff. Ambassador Carrague is one of those wizards who uses his powers to accomplish things we would do with technology, for the desire to save labor and enjoy the comforts of life are universal.

Carrague's Steam Machines are basically reinventing the train. Technically, they're not even magical, as only the power source differs from earthly trains. Unfortunately for him, Torilians are superstitious of anything that looks technological due to those annoying Gondites, so there's only a few prototypes of these in existence. It'll take a lot of work laying down tracks before you can ride anywhere in style in these.

Carrague's Decanter of Endless Steam is just a decanter of endless water, only hotter. This makes it a very effective power source on top of all the normal uses for large quantities of water, and much more dangerous in combat as long as you have some means of coping with the recoil. Just one of these running at full power in a generator could make a city a good deal more comfortable, at least until the long term changes in water level and greenhouse effect catch up with you.

Carrague's Iron Golem ditches that unethical business of summoning & binding elemental spirits and instead makes it operated by a VR suit elsewhere. Make sure there's a thick wall between operator and golem, for if you're spotted, trying to deal with attacks while it's mirroring your actions will be humorously awkward.



Character Generation: It's been three years since they first allowed you to create persistent characters for the Living City and take them through tournament adventures, gaining levels along the way. It's been going long enough, and had enough feedback that they've decided it's time for a revision, in the process taking things even further away from AD&D 2e RAW. From every level between 2nd and 10th, you gain at least one ability point. Most of them can be assigned to any score, but some automatically go to your charisma, as for some reason living city characters tend to have a deficit there. You can have any kit from the official books you qualify for, which is surprisingly generous, but psionics are completely banned, as if you can't be trusted to roll for ability scores, you definitely can't be trusted with rolling for wild talents, let alone the prospect of teleportation or astral travel at 1st level as a psionicist. They're still using Comeliness, four years into 2e, and they've made dual-classing even harder than it is in the corebooks with an extra XP surcharge when you first switch. As with last time, it's a weird mix of things that won't become part of the official rules until next edition and holdovers from 1e. It goes to show, people really wanted some way for you to improve your ability scores as you level up, rather than just rolling lots of characters, and having the ones with higher scores more likely to survive that long. (plus XP bonuses for high prime requisites compounding the unfairness) Curious that the RPGA would decide to pander to that before the official designers. So there's actually plenty of interesting stuff in here to analyse, and less outright banned than I expected. Let's see how long it lasts before they have to revise these rules again.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 84: June 1993



part 4/5



The Everwinking Eye: Having spent two issues on the history of Zhentil Keep & it's rulers, Ed talks about what they're up to in the present. While they'd like to dominate the world, they've accumulated enough enemies that they're far too busy just holding onto what they've got to seriously expand. However they're quietly increasing the number of organisations they've infiltrated, and working at establishing new trade routes through hostile terrain that would make them very rich indeed by being able to deliver goods much faster than any competitors. Some of the monsters they'll negotiate with to accomplish this, while other are less willing to listen to humans regardless of alignment, in which case they have no qualms about killing them, or better yet, petrifying them and setting them in locations they want to guard with automated dispels triggered by anyone who doesn't use the correct procedures. Or in other words, another excuse to have dungeons full of monsters placed in rooms with no food and no thought about how they interact just waiting to fight the PCs and have it make sense in universe. Gotta love all that lampshade hanging. As usual, he's putting far more work in than he needs to to make the Realms both a good place to adventure in and still somewhat coherent, with even the most diabolical of villains still having to spend much of their time worrying about economics and logistics. It's an fascinating read yet again. I just wish any of the other developers were half as invested in their worlds, so there was some kind of competition. When first place is so far ahead of everyone else in the field, it can be a little bit discouraging.



