Davies
Legend
... but that never helps.
TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon
- Thread starter (un)reason
- Start date
(un)reason
Legend
Polyhedron Gen Con Special: August 1999
part 3/3
Food Fight!: Another food related article? How curious. Well, we've seen several comedy adventures that degenerate into brawls in the cafeteria in here, so it's not completely out of character. However, on closer reading it turns out that this isn't a comedy article at all, but a serious look at the complexities of making bread and the economics surrounding it in a realistic medieval setting. Only a few people can afford ovens, so everyone else is dependent on them to turn their flour into edible food, with a heavy tax rate. There's no nationally agreed set of standards or OSHA equivalent to enforce them, so people cutting corners to increase profits are widespread. Just another of those irritations like lack of running water & toiletries, widespread literacy, mass production in general. But you can't go full murderhobo and slaughter the baker & all their assistants every time you get a substandard loaf, as that'll just reduce supply, drive up prices and lower standards in the future even if you avoid arrest. On top of that there's a complicated hierarchy of what kinds of bread are acceptable for different social classes, with serving substandard bread an easy way to alienate your guests and fail to get that favour you really wanted. All of this turns out to be just a small part of a full book on the complexities of medieval food, another example of just how obsessively people can study their fields of interest. If you want your campaign to be on the gritty medieval end, including the grit in your cheap bread accelerating tooth damage and all the nightmares of primitive dentistry that follow from that, this definitely points the way.
Bestiary: Rusalka are another of those folklore monsters that somehow slipped through the net so far, probably because nereids and kelpies occupy a very similar niche. But there's enough room for goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, norkers, bugbears, goblyns, kobolds, jermalaine, etc to coexist, so why not have another monster that appears to be an attractive woman and lures you into the water to drown? At least these ones are undead so clerics can turn them. They'll appear again much quicker next edition, in Dragon 290, showing that once people know about a thing it's more likely to appear again. Another pretty decent pair of decathlon entries that shows the advantages of having lots of different people submitting stuff.
The final page prints the full RPGA tournament schedule for the weekend, which we've also seen before.
The articles were actually pretty decent in this one, and they even managed a bit of a theme, but it was over extremely quickly, reminding us that they have become less efficient with their use of page counts since the early years when 16 pages was the standard for the newsletter. As such, this feels more like a punctuation mark than a full issue. Let's hope it did it's job and brought more people in so they can make future ones bigger and with higher production values.
part 3/3
Food Fight!: Another food related article? How curious. Well, we've seen several comedy adventures that degenerate into brawls in the cafeteria in here, so it's not completely out of character. However, on closer reading it turns out that this isn't a comedy article at all, but a serious look at the complexities of making bread and the economics surrounding it in a realistic medieval setting. Only a few people can afford ovens, so everyone else is dependent on them to turn their flour into edible food, with a heavy tax rate. There's no nationally agreed set of standards or OSHA equivalent to enforce them, so people cutting corners to increase profits are widespread. Just another of those irritations like lack of running water & toiletries, widespread literacy, mass production in general. But you can't go full murderhobo and slaughter the baker & all their assistants every time you get a substandard loaf, as that'll just reduce supply, drive up prices and lower standards in the future even if you avoid arrest. On top of that there's a complicated hierarchy of what kinds of bread are acceptable for different social classes, with serving substandard bread an easy way to alienate your guests and fail to get that favour you really wanted. All of this turns out to be just a small part of a full book on the complexities of medieval food, another example of just how obsessively people can study their fields of interest. If you want your campaign to be on the gritty medieval end, including the grit in your cheap bread accelerating tooth damage and all the nightmares of primitive dentistry that follow from that, this definitely points the way.
Bestiary: Rusalka are another of those folklore monsters that somehow slipped through the net so far, probably because nereids and kelpies occupy a very similar niche. But there's enough room for goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, norkers, bugbears, goblyns, kobolds, jermalaine, etc to coexist, so why not have another monster that appears to be an attractive woman and lures you into the water to drown? At least these ones are undead so clerics can turn them. They'll appear again much quicker next edition, in Dragon 290, showing that once people know about a thing it's more likely to appear again. Another pretty decent pair of decathlon entries that shows the advantages of having lots of different people submitting stuff.
