TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 96: June 1994



part 3/5



Conjurings: Time for another bumper helping of spells submitted by clubs all over the world to fill out the middle and make this review longer than usual. Let's see where these fall on usability, balance and seriousness as usual.

Animal Sanctuary keeps your squishy pets or familiars alive in combat. The cleric version is more powerful than the wizard one, even though they probably need it less, because they have healing afterwards.

Aunty's Bath turns any body of water into a soapy autoscrubbing comfort zone, letting us know quickly that there are going to be some lighthearted utility spells in here that adventurers who only focus on the combat minmaxing will ignore.

Know Weight is another self-explanatory utility effect that may seem low key, but could be very tactically useful or help solve an intractable puzzle. Just don't cast it on a sphere of annihilation if you want to keep your sanity.

Talon's Waterproof could well save your spellbook or other crucial macguffin so it's another one pure combat monsters will ignore, and may well wind up wishing they hadn't.

Jester's Jest ironically does the exact opposite, temporarily completely removing the target's sense of humour. Whether you use it to get troublemakers to pipe down and focus, or set people up to be the butt of the joke to everyone else is up to you.

Projected Magnification lets you create a scaled up or down image of any object nearby. Very handy for both scientific and espionage purposes, as it has a large enough range & AoE to count a building as an object, letting you spy inside from any angle and plan your route in advance.

Talon's Skitmaster simultaneously makes you invisible and a bunch of illusionary creatures appear. It has some quirky limitations that mean it's not really that great for combat, but for a storytelling bard, it's a perfect tool to make what you're narrating real to the audience. Still, in a pinch I'm sure you can get some clever use out of it in dangerous situations as well.

Talon's Soundmaster puts a bunch of sound effects in a little cube to be released when you press it's sides, supplementing the previous spell and giving you all manner of theatrical or comedic possibilities.

Aryeric's Cloak of Protection is an AoE shield that not only boosts the whole party's saving throws, but also allows you to redirect damage that still gets through to the people most capable of taking it. That way, hopefully everyone'll survive the encounter to get healed rather than the much greater expense of raising.

Bubble Breath is considerably less dangerous than Pink Dragon's similar effect, merely coating you in mildly hindering soapy slime when the bubbles hit you and pop. Not really worth a 4th level spell slot if you're expecting a serious fight.

Fire Wake superheats your target's posterior, sending them running around screaming like Super Mario when he hits lava until someone dispels it or they run out of hit points. Another one that's not really competitive with corebook combat spells of the same level in terms of raw damage, but worth it for sheer humiliation value.

Rastor's Magical Spy turns a brooch into a spy-eye. Another handy way to gather information, with some definite limitations that mean it isn't a miracle problem-solver, as you need to get it on the person of someone suitable to go where you want to spy, and most people will be paranoid about unexpected presents.

Scapegoat makes everyone in the vicinity hate and attack one person. They get to save every round to snap out though, which puts this initially very powerful effect at 4e levels of weakness long-term.

Bestow Enchantment is metamagic that turns a self only spell into a touch one. Another one that really rewards ingenuity and teamwork skills to get the most out of.

Nemicron's Transference swaps a single physical property like weight, temperature at which they melt/boil, tensile strength, conductivity, etc between two inanimate objects. This is permanent, so repeated use by a patient wizard can abuse this in all sorts of creative ways to make technically nonmagical but fantastical items. Have fun driving the DM to despair with your exploits.

Reflectorum Arcana is much more limited, giving you a magical shield that reflects a fairly limited subset of single target blasty spells. Like spells that let you resist a particular energy type, you're only going to memorise this if you're going up against a foe known to specialise in them.

Sacremon's Acid Wit makes a magic mouth to follow someone around and abuse them, causing a mild debuff due to distraction. Really not worth a 5th level spell slot and should be several levels lower.

Shadow Play is another idiosyncratic divination, getting the shadows in a room to replay what happened several hours ago. Handy but not an instant solution to most murder mysteries, given the vagueness of shadows in general.

Salamander's Seismic Seisure is a weaker earthquake spell. That's one type of combat magic clerics actually do better.