The Living Galaxy: Roger decides to go full Harry Turtledove this time, giving us an alternate history themed column. A single change a few centuries ago, followed up logically, and you can wind up with a completely different geopolitical setup. Whether you stick strictly to real world laws of physics, or introduce a few fantastical macguffins to push the divergence along, you can have endless amounts of fun by picking different places and times to make that little push and set the ball rolling. What happens if the weather was a little nicer and the Spanish Armada wasn't devastated? What happens if China colonised the Americas from the west first? What happens if the Nazis won WWII? What does the existence of superheroes do to the world if you don't keep on pressing the reset button? As usual, he references a wide variety of sources, including some of TSR's own books, but has to admit that the best all-round game for this kind of scenario is GURPS, due to the sheer number of historical & genre sourcebooks combined with a solid system. (God I wish they'd do some Living GURPS material in here, but it doesn't seem to be particularly popular as a tournament system, probably because using pregens doesn't suit the strengths of the system, and creating your own point-buy character without GM supervision is packed with railroad-breaking exploits. ) As this topic works particularly well when you do lots of research and break things down into smaller chunks rather than trying to come up with the entirety of new history at once, this is a topic that synergizes well with Roger's writing style, resulting in an above average column for him. This is a well you could go too quite a few times with quite different results and still keep your players entertained.



Into the Dark: James can't think of a theme, so it's time to review another round of reader recommendations. These definitely skew towards the recent end, which reminds us that most of the readers are somewhat younger than the TSR writers. Will James enjoy any of these, or wish he'd stuck to his own selections?

The Blood of Heroes is basically a gritty postapocalyptic version of Quidditch starring Rutger Hauer. There's nothing new in the world, and even less originality in Rowling's writing. The usual sports tropes involving plucky underdogs, forming bonds with your team and careers ruined by behind the scenes politics make their appearance. James finds it decent enough, but runs out of steam at the end. Not one to put any great effort into hunting down, but might watch if it happened to be on.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves annoys James with virtually everything it does. Formulaic, bloated and cheesy, embracing regressive classism and cartoon villainy. Consistent geography or accents, no thank you! So much money and talent thrown at the screen in a fundamentally misguided way. Which means the lowest common denominator viewers loved it, and it was the second biggest selling film & biggest soundtrack album that year. It richly deserves the many parodies it got in the next few years.

The Guyver is the 1991 american adaption of the manga & anime. The whole thing turned out more power rangers than serious body horror, limited by the rubber suit tech of the day. There's plenty of amusing cameos, but if you want something a little less saturday morning, stick to the japanese adaptions.

The Flight of Dragons is a bit of derivative Rankin-Bass animation, on about the same technical level as their adaption of The Hobbit, but adapted from a distinctly less famous author. Younger viewers might be entertained, but anyone who's already consumed a large quantity of books will see the frequent obvious cliches and yawn.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is by far the oldest of these, and the only one James actually gives a positive result too. The 50's stop-motion might look a little dated now, but the human characters are better handled than most giant monster movies and the writing in general is tight. There's a good reason why it's been imitated so frequently.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 84: June 1993



part 5/5



What's In A Name: Oh god, they're trying to make a mascot for the RPGA. Choose one of the 6 twee looking potential candidates, all drawn by Gary M. Williams so there's no real variety in terms of art style, and submit a name for them. Two different dragons, three faeish sorts and one vague blob person with a d20 for a head. Mildly more choice than your average political election, but you're still not going to make any significant difference to the overall way things are run with your vote. Winner gets a year's membership extension and the smugness of being able to point to the mascot on every issue (until the next big revision) and say they were responsible for it. I wonder who's idea this was in the first place. In any case, it's mildly irritating, but in an interesting way, and like the elections gives me something else to look forward too. Will the audience at the time be more enthusiastic about it than I am?



Beaming Into Mecca: The Mecca arena in Milkaukee that is, as while we've seen a few letters from Israeli gamers over the years, there's been absolutely zero signs of any RPG penetration into Muslim-dominated middle eastern countries in any of TSR's products. Gene DeWeese talks about his convention appearances, Star Trek in general, and how he got into writing for them. He was a fan of the show right from the start, and one of the people who bombarded Paramount with letters when it was first cancelled. He published a wide variety of books before getting into the licensed fiction market, including one for TSR, but his Star Trek books have been the biggest selling and most referenced whenever fans meet him in person. Despite his success, he's still not so big that he can just get any idea published - he still has to pitch them to the executives and often has to shop them around several companies before he finds a buyer. He also has to deal with the sexist & racist complaints of his fans for including competent diverse protagonists, even though Star Trek is supposed to be a time when those prejudices don't exist anymore. Another of those things that hasn't changed 30 years later, but the internet has given the worst of fandom a louder voice. So despite making a comfortable living, he's still a working author, not a celebrity who can afford to not publish anything for years and then have a bidding war when they do. Even the biggest author working in licensed fiction will still be subject to various restrictions that someone who owns their own IP doesn't. He seems pleasant enough.