The final page prints the full RPGA tournament schedule for the weekend, which we've also seen before.
The articles were actually pretty decent in this one, and they even managed a bit of a theme, but it was over extremely quickly, reminding us that they have become less efficient with their use of page counts since the early years when 16 pages was the standard for the newsletter. As such, this feels more like a punctuation mark than a full issue. Let's hope it did it's job and brought more people in so they can make future ones bigger and with higher production values.
(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon Issue 76: Sep/Oct 1999
part 1/5
92 pages. Darkness is closing in once again and the cover takes us to the frozen north, where lots of monsters grow very big as it's a good way to conserve heat, yet retain an uncanny skill at blending in with the background until it's time to strike. Time to see if we can survive the trek and find anything of value up there, or the whole thing will be a big wild goose chase that winds up losing members to starvation and frostbite.
Editorial: Chris delegates the editorial to Raymond E. Dyer, who's adventure is first in line once we get through the formalities of all the adverts & letters page. He spends it talking about his various inspirations in writing it. He could have just done a straight retelling of Frankenstein, but they already did that in issue 61, and most gamers would spot something that basic and rehashed straight away. Instead, he’s mixed in a bit of Salem’s Lot, a bit of The Exorcist, a bit of Haunting of Hill House, a bit of actual D&D fiction and at the suggestion of the editors, monsters from last year’s halloween edition of Dragon to tie things together. Hopefully that’s a complex enough mix that it becomes it’s own thing rather than just another derivative spooky story. Ravenloft doesn’t need any more of those, surely they have enough from the official writers.
A fairly promising and self-aware start then. Let’s hope the practice is as well put together as the theory.
Letters: First letter complains they do too much AD&D and not enough anything else. Surely they could spare a few scraps for lovers of other systems?
Second is contrasting, saying they do too many quirky gimmick adventures these days, and need to go back to the meat & potatoes stuff of the first 20 issues. As usual, it's impossible to please all the readers all the time. Still, an edition change will give them an excuse to go back to basics for a bit without feeling like they're repeating themselves, because the mechanics of the encounters will be all different.
Third is very intrigued by the idea of Hero Points and wants to know more. They can be as weak or strong as you want. It's your campaign after all. The big restriction is that you shouldn't let them earn a hero point on an action they're spending a hero point to boost, as that deflates their value. Sometimes they have to manage to be awesome on their own steam to gain more.
Fourth is the author of Night of the Bloodbirds, who's quite pleased with the artwork they added to it, as well as the other adventures in the same issue. He already has plans about how to fit them into his own campaign.
Finally, another person who wants more serial adventures and variety in general. Some of the more out there ones might not seem useful to you now, but you never know where a campaign might take you, so a diverse archive is more useful than repeating the same ideas every few years. An annual would also be a good idea.
Nodwick helps out with the editorial, letters and playtesting this issue, putting even more pressure on his already excessive workload.
part 1/5
92 pages. Darkness is closing in once again and the cover takes us to the frozen north, where lots of monsters grow very big as it's a good way to conserve heat, yet retain an uncanny skill at blending in with the background until it's time to strike. Time to see if we can survive the trek and find anything of value up there, or the whole thing will be a big wild goose chase that winds up losing members to starvation and frostbite.
Editorial: Chris delegates the editorial to Raymond E. Dyer, who's adventure is first in line once we get through the formalities of all the adverts & letters page. He spends it talking about his various inspirations in writing it. He could have just done a straight retelling of Frankenstein, but they already did that in issue 61, and most gamers would spot something that basic and rehashed straight away. Instead, he’s mixed in a bit of Salem’s Lot, a bit of The Exorcist, a bit of Haunting of Hill House, a bit of actual D&D fiction and at the suggestion of the editors, monsters from last year’s halloween edition of Dragon to tie things together. Hopefully that’s a complex enough mix that it becomes it’s own thing rather than just another derivative spooky story. Ravenloft doesn’t need any more of those, surely they have enough from the official writers.