Shadow Speak adds auditory components to Shadow Play, making your detective work much easier again while still not breaking theme, which is important for specialist wizards who want to fill their bonus slots.

Janga's Jewel trades one high level spell and a suitable jewel for a bunch of lower level divinations. Not sure if it's worth it overall, but a nice signature move for a specific wizard to show off with and use those other spells casually in a social situation without all the faff of casting them separately.

Teleport Block, on the other hand, is the kind of thing that gets developed independently by lots of high level spellcasters. Ed came up with his own version over in Dragon, and I'm sure other people did too before it was finally incorporated into later edition's corebooks.

Aranen's Divvinial Armor boosts HP & AC, but only for people wearing metal armor, so it's most useful if you have hirelings rather than just 1 PC of each class.

Eldeth's Tranquility gives you disney princess level of friend to all animals aura. Ability to come up with spontaneous song & choreography not included, unfortunately.

Spliffs Wonder Bubbles give each person caught in them a random minor buff or healing effect. Probably not as useful as just Blessing the whole party, but it looks cool.

Gloomcloud makes a literal small raincloud appear above the victim's head. This obviously has a very negative effect on their mood, while encouraging cruel humour in those surrounding them. Once again there are much better combat effects at the same level, but that's not really the point.

Hand of Fate makes the common Zakharan metaphor literal, making a massive blue hand appear to save your life in dangerous situations. If you're in combat and down to your last few hit points, being saved once probably won't turn the tide of battle, but for a cliffhanger situation it's the perfect safety net.

 

[(un)reason]

Well, we've made it to the second anniversary of the thread. Decently over halfway through Polyhedron, but still a long way to go through Dungeon, it looks like I'll still be chugging along for several more years yet. Let's see if I can continue a reliable schedule of daily posting without anything going wrong, and hope that someone out there is getting anything useful from me doing this.


Polyhedron Issue 96: June 1994



part 4/5



Into The Dark: Another issue where there's no particular theme, and James deigns to accept the recommendations of others, this time his fellow convention-goers at Winter Fantasy. He may not agree with all of them, but he'll do his best to give them all a fair showing at least.

Beauty & the Beast (1946) gets a solid 5 stars. The disney version may have replaced it in most people's minds as the adaption everyone thinks of when you mention it, but James thinks this is considerably superior. Don't let the mouse bowdlerise everything you consume.

Infra-Man is a bit of Hong Kong cheese clearly based on the Japanese Ultraman. Man gets enhanced with super science gadgetry and fights rubber suit monsters, with cheesy sound effects accompanying every strike. Don't expect particularly deep or consistent writing, but it's still an entertaining watch.

The Hunger also gets a mixed result. It's certainly got plenty of style, and David Bowie is excellent as ever, but underneath all the visual effects the story is a bit insubstantial. What works in music videos gets a bit tiresome stretched out to full feature length.

The Devil Doll is another ancient movie, this time from 1936, that James finds is still well worth watching. People being turned into tiny assassins by a mad scientist would be laughable in lesser hands, but this manages some genuine scares and decent human level subplots as well. The completely static camerawork might be a bit odd to people used to modern stabilised handhelds and fast cuts, but you'll soon get used to it.

Fist of the North Star is another one that gets a middling review. Yes, the martial arts fights are impressive, but the characterisations are stiff and shallow, and the episodic nature of the manga doesn't really suit being boiled down to a single movie. There are better formats to experience this story in.



The Living Galaxy: Roger takes us back down to earth again, to look at the possibility of playing nonhumans from earth, a la the works of Larry Niven or David Brin. What possibilities and potential hitches does adding an uplifted dolphin, elephant or dog to your party offer? You can go places a human can't, employ senses that would require expensive equipment for us to replicate and things like superhuman strength or flight are well within the bounds of possibility. On the negative side, the lack of hands makes things we take for granted inaccessible without expensive cybernetic enhancements, and even basic amenities may be more expensive, depending on how common creatures of that type are, their earning power and citizenship status. There's definitely a lot of room for this kind of story to get dystopian, with questions of what really counts as legally human tempering your enthusiasm at the cool things very different creatures can achieve working together. As usual there's plenty of references, with a particular emphasis on the nonfiction ones about studying the animals as they are and the quirks of their personalities and social orders. Making them smarter and hopefully less aggressive isn't going to change those natural tendencies and they can make for fun roleplaying so you wouldn't want to remove them completely anyway. Another competent bit of work that looks like it would combine well with the Amazing Engine stuff earlier as well. When you're up against giant bugs, bringing an elephant along could be very helpful indeed, particularly if they're carrying an elephant sized flamethrower and firing it with their trunk.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 96: June 1994