Bloodmoose & Company have to face up to the cruel realities of death and taxes hitting at the same time in their final appearance. No happy ending here then, but an unusually realistic one.



A very Living City heavy issue indeed, between the 4 setting articles and revising the character creation guidelines on top of that. The longer things go on, the more it seems to be absorbing their other convention related activities. Will they ever get another Living setting off the ground? The Gamma World one seems to have been a non-starter. It also shows how important Polyhedron was to the Forgotten Realms becoming by far their biggest setting, building up it's hardcore fanbase and adding lots of detail beyond Ed's own contributions. Will next issue have more of the same, or be a diversion into a more novel theme? I guess we'll see tomorrow.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 85: July 1993



part 1/5



36 pages. Ugh, you can't go anywhere in a fantasy world as an attractive woman without getting ogled. Scrying wizards, talking animals, intelligent trees, and if all else fails there's always the gods taking a peep with no regards to your privacy, all with curiously human heteronormative tastes regardless of their own body forms. Why don't you paint a portrait, it'll last longer … oh, you already did. :sighs: Let's see what kind of attitudes we're dealing with inside this issue.



The Third Degree: We take a break from dungeon-crawling and princess rescuing this month, as Jeff looks at Over the Edge, the game of surrealist roleplaying in weird Casablanca. Inspired by the works of boundary pushing artists like William S Burroughs and Philip K Dick, you can play this comically, but like Paranoia, it can also get very dark indeed if you look at the logical consequences of all this strangeness jammed together into one small island. The system is relatively simple, with narrative traits almost as important as the more straightforward defining of what you're good and bad at. It's all quite refreshingly different from most games of the time. His main complaint is that the looseness of the rules means it's quite susceptible to becoming just GM fiat as to what happens. This means he definitely can't recommend it to beginner players, but if you've already played several RPG's and are tiring of learning new heavy systems, it could be just what you're looking for.



Notes From HQ: It took them several issues and nearly a year after the RPGA was founded to properly settle on a name. Now they're wondering if it was the right choice. This issue's contest is to suggest other, snappier ones for both the RPGA and Polyhedron, see if any of them stick. This is one where I can't even pretend for the sake of drama, having already seen the complete run of the newszine's covers. It isn't going to happen, although exactly how large the majority wanting things to stay the same is remains to be seen. The rest of the editorial talks about their time at ConnCon and Spring Fantasy, both of which went fairly smoothly apart from the hotel inexplicably setting the water way too hot with no controls in the individual rooms. I guess it's more hygienic than the opposite extreme, particularly as hotels are prone to spreading infections at the best of times. People are still having fun, running tournaments, and raising money for charity. Not much I can say about that, so good work, keep it up.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 85: July 1993



part 2/5



Letters: First letter complains about a lack of letters in issue 81. Dragon always has more than enough until the very end, when the internet commentary replaces most direct replies, but both Polyhedron & Dungeon have regularly struggled on this front. Jean asks for more help, but I suspect letters will continue to come in drips and drabs rather than a consistent stream.

The second is much more specific, as it complains about too many conventions only running exclusive first-run tournament modules, to the detriment of average quality. While you do need a decent stream of new ones, especially for the Living City where keeping PC's from playing the same adventure twice at different conventions is important for continuity & fairnesses sake, not running good adventures just because someone else got there first is shooting yourself in the foot. Jean is very interested to hear if this should be regulated in some way, and if so, how. Hopefully that'll stir up a good debate in the next few issues.