A fairly promising and self-aware start then. Let’s hope the practice is as well put together as the theory.Letters: First letter complains they do too much AD&D and not enough anything else. Surely they could spare a few scraps for lovers of other systems?
Second is contrasting, saying they do too many quirky gimmick adventures these days, and need to go back to the meat & potatoes stuff of the first 20 issues. As usual, it's impossible to please all the readers all the time. Still, an edition change will give them an excuse to go back to basics for a bit without feeling like they're repeating themselves, because the mechanics of the encounters will be all different.
Third is very intrigued by the idea of Hero Points and wants to know more. They can be as weak or strong as you want. It's your campaign after all. The big restriction is that you shouldn't let them earn a hero point on an action they're spending a hero point to boost, as that deflates their value. Sometimes they have to manage to be awesome on their own steam to gain more.
Fourth is the author of Night of the Bloodbirds, who's quite pleased with the artwork they added to it, as well as the other adventures in the same issue. He already has plans about how to fit them into his own campaign.
Finally, another person who wants more serial adventures and variety in general. Some of the more out there ones might not seem useful to you now, but you never know where a campaign might take you, so a diverse archive is more useful than repeating the same ideas every few years. An annual would also be a good idea.
Nodwick helps out with the editorial, letters and playtesting this issue, putting even more pressure on his already excessive workload.
(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon Issue 76: Sep/Oct 1999
part 2/5
The House on the Edge of Midnight: Bringing people back to life never goes well in Ravenloft. But there’s always someone who’s not genre-savvy enough to do it anyway and doom themselves to an eternity of ironic punishment. The Ramsay family forgot that everybody needs good neighbours and sailed off to a little island in the Sea of Sorrows where the dad could pursue his unethical experiments on human subjects without anaesthesia in peace. His wife gave birth to two handicapped sons, which were obviously no use as successors so he ignored them and focussed all his attention on their daughter. When she was blown off the cliffs in a particularly nasty storm, he snapped and killed the rest of his family to use their body parts to bring her back to life. This almost worked, but because the Dark Powers knew what a horrible petty little man he is, they gave her one minor flaw of green eyes instead of blue, with any subsequent eyes also turning green as soon as they were put in. This simply will not do for him, so now he’s trapped in a cycle of fruitlessly stealing eyes from any visitors that happen by the island while keeping her locked up in the basement, (and quite insane by now) all the while haunted by the ghosts of the other three family members. The PC’s will be the next group shipwrecked and washed up on his shores instead of their original intended destination. Will they be able to keep all their eyes & other appendages and escape alive? As is often the case for Ravenloft darklords, regular killing won’t keep him dead for long, and you have to resolve the familial psychodrama to get rid of him for good and lay everyone else to rest. So while there’s plenty of room for you to do an atmospheric slow build here where he invites you for dinner and then strikes when the PC’s guards are down, it’s also built robustly enough mechanically that the adventure doesn’t fall apart if you jump straight to the conclusion that the creepy guy living all alone in a dilapidated mansion is a bad guy. There’s plenty to explore and the new monsters are used effectively to set the tone, not just as combat challenges. This does indeed manage to work as both a story and an adventure, although the default ending with a convenient trip home after winning is a bit deus ex machina. Overall, more good than bad here, putting it firmly in the usable level of quality.
Nodwick is brought back to life so frequently and with so little consequence that the idea of meddling with the veil between life & death loses all it's blasphemousness.