part 5/5



Living City Character Generation: Just a year since they last gave us the character generation rules in here and they do it again. As far as I can tell, it's identical to last time, right down to the wording, only they don't go into the full list of how characters increase their ability scores as they gain levels, so this is just a refresher to pull a few more newbies in. Nothing much to comment on this time then.



Network Invitational: As in the editorial, they're making another push to increase the number of adventures they get with the offer of winning prizes. Both Basic and Advanced D&D, of course, but stuff for Shadowrun is also in demand, and they'd very much like the Amazing Engine to be as well. (but we know in hindsight it won't) The usual criteria apply - show you understand the rules, use good SPG, come up with an interesting story, precisely 6 encounters, no more, no less, and make sure your name & network number is on every page so if one bit gets lost they can easily match them up again. You're not going to be getting any particularly experimental epics working under constraints that tight. I find it hard to work up any enthusiasm about the products of production line writing like this.



The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: We finish off with the start of another semi-regular column full of Raven's Bluff news, presented in a mostly IC manner with OOC stats in italics. The largest section is a look at the demographics of registered adventurers. There are currently 1495 of them, slightly over half 1st level, and then declining exponentially until there's only a single 9th level character, city council member Melissa Eldaren, who obviously has not been resting on her laurels since winning the election, as she was only 7th level in issue 84. Unsurprisingly, humans & fighters are the most common race & class, each twice as common as the nearest runners-up, which are elves & thieves, also to my complete lack of surprise. Let's hope we'll see updates on this in the future so we can find out precisely how fast they grow and average level increases over the years. The other big news is the death of Ambassador Carrague the building inspector, another NPC we've seen a couple of times before, and the appointing of his replacement, a low level fighter/thief called Guildernstern Shakespear (insert I understood that reference gif) who's also played by a regular RPGA member. So it looks like they're continuing to give regular PC's the chance to win various government posts and feel like important parts of the setting, although how much real policy control they have remains very questionable. Is anyone who managed that feat still around on the forums to tell us how significant those positions actually were? Did you get to make a difference or was the only reward of all that effort bragging rights and access to higher level tournament adventures?



With a couple of new regular columns, lots of interesting spells, a decent amount of non D&D material, and a stepping up of their forgotten realms metaplot developments, there's lots of interesting and useful stuff in this issue. As ever, it's just a question of if they can bring people along, particularly if the changes they make here are lasting, but never explained properly anywhere else. Time to see what other stuff next issue features, and how obscure it'll turn out to be long term.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 97: July 1994



part 1/5



32 pages. Don't hit the beer too hard as an aging swashbuckler. It's a fine line between keeping up that party animal reputation and getting so sloppy that any young buck can beat you in a duel. Not that that's likely to happen under D&D rules, with aging penalties pretty trivial compared to your boosts from gaining levels and magic items. Let's see how likely your players are to have a fair chance against him inside.



The Living City 1: Straight away, they provide context for the cover. They're finally giving us full stats for Mayor Charles Oliver O'Kane. He's been heading up the government of Raven's Bluff for a full three decades now, with the help of a few potions of longevity from the looks of him. During that time the place has become noticeably more civilised and law-abiding, (although as we've seen elsewhere, said system of law still has a fair bit of corruption still running through it.) with piracy in particular reduced to a fraction of what it used to be in the city's vicinity. Despite the length of time he's been in charge, he hasn't become corrupt himself, with his strong Helmish faith keeping him dedicated to the cause of civic improvement. He's a confirmed bachelor, but because of the code of conduct we can't directly hint that he has any sexual interest in non-females, so he regularly invites different women to be his +1 at parties and political events, based more on gossip about who's an interesting up-and-comer worth getting to know than personal attraction. Since he's 15th level, and we saw at the end of last issue that even the most dedicated player has only made it up to level 9 over 5 years of Living City adventures, it doesn't look like he'll be replaced any time soon. Despite the various dangers around the edges, the Realms is fundamentally a cosy place with a far higher proportion of decent people in charge than the real world, and this just reinforces that. Whatever adventures you go out and face, you can feel pretty secure that your home will still be there when you get back, and they're not going to blow the whole city up unexpectedly in the metaplot. After all, there are literally thousands of adventurers here. Even if some of them die, the rest will definitely foil even a marauding dragon or army before too much damage is done.