The Everwinking Eye: More demonstration here of why the Zhentarim can appear terrifying, but are ultimately losers on a larger scale perspective. Like generals in WW1, they have no hesitation in throwing waves of minions after a single problem, which just means more opportunities to gain XP for a competent party and leaves them short-handed later even if they do eventually win the battle. This approach is also applied to the city guard, which does at least mean the streets are pretty safe, clean and crime-free, and there's low unemployment due to constant need for new mooks. It's not hard to get on in the ground level as a potential infiltrator if you have any talent for violence, but surviving the treacherous politics and working your way up is not safe or easy. As with the other Moonsea cities, there's oddly little pub culture, with anyone of any refinement preferring private parties where they can indulge their depravities without having to worry about unwelcome walk-ins, while what pubs there are are filled with foreigners and troublemakers who want an acceptable target. It's not all cackling villainy here, and at least there's less random mind-reading going on than Mulmaster, but as soon as you engage with the people in charge you'll find it's one set of rules for them, and another for everyone else. As before, this lampshades the ridiculous events that happen in the FR novels, and attempts to show the quieter logistical stuff that happens in between them. Also as usual, his magazine articles are superior to his full length novels where Elminster does cheesy overpowered naughty word and mows through villains with more high level spells per day than any wizard actually working by the rules could cast, but I guess you've got to write what sells. There's still plenty of room to take the toys he's created and play with them in other ways.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 85: July 1993



part 3/5



Silverwood: Ah joy, a save the trees plot. It is the 90's, so we were bound to have a bit of eco-froofery in here as well. An evil sorceress with a passion for perfume is engaging in unsustainable practices in her pursuit of the sweetest scents to bottle, pissing off the elves and woodland creatures. Truly a motivation that puts her in the same league as Cruella De Vil in terms of pettiness. The oldest and wisest intelligent tree in the forest sends out a psychic call for help that your players pick up on. Let's hope they're the right people for the job. Fight some ogres, the first batch of collectors sent to the forest, get arrested on false charges when they stop for the night at a suspicious village, get sent on another rescue mission by the villagers, then finally get sent in the right direction for the final dungeon. As usual, it's very linear, and expects the PC's to just go along with the naughty word rather than fighting it in some encounters, falling apart if they make the wrong decision and have the dice rolls to back it up. It is at least both a decent challenge, not so short as to feel trivial in a 4 hour slot, or so jokey as to undercut any tension and immersion. Overall, it's decent enough by Polyhedron standards, but that's still grading on a curve and it's not one I'd have any interest in running.



The Living Galaxy: Roger must be starting to run out of ideas, as he recycles one from earlier on in this column with minor variations. How to differentiate countries on the same planet vs how to differentiate cities on the same planet in issue 53. The formula is pretty much the same. Steal liberally from reality or fiction, file off serial numbers, figure out the history & relationships with neighbours. Apart from growing increasingly fond of lists, his writing style hasn't changed much in the intervening time, so this is the kind of article that's particularly useless to long-term fanatical readers. Which since the RPGA tends towards the hardcore end of the gamer spectrum, is probably a pretty high proportion. Some magazines might be able to get away with recycling the same idea every few years, or being mostly adverts so the content of the articles is almost irrelevant, but this is not one of those. Disappointing to see.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 85: July 1993



part 4/5



Into The Dark: Fittingly for the column's title, James decides to do a whole bunch of night themed movies. No matter how many electric lights we fill our cities with, night remains scarier than day for humans. Who knows what could be lurking out there, just waiting for us to venture beyond our small circle of carefully constructed safety?

Night of the Living Dead is the OG of this naming convention. As usual for originators, it's one of the best, really putting man's inhumanity to man over the monsters in focus. Some of the things that really made the atmosphere great may have been lucky accidents or working around budgetary limitations, but it's the results that really matter and it's still well worth rewatching.

NotLD's 1990 remake gets scored just a fraction of a point lower, as while it improves on the original in quite a few technical areas, just outright showing what was merely implied before is actually less atmospheric. Still a good movie, but couldn't they have spent the time and energy on an all new one?

Night of the Demons is your basic slaughterfest where a bunch of dumb teenagers free a demon and suffer the consequences. The effects are decent, but the writing is incredibly cliched and the human characters mere cutouts which you won't get particularly attached too before they die.