part 2/5
The House on the Edge of Midnight: Bringing people back to life never goes well in Ravenloft. But there’s always someone who’s not genre-savvy enough to do it anyway and doom themselves to an eternity of ironic punishment. The Ramsay family forgot that everybody needs good neighbours and sailed off to a little island in the Sea of Sorrows where the dad could pursue his unethical experiments on human subjects without anaesthesia in peace. His wife gave birth to two handicapped sons, which were obviously no use as successors so he ignored them and focussed all his attention on their daughter. When she was blown off the cliffs in a particularly nasty storm, he snapped and killed the rest of his family to use their body parts to bring her back to life. This almost worked, but because the Dark Powers knew what a horrible petty little man he is, they gave her one minor flaw of green eyes instead of blue, with any subsequent eyes also turning green as soon as they were put in. This simply will not do for him, so now he’s trapped in a cycle of fruitlessly stealing eyes from any visitors that happen by the island while keeping her locked up in the basement, (and quite insane by now) all the while haunted by the ghosts of the other three family members. The PC’s will be the next group shipwrecked and washed up on his shores instead of their original intended destination. Will they be able to keep all their eyes & other appendages and escape alive? As is often the case for Ravenloft darklords, regular killing won’t keep him dead for long, and you have to resolve the familial psychodrama to get rid of him for good and lay everyone else to rest. So while there’s plenty of room for you to do an atmospheric slow build here where he invites you for dinner and then strikes when the PC’s guards are down, it’s also built robustly enough mechanically that the adventure doesn’t fall apart if you jump straight to the conclusion that the creepy guy living all alone in a dilapidated mansion is a bad guy. There’s plenty to explore and the new monsters are used effectively to set the tone, not just as combat challenges. This does indeed manage to work as both a story and an adventure, although the default ending with a convenient trip home after winning is a bit deus ex machina. Overall, more good than bad here, putting it firmly in the usable level of quality.
Nodwick is brought back to life so frequently and with so little consequence that the idea of meddling with the veil between life & death loses all it's blasphemousness.
(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon Issue 76: Sep/Oct 1999
part 3/5
Side Treks - A Day at the Market: There's a Gray Ooze loose in the marketplace! You go years without one and suddenly two turn up just a few months apart from one-another. Probably both inspired by something recent in wider media, like most of these kinds of synchronicity. This one isn't giant sized, but it has just eaten a wand of wonder carried by a wizard who was exploring the sewers and is expending charges erratically as it digests it. Just to make things even more complicated, the first of those summoned a rhino, which is also rampaging through the market, probably requiring you to split the party to fully contain the havoc. Beyond that, the difficulty of this encounter will vary a lot depending on what random results you get each round. (particularly if you're using one of the expanded results tables from the Encyclopedia Magica) So this falls firmly into the playfully chaotic kind of encounter that could be funny, but could also be very scary depending on what those wild surges do and if they cause any long-term transformations to your characters. We haven't had any of those in a while, and this is sufficiently different to it's polyhedron counterpart that they don't feel repetitive put together, so this is very welcome, even if it would be better placed in the april issue.
Mertylmane's Road: As is often the case, the cover story is the longest adventure in the issue. Main Map of Mystery man Craig Zipse takes us up to the far north in the middle of winter to get supplies through one of the roughest routes going. War has made the previously safer ones dangerous enough that they feel risking goblins, wolves, yetis and who knows what else on rarely used Mertylmane’s Road is the smarter option. You’ve got to escort a caravan of dogsleds through 300 miles of challenges for not much pay or lose your heroic reputation in the area. Time to get out those rules on what happens if you aren’t properly insulated or start to run low on supplies as you go through a lengthy sequence of mostly linear encounters. Warm up with a small group of bugbears. Then an ambush from a somewhat larger group of orcs. An ominous bunch of frozen bodies from a previous attack by the wayside. (that you can get a bit of information from if your cleric memorised speak with dead today) Then things get a little weirder, as you’re harried by groups of yeti led by our extraplanar cover star, a new monster from the plane of ice created just for this adventure. At this point you reach a fork in the road and are faced with the choice of heading straight to your destination and skipping the second half of the adventure, or going north to find out the cause of all these troubles. Turns out the frost giants are getting expansionistic, and they & their minions have taken over an old dwarven hall. (although they can’t fit in big chunks of it, so they’re busy renovating, leaving it open to the elements in multiple places.) Do you have what it takes to turn back the tide and drive them out of the place?