Notes From HQ: Speaking of deaths, apparently 11 people managed to get their Living City characters killed at ConnCon, which is a new record for a single event. (which does still demonstrate just how much less lethal their adventures are than old school ones like Tomb of Horrors, where many whole parties got TPK'd in the early tournaments.) Thankfully this was also because of record signups, showing that Living City events are still growing in popularity, with people signing up to them in preference to standalone tournaments because they actually have long term consequences. To continue that growth and make the place feel even more like a community they're adding Living City Bazaars to several big conventions this year, so you can buy stuff, meet people, join guilds, and generally shoot the breeze IC without having to worry about finishing a mission within 4 hours and being stuck with the same party of randos the entire time. If the first few are a success, they'll be delighted to make them another regular event. Along with adding the newspaper, it seems like they're still finding ways to expand the amount and types of Living City content they give us to keep things interesting and make sure their long-term growth continues. That's pretty pleasing to see.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 97: July 1994



part 2/5



The Living City 2 & 3: An extra large double helping of establishments by regular writer Nicky Rea fills out the first half of the issue. The Hand of Mercy is a children's hospital & orphanage run by clerics of Ilmater. Like most charities, they always have more clients than they can really afford to take care of, but thanks to the cleric's conjuring powers at least they never run out of food. Among their staff is one of the Realms' growing numbers of heroic drow, teaching sign language to the deaf kids and trying to get over his own trauma from a lifetime of living in an evil female dominated society. If you're only interested in killing things and taking their stuff, you won't find much of interest here, with the only treasure a few healing potions stashed away for particularly urgent crises, but if you prefer not to slaughter whole tribes of humanoid babies along with the adults and think a better future is possible there's plenty of quirky NPC's here for you to interact with and opportunities for you to be heroic in small everyday ways that make their lives better. This is pretty pleasing to see, providing disabled representation and an antiracist message all in one go. You can see why White Wolf would snap her up and give her even freer rein in that area.

Marigold's Menagerie, meanwhile, is a small zoo just outside the city proper. Originally set up for circus animals who are getting too old for jumping through flaming hoops and balancing on the tightrope, it's turned into more of a general purpose animal shelter, that once again struggles financially because the owner is just too darn nice and can't say no to a sob story. If you have a druid or ranger in the party, it's a good place to pick up companions who already have a wide range of tricks and are used to humans using magic to communicate with them directly. The quirks and personalities of the various animals currently housed there are given just as much care and attention as the people in the other entry and several of them lead to obvious adventure hooks. Once again, this looks like it could be pretty useful in a more roleplaying heavy campaign where players care about pets and the community rather than just their own raw power.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 97: July 1994



part 3/5



Into the Dark: After several columns with vague or nonexistent themes, James picks a solid specific one this time. Wax Museums and their occupants. They can be pretty creepy just as they are, so if they start moving, you know it's probably not to do anything nice. But it's fairly cheap on the special effects, as all you need is heavy makeup and someone capable of standing very still until the crucial moment, so there's plenty of films that use the idea one way or another. Let's see if the low bar to entry means at least some of them are good.

Mystery of the Wax Museum takes us right back to 1933, to hear Fay Wray scream repeatedly and piercingly in response to the horrors Lionel Atwill's mad sculptor inflicts upon the world. Interesting, but also very dated indeed, with the slang very amusing to modern ears. Not the best, but not the worst either.