Night of the Lepus is less cliched, but considerably more silly and less technically adept. A plague of giant man-eating rabbits? Run away! Get the holy hand grenade! You can't take it seriously, with both the acting and special effects barely above school play levels. Unless you have an unwanted vengeance demon hanging around, this can stay unwatched for now.

Night of the Seagulls is not actually about evil seagulls, which would be considerably less silly than evil rabbits because even regular seagulls are loud, bullying, thieving bastards. Instead, it's a particularly silly zombie movie, as the undead are not only slow moving, but blind as well, so only the utter idiocy of the human cast makes them any threat at all. How anyone could be scared of that is pretty baffling.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 85: July 1993



part 5/5



With Great Power: Dale decides to go back to the Golden age of superheroes this time, talking about what distinguishes them from more recent Marvel stories. Surprisingly few of them have inherent powers, most either using gadgets or just their own skill and pluck to fight crime and explore strange places. They're also much lower on angst than the silver age onwards, both of the general balancing mundane life with superheroics, and whether they've got the right stuff to beat their various villains in the first place. To be fair, the average power level of said villains tends to be lower as well, with many of them only appearing once rather than recycled endlessly with a little more power creep each time. There's still plenty of weirdness though, particularly as there's much less worry about continuity and shared universes in general, so they can introduce elements without worrying how superman showing up might affect batman's rogues gallery. It was a more innocent time, when people still believed in good and evil, and every IP didn't have a wiki chronicling every character's every appearance and broadcasting it to the world days after each new instalment. As with Roger's columns, he has plenty of references, including the obligatory plug of their new, more pulpy Buck Rogers game, which is specifically tailored for tales of derring-do with implausible cliffhangers between each session. Gangbusters and Boot Hill also get their first mentions in a while - they must still have a fair amount of the new edition's books lurking in the warehouses. Call of Cthuhu gets a mention for being made in the same time period, despite not particularly fitting the pulp style. There's definitely no shortage of source material as long as you can find it. This is all pretty familiar stuff, formulaic both in what it's referencing and the way it's referencing it. Overall, competent but dull.




The Roving Eye: They've published convention photos irregularly for many years now. It looks like they've decided to try and make a regular column of it, just like Dungeon did with Side Treks. get ready for another round of goofy facial hair and gamers posing awkwardly. Let's see if this attempt at branding sticks, or it'll be forgotten within a few issues like half the columns in issue 323 of Dragon.



With no Living City material at all, this issue feels quite different from the last one. That doesn't mean it's good though, with the long-running regular columns being particularly formulaic in both topic and approach. A name change won't help you if the contents start to bore people away with repetitiveness. Another of those times where I'm quite glad I get to flip between sister magazines to get a change of pace and writing style.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 42: Jul/Aug 1993



part 1/5



72 pages. After a large chunk of the readers made it clear in the survey they didn't want any adventures that reminded them of africans or native americans, it's pleasing to see them put a darker-skinned character on the cover. Whether the story they're in is a good one, and whether they're protagonist or antagonist remains to be seen, but at least it's a little bit of a pushback. Let's find out what the context is inside.



Editorial: One of those topics that turns up regularly gets recycled here, as Wolfgang talks about using music & props to enhance the gaming experience. Create atmosphere, provide hints as to the solution of a mystery without having to explicitly describe all the clues, maybe a few jump scares. Send in your best ideas (and also the ones you tried that really didn't work, as that's a good laugh to put in the letters page) and maybe they'll build a special feature around them. Another little way to drive engagement and hopefully increase the variety of things they publish. We'll see if it bears any fruit in a few issues time.



Letters: First letter points out that good plots are much harder to write than just stringing together a bunch of dungeon rooms full of monsters. This is why it makes sense for the magazine to favour those. Just remember that too rigid a plot means no room for actually roleplaying as a player, which defeats the whole purpose of the game.

Second is Willie Walsh talking about the statistics of accepted vs rejected adventures. Even he's batting less than 50%. Don't get down on yourself if your first try doesn't measure up.

Third is from Israel, and complains how hard it is to find roleplaying stuff there. As I said a couple of issues ago, you should see the neighbours. He also wants more extremely low & high level adventures, as those are the trickiest parts of the system to support.