This winds up feeling more like a two-round Polyhedron adventure than a Dungeon one, with the first session a linear sequence of combat encounters and the second a fairly short dungeoncrawl that could also probably be done in a single session. It pushes you hard to do certain things while punishing you for not doing others despite there being very little chance you’d think to do them. (ransoming the giant leaders instead of killing them to prevent this from leading into a blood feud? How many groups would think to do that even if they had the rope to hold a giant-sized captive?) There’s plenty of good elements in here, with an interesting new monster, new magical items and a map that actually covers a large area, but the way they’re put together in the adventure itself is pretty annoying. Frankly, I’d be more interested in seeing them tackle the obvious sequel, where the two human countries have to patch up their differences and join forces to deal with full-on war against the frost giant armies. That would be much more ambitious and to my tastes.
part 3/5
Side Treks - A Day at the Market: There's a Gray Ooze loose in the marketplace! You go years without one and suddenly two turn up just a few months apart from one-another. Probably both inspired by something recent in wider media, like most of these kinds of synchronicity. This one isn't giant sized, but it has just eaten a wand of wonder carried by a wizard who was exploring the sewers and is expending charges erratically as it digests it. Just to make things even more complicated, the first of those summoned a rhino, which is also rampaging through the market, probably requiring you to split the party to fully contain the havoc. Beyond that, the difficulty of this encounter will vary a lot depending on what random results you get each round. (particularly if you're using one of the expanded results tables from the Encyclopedia Magica) So this falls firmly into the playfully chaotic kind of encounter that could be funny, but could also be very scary depending on what those wild surges do and if they cause any long-term transformations to your characters. We haven't had any of those in a while, and this is sufficiently different to it's polyhedron counterpart that they don't feel repetitive put together, so this is very welcome, even if it would be better placed in the april issue.
Mertylmane's Road: As is often the case, the cover story is the longest adventure in the issue. Main Map of Mystery man Craig Zipse takes us up to the far north in the middle of winter to get supplies through one of the roughest routes going. War has made the previously safer ones dangerous enough that they feel risking goblins, wolves, yetis and who knows what else on rarely used Mertylmane’s Road is the smarter option. You’ve got to escort a caravan of dogsleds through 300 miles of challenges for not much pay or lose your heroic reputation in the area. Time to get out those rules on what happens if you aren’t properly insulated or start to run low on supplies as you go through a lengthy sequence of mostly linear encounters. Warm up with a small group of bugbears. Then an ambush from a somewhat larger group of orcs. An ominous bunch of frozen bodies from a previous attack by the wayside. (that you can get a bit of information from if your cleric memorised speak with dead today) Then things get a little weirder, as you’re harried by groups of yeti led by our extraplanar cover star, a new monster from the plane of ice created just for this adventure. At this point you reach a fork in the road and are faced with the choice of heading straight to your destination and skipping the second half of the adventure, or going north to find out the cause of all these troubles. Turns out the frost giants are getting expansionistic, and they & their minions have taken over an old dwarven hall. (although they can’t fit in big chunks of it, so they’re busy renovating, leaving it open to the elements in multiple places.) Do you have what it takes to turn back the tide and drive them out of the place?
This winds up feeling more like a two-round Polyhedron adventure than a Dungeon one, with the first session a linear sequence of combat encounters and the second a fairly short dungeoncrawl that could also probably be done in a single session. It pushes you hard to do certain things while punishing you for not doing others despite there being very little chance you’d think to do them. (ransoming the giant leaders instead of killing them to prevent this from leading into a blood feud? How many groups would think to do that even if they had the rope to hold a giant-sized captive?) There’s plenty of good elements in here, with an interesting new monster, new magical items and a map that actually covers a large area, but the way they’re put together in the adventure itself is pretty annoying. Frankly, I’d be more interested in seeing them tackle the obvious sequel, where the two human countries have to patch up their differences and join forces to deal with full-on war against the frost giant armies. That would be much more ambitious and to my tastes.
(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon Issue 76: Sep/Oct 1999
part 4/5
Crusader: It's so easy to take the piss out of the whole paladin concept. Between criticisms that hitting things really well is maybe not the skillset best equipped to spreading good throughout the world and moral relativity deconstructing the whole concept of good & evil in the first place, there's a lot of people that have problems with them, and that's even before you get past the conceptual level to more mundane complaints like them frequently being played as stuck-up prigs or bureaucratic lawful dicks. Dragon has done several articles on that from different perspectives and degrees of cynicism over the years. Due to it’s format, Dungeon has to be more show, not tell.