House of Wax remakes the same story 20 years later, with Vincent Price as the villain. This is an improvement on both acting and technical levels, but is also more sanitised, as we're now right in the middle of Hays Code censorship. Drug references and female protagonists with a job? Just say no! Once again, it's interesting to see how things have developed over the years, but there's still room for improvement. Maybe someday there'll be a definitive version.

Nightmare in Wax, on the other hand, is of no great value or interest, and very unlikely to ever get remade. Cheaply made horror where people are turned into waxworks by injection, until wearing off at dramatically appropriate moments, with a scenery chewing ham villain. Yet another one I feel no desire to check out.

Terror in the Wax Museum is somewhat higher budget and features a surprisingly good cast, but that just means it manages to be bad in a more conventionally boring way, which leaves me with even less desire to check it out even in a rubbernecking way.

Waxwork sucks the victims into the places depicted, letting them depict a whole smorgasbord of horror scenarios in shallow vignettes. This one falls into the OK overall level of quality, decent cast and effects, but poor scripting and bits that are just an enactment of the writer's barely disguised fetish. Of course, if sado-masochism is also your thing, that'll just be a bonus, so make of that what you will.



Weasel Games: Having established the basic principle of the column, that backstabbing is fun and you should do it whenever you can get away with it, Lester gives some more examples of games and the terrible things he did in them. Cosmic Encounter and Castle of Magic have some sadistic potential. But it's Diplomacy that any aspiring Starscream should really hone their skills on, as without any dice rolls, winning is entirely contingent on knowing when to make alliances and when to break them. Who is weak enough to annihilate without consequence, who is far away enough that you can't fight anyway, so you might as well ally with them to crush the people in the middle, who is too strong to fight on your own so you need to ally with others take them down soon even if it's not the optimal course of action short term. Eventually you'll have to betray everyone to win, but the order in which you do it is crucial. Essentially a lesson in enlightened self-interest, this once again stands out quite a lot against the overall tone of the newszine and is quite an entertaining read. There's a good deal of fun to be had embracing the dark side and it's nice they they've decided to cater to that section of the gaming public at last. Still not sure what the response will be, or how soon it'll get stale, but I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 97: July 1994



part 4/5



Adversaries: This column goes Star Wars to give us another scenario where you could wind up on either side, although there's a clear hero & villain this time. Tyanna Tymb and Alara Fax were once business students at the same academy until Tyanna framed Alara for cheating and got her expelled. With the skills but not the formal piece of paper, Alara was forced to turn to organised crime to survive, while Tyanna remains technically within the bounds of the law, but using every dirty trick at her disposal to increase her company's profits, and probably evade taxes as well. Now both successful traders, they're set on collision course again as they compete for the resources of Bestal Three. Your basic LE vs CG situation. Since Star Wars is already all about plucky rebels vs the evil empire it's pretty obvious which side you should be on. While not a marvel of innovation, this is at least considerably superior to the first two instalments in terms of problematicness, and seems usable enough in other spacefaring sci-fi settings as well. Not saying I'm going too, with the sheer quantity of other options I have just from these magazines, but not ruling it out entirely either.



Your Tax Dollars At Work: The guy at the top in Raven's Bluff may be heroic and true, but there sure are a lot of pieces of work in middle management. Bradlie Tagart, for example. This incompetent numpty is head of the Special Advisory Council Guard, (shortened derogatorily to Spags) a position he keeps because for all his self-serving corruption and organisational uselessness, he is good at bootlicking, toadying up to his superiors and shifting the blame whenever things go wrong. Your PC's wind up working for him, framed for kidnapping a nobleman's son (which he actually did himself) and arrested. Then, as usual for this place, they're released on bail and it's up to them to prove their own innocence. Watch out for the scammer lawyer who'll try to get you to sign a contract that entitles him to all your worldly goods in the small print, because that could wind up getting enforced even if you solve the main challenge, resulting in your character being even worse off than a regular starting PC for any future adventures. So this is a particularly obnoxious railroad at the beginning, before allowing you multiple levels of success or failure and the potential to lose quite a lot while still surviving at the end. In a campaign setup like the Living City, where you only get a few adventures a year unless you spend a ton on going to conventions that's actually crueler than TPKing the group and forcing you to start from scratch. The kind of bad adventure that's interesting to read but leaves me with absolutely negative amounts of desire to inflict it upon some poor group of players. I thought we played RPG's to get away from being jerked around by incompetent corrupt managers who only keep their jobs via bootlicking or be able to kill them without consequences.