Fourth is Steve Kurtz, pointing out that psionics is only broken when the PC's have it, but none of the NPC's know about it or have any countermeasures. Psionic characters also have sensitivities nonpsionic ones lack, and in a setting where they're common, even complete nulls will know how to exploit these.

Fifth is another adventure path, showing how he used the characters in one to lead smoothly onto the next planned adventure. All it takes is building a few more connections between areas that weren't in the original scenarios.

Sixth is another person complaining about them including monsters from books they don't have. Sharing is caring. If you can't afford those books, or your wife won't let you, maybe one of the other group members has them and will let you have a look.

Finally, another adventure path from Australia, along with a few of the modifications they made. Not all of the adventures are from Dungeon, but they couldn't have done without it, due to the sheer quantity of adventures in here vs their standalone modules.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 42: Jul/Aug 1993



part 2/5



Side Treks - Whistledown's Mantrap: Huh. For a second time, it turns out that rape is acceptable to the Dungeon editorial staff as long as it's woman on man, and you don't dwell on the finer details. A dryad has cultivated a giant hypnotic venus flytrap (cue little shop of horrors themetune) next to her tree, which has really put a dent in the local animal population. It'll lure you into it's jaws with it's sweet scent. If there's any cute guys in the group, she'll let the rest of the party go in exchange for that one becoming her plaything. (until she gets bored, and releases them "a little worse for wear" a few months later) If not, she has no compunction about using her mind control powers to get what she wants, and ordering her current mind-controlled paramour to engage in violence on her behalf if neither of those approaches works. Charming. Even if you do free her minion from mind control and rescue him, you may come to regret it, as he's cut from the Gaston-esque dumb but egotistical himbo mould and will try to take over your party. No good deed goes unpunished, eh? So this is a collection of enemies where it makes sense on a tactical, game mechanics and in setting level that they would be encountered together, but is a big yikes on a thematic one, reminding us just how much dubious mind control stuff D&D fae can do and still retain a neutral or even chaotic good alignment. Whether it gets used in your campaign will obviously depend heavily on your opinion on that whole minefield of debate.



The Lady of the Mists: Connecting to the editorial, we have a bit of gothic tragedy here that would definitely be enhanced by playing the music choices they suggest in the background. A powerful wizard developed a potion that gave it's drinkers Highlander level immortality and regeneration. She spent the next few centuries building up a small cabal of immortals, which naturally tended to become wealthy and influential over their extended lifespans. Then tragedy struck, and she decided that immortality was not a thing man was meant to have, and spent several more centuries developing an antidote and hunting down her former peers. Turns out she needn't have bothered, as it stops working on it's own eventually. So she and the last few immortals have started ageing again, and they've mysteriously vanished from their usual positions heading for her castle in a panic in the hopes of getting another dose. Since they're rich and influential, this causes quite the stir in the halls of government, and the PC's are sent to investigate.

Anyway, this lengthy backstory leads up to a fairly typical crumbling gothic castle full of weirdness, undead and traps, with spooky organ music playing from higher up, and while there are some hints along the way, you'll only get to find out the full story if you talk to the wizard in the final encounter instead of attacking her straight away, as you would be quite justified in doing after all the crap you had to go through to reach her. So while the adventure part of this isn't terrible, this is really one where the backstory is the main focus. It would be better suited as a novel, or maybe a WoD style campaign where you play said secret immortals angsting and scheming their way through history, rather than a group of adventurers that just blunder in to discover the aftermath. It also doesn't work thematically in high magic campaign worlds where there are lots of powerful spellcasters who've exceeded mortal lifespan just operating happily out in the open, like the Forgotten Realms. It could all have been much more interesting if they weren't bound to the D&D system and adventure format. But then again, most White Wolf prefab adventures were even worse about telling a story rather than helping the PC's create their own, so it's obviously not as easy as it looks. A big part of D&D's continued supremacy is that adventures where you kill things and take their stuff are relatively easy to design compared to more social scenarios that only work with very specific sets of PC's. Overall, this is a bit irritating.