The PC’s are going about their business in town one day when an old man has a heart attack and keels over. Presuming they don’t completely ignore it, they get there just in time to hear his last words, which are of course a cryptic clue to the rest of the adventure. First thing they need to do is find out who Lord Broden is. This is not hard, because he’s a very famous paladin. Despite his noble title, he lives in a tiny leaky shack in the worst part of town because he gives all the money he finds in his adventures to the needy. When the PC’s find him, he’s conked out from having been going heroically non-stop for a week. If the PC’s wake him, (or hang around for him to wake up naturally), he’ll tell them that the second word was the name of the magic sword the wizard was supposed to be making him. With any luck that means he finished it and was coming to tell him. However, he has dragons to slay, undead to turn, etc, and won’t take a few hours out of his busy schedule even though having the sword would make subsequent tasks much easier, so the PC’s will have to do it for him. This of course means going to a wizard’s tower and dealing with your typical array of magical traps & puzzles defending the treasure, which his other final words will be crucial in solving without having to fight some nasty constructs that are probably above your pay grade, then once you’re done, finding the paladin again, (or doing a whole load of tedious waiting around) because who knows how long it’ll be before he checks in at home again.
So this is a combat-light little adventure where all the drama is driven by the main NPC being a completely relentless engine of do-gooding, even at the expense of practicality and their own health. It feels like a lesson to groups that are similarly devoid of personality, be it in the same vein of paragonic purity or the charop obsessed murderhobo end who spend every copper on more powerful magic items, that maybe they should lighten up a bit and do more roleplaying between the fighting & treasure hunting, form connections to the world they're in. It’s an aesop to the readers as much as it is an adventure to actually be played. It’s an interesting read, but a bit short and underwhelming as an actual adventure, with lots of dialogue bits where the PC’s don’t really have much choice of action. Tolerable once, but it would hit diminishing returns very quickly if they tried to do the same trick again.
Maps of Mystery invites us into an inn to stay the night. Not just any old inn though, as it has a big statue of a dragon in the main lobby, a nice balcony on the upper level and a secret door leading down to an easily expanded basement level. No en suite bathrooms though, so if all the rooms are fully booked there's going to be a bit of a queue at the (completely gender neutral, tough luck TERFs) privys first thing in the morning. It's spacious enough and with enough distinct features that if a fight breaks out here you can make it properly swashbuckling instead of just a boring back and forth until someone's knocked out. There are definitely worse places to start an adventure in.
part 4/5
Crusader: It's so easy to take the piss out of the whole paladin concept. Between criticisms that hitting things really well is maybe not the skillset best equipped to spreading good throughout the world and moral relativity deconstructing the whole concept of good & evil in the first place, there's a lot of people that have problems with them, and that's even before you get past the conceptual level to more mundane complaints like them frequently being played as stuck-up prigs or bureaucratic lawful dicks. Dragon has done several articles on that from different perspectives and degrees of cynicism over the years. Due to it’s format, Dungeon has to be more show, not tell.
The PC’s are going about their business in town one day when an old man has a heart attack and keels over. Presuming they don’t completely ignore it, they get there just in time to hear his last words, which are of course a cryptic clue to the rest of the adventure. First thing they need to do is find out who Lord Broden is. This is not hard, because he’s a very famous paladin. Despite his noble title, he lives in a tiny leaky shack in the worst part of town because he gives all the money he finds in his adventures to the needy. When the PC’s find him, he’s conked out from having been going heroically non-stop for a week. If the PC’s wake him, (or hang around for him to wake up naturally), he’ll tell them that the second word was the name of the magic sword the wizard was supposed to be making him. With any luck that means he finished it and was coming to tell him. However, he has dragons to slay, undead to turn, etc, and won’t take a few hours out of his busy schedule even though having the sword would make subsequent tasks much easier, so the PC’s will have to do it for him. This of course means going to a wizard’s tower and dealing with your typical array of magical traps & puzzles defending the treasure, which his other final words will be crucial in solving without having to fight some nasty constructs that are probably above your pay grade, then once you’re done, finding the paladin again, (or doing a whole load of tedious waiting around) because who knows how long it’ll be before he checks in at home again.