Going, Going: Another of their charity events gets promoted. Support a children's hospital and purchase new magic items for your Living City characters with a part IC, part OOC auction. Some items are bought using your real dollars converted into GP, while others can only be bought with actual GP won in adventures. Sounds a bit confusing, and like a precursor to MMO lootboxing, giving people who are rich in reality an advantage in game, but at least the money is going to charity rather than just profiting the coffers of the RPGA. Fingers crossed they can avoid getting sucked into that rabbit hole of corruption.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 97: July 1994



part 5/5



The Living Galaxy: After a couple of quite specific themes, Roger does the ultra basic one of telling us to think about the weather on our planets. Hot, cold, wet, dry, extreme seasons or tidally locked, think about both the averages and the degree of variation compared to earth. What does the weather mean for the characters in practical terms, and just as importantly, what does it symbolise in terms of emotional impact and themes. Is the sun suitable for basking in, or a scouring orb of doom that forces people to stay in during the middle of the day? Is the rain the persistent drizzle of depression, or the wild thunderstorms of MAD SCIENCE!!! As usual, there's lots of examples of the part weather plays in various books and movies, which obviously aren't hard to find because the weather gets everywhere, no matter how hard you try to keep it out. Not really learning anything new from this one then, as it's the kind of knowledge anyone with any experience of storytelling who doesn't live entirely in their own head will already have internalised. Meh.



The Raven's Bluff Trumpeter: Ambassador Carrague aten't dead! He was just sleeping really deeply! Not sure if he also wants his job back from the person who took it last month, at 130 you can understand if a man wants to slow down a bit, but this is highly amusing to see anyway. There are some obituaries that probably will stick though, elaborating on the editorial by talking about two of the higher level adventurers who died in the course of their adventures. May their next characters survive a little longer. Finally, they also tie into the first article with a little more gossip about the Mayor's latest romantic entanglement, which apparently isn't going very well but also won't go away, making him irritable, and the jockeying between for position amongst his advisors, with the newly formed ministry for wizardly magic in general annoying both the more established clerical one AND the diviners guild. This gives them the chance to reuse characters that have only been seen before in a single article and have them interact, which is precisely what they should be doing more of in a shared universe. Once again this column gets my strong approval as a way to make Raven's Bluff feel like a living, changing place rather than just a bunch of disconnected reader submissions.



Another issue with lots of interesting Raven's Bluff developments, both new and expanding on already existing people and places, making them increasingly playable. They're still not particularly consistent in tone, but then again, that's more realistic to a big city than making it all one note, and makes it more useful for adventuring in. Let's see what changes and corrections they have to make next month and if any of them will be referenced in issues beyond that.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 48: Jul/Aug 1994



part 1/5



69 pages. That's a properly huge dragon. A human scale rider isn't going to be functionally wielding a lance that can hit the opponents from that position. Looking inside, I'm not surprised to see that the tie-in adventure involves Council of Wyrms, another of their experimental releases that's unlikely to see any reader submissions beyond this because hardly anyone played it. Hopefully I'll be able to enjoy this particular novelty while it lasts rather than being exasperated by it.



Editorial: One of those editorials that's just telling us what's in the issue a second time, as if the contents aren't just on the other side of the same page. Well, it has been a full 8 years now, it's understandable if you're running out of witticisms and philosophical ruminations. Enjoy the full colour centrefold map and the latest index update, but any really big celebratory stuff will be saved for issue 50. Fair enough. Onto the real meat then.



Letters: First letter is Chris Perkins complaining about the way they standardised what was originally an exception-based encounter in Quelkin's Quandary so it no longer had the same impact, then offering an even more inventive solution. If only they'd done that extra editing in private before the whole world saw.

Second is someone who's very much in favour of fastforwarding through lengthy conversations and shopping to get to the exciting parts of a game. If a game doesn't improve on real life in terms of fun/effort ratio, what's the point in playing?

Third wants to make sure Fraggart's Contraption doesn't break people's games after they beat him, reminding them that things like that are expensive and finicky to maintain. If none of the PC's have similar nonweapon proficiencies it'll soon break down.

Fourth similarly wants to make sure steam engines aren't contagious in your world unless you as a DM permit it. Just change the laws of physics in some obscure way to prevent the players from metagaming real world technical knowledge.

Fifth is from australia, and has also turned things upside down by putting together an all female group. They've responded very well to adventures from Dungeon. One would think so given the magazine has been female led virtually since the start.

Sixth objects to the idea that all female characters in D&D adventures are traps, pointing out plenty of examples where they're not just from recent issues. You use one veiled medusa and the players never let you live it down.

7th & 8th want more grim and gritty adventures and less jokeyness in general. 2e has become just too nice and forgiving to the players over the years. This is what happens when you live in fear of the moral majority and don't go anywhere near realistic depictions of sex and gore.

Finally, another person complaining about some of their players bogging things down with roleplaying stuff that slows the plot to a crawl, boring the other ones. You may need to split up the group so everyone can be with people that fit their playstyle better, then everyone'll be happy.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 48: Jul/Aug 1994



part 2/5



To Bite The Moon: Lisa Smedman finds the time amid writing novels to submit another little adventure here as well. Some gnolls in the pricklepine mountains are suddenly proving much more effective in their raiding thanks to a little magical assistance. A dwarf who barely managed to survive hires the PC's to recover their stolen goods. Seems like a simple enough mission, right, particularly as the gnolls also stole very large quantities of alcohol so it should be an easy fight if you time it right. What you're not told is that one of the stolen items is a ring of wishes, and a casual wish by a drunken gnoll gets taken literally, turning the PC's into gnolls just as they arrive. They can still try to fight their way through the mission and then find a way to turn themselves back, but the adventure strongly pushes turning it into a comedy of errors where they pretend to actually be gnolls and bluff their way through gnollish social conventions (which are predictably abusive and counterintuitive to more civilised folks) until they get an opportunity to retrieve the items and make an exit. A moderately irritating and quite whimsical transformation adventure that's mainly tolerable because it does have some interesting setting details & characterisations, and isn't so long that the joke wears out it's welcome. It also goes heavy on reminding us just how racist the 2e physics & gods are, strictly enforcing the gnoll's class/level restrictions and not having the gods answer cleric PC's as long as they're of the wrong species, which means it wouldn't work in the same way if converted to other editions or even settings like Dragonlance where the same few gods are explicitly worshipped by all races under different names. So this is dated in a very 2e way, both rules-wise and tonally, and much less generally useful than her previous adventure in here. One I'd pass on using.



The Oracle at Sumbar: Pirates dying and leaving behind buried treasure with only a cryptic map has a long literary history. But what happens if there are no convenient clues like that? Fortunately, in a fantasy campaign, there's always divination magic. Perhaps the oracle at Sumbar can help. The catch is that you need to get there, then get to the treasure, and then get back to Yhaunn within 30 days, or one of the PC's Aunt Maria is going to have everything repossessed to pay gambling debts. Can you find a suitable ship that isn't run by people who'll double-cross you, negotiate the weather and random encounters along the way, decode the oracle's riddle, get to the treasure's location and deal with that underwater dungeon, then deal with doublecrossing pirates and/or cormyran officials claiming some of the treasure belongs to them and come back with enough money to pay off the debts and still come off with a positive bank balance overall? That's a lot of different stages you could fail at, quite a few of which won't kill you, and a lot of talky bits at the beginning that the players could mess up and wind up not even getting into the adventure in the first place. A fair number of the plot beats could also be short-circuited in the other direction if you have powers the adventure doesn't expect, keep anti mind reading magic up at al times, swim, fly or teleport the journey instead of sailing, etc. It all seems a bit fragile, and definitely not of use against a group of ruthlessly optimised murderhobos who won't give a damn about helping fictional relatives in the first place. Another very 2e feeling adventure in the bad way that means I'm very unlikely to use it.