So this is a combat-light little adventure where all the drama is driven by the main NPC being a completely relentless engine of do-gooding, even at the expense of practicality and their own health. It feels like a lesson to groups that are similarly devoid of personality, be it in the same vein of paragonic purity or the charop obsessed murderhobo end who spend every copper on more powerful magic items, that maybe they should lighten up a bit and do more roleplaying between the fighting & treasure hunting, form connections to the world they're in. It’s an aesop to the readers as much as it is an adventure to actually be played. It’s an interesting read, but a bit short and underwhelming as an actual adventure, with lots of dialogue bits where the PC’s don’t really have much choice of action. Tolerable once, but it would hit diminishing returns very quickly if they tried to do the same trick again.
Maps of Mystery invites us into an inn to stay the night. Not just any old inn though, as it has a big statue of a dragon in the main lobby, a nice balcony on the upper level and a secret door leading down to an easily expanded basement level. No en suite bathrooms though, so if all the rooms are fully booked there's going to be a bit of a queue at the (completely gender neutral, tough luck TERFs) privys first thing in the morning. It's spacious enough and with enough distinct features that if a fight breaks out here you can make it properly swashbuckling instead of just a boring back and forth until someone's knocked out. There are definitely worse places to start an adventure in.
(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon Issue 76: Sep/Oct 1999
part 5/5
Earth Tones: After all the heroic nonsense of the last adventure, this one has the somewhat more neutral motivation of exploring a recently discovered abandoned dwarven steading for treasure. Of course, when the person who discovered it sends out a general call for adventurers there's a distinct possibility other ones will get there before you and take most of the obvious treasure. There's also the risk of dwarves turning up claiming to be relatives of the original owners, (whether they actually are or not) which means they're entitled to take over the property by inheritance. So it turns out here, where the dwarves are actually duergar that have been looking for this place for ages, and not above using theft and causing trouble for the human settlement nearby in the process to get the treasure they came for. This means there's not a huge amount of actual dungeoncrawling here since the place is already mostly mapped out and the treasure claimed by the time you get there, but there is plenty of interesting stuff going on, between the social wrangling and attacks from burrowing creatures in the village like purple worms, bulettes and umber hulks. So this turns out to be mostly an exploration of the politics that happen in a world where dungeon-crawling is a common thing and there are lots of groups of adventurers competing for the same treasures, some independent wanderers, some sponsored by various nobles who will bring down the full force of the law upon you if you try to take stuff found on their land without giving them a good cut of the loot. If you're high enough level, you can still get away or kill them and take over, but either of those will probably lead to further consequences somewhere down the line. (which hopefully can be fun in themselves, but it'll take a bit of work from the DM.) If you want to put a bit more realpolitik in your dungeon crawling as players go up levels and attract more attention from powerful figures in the world, this is a pretty good example of how to do it. The kind of thing they should have done years ago, before the whole attracting followers and domain management thing was mostly forgotten about, as we really need more adventures covering this phase of the adventuring lifecycle to ease them into it without the campaign stalling.
Fruit of the Vine: Our final adventure also sticks to the mildly warm end of the colour spectrum, as it looks at what happens when Olive Slime and Yellow Musk Creepers combine. Rather than the slime simply eating the creeper, they reach a symbiosis that makes them more deadly than the sum of their parts, although the zombies probably don't stick around as well long-term. Someone the PC's know has been infected, preferably a merchant or other well-connected figure they have regular contact with between adventures. (so hopefully they'll look for a cure instead of just killing them straight away when they start acting weird) When confronted by you or a bystander who's seen them acting suspiciously earlier they'll release a bunch of slime infected rats and try to get away. Asking people about their recent movements will lead you to the abandoned house where the plant itself is growing. Explore it and root out the cause of the problem. Fortunately, all the infected creatures are still linked to the master plant, and destroying it will free them as long as you don't dawdle and let them plant new seeds elsewhere. (and hey, you can always say it happened offscreen anyway if you want to set up a sequel) A short adventure, but one packed with little setting details that are ripe for expansion and follow-ups, this is another example of the kind of monster design they'll use a lot more next edition, turning some things into templates that can be combined with all sorts of other things, advanced with class levels and generally customised instead of having to make up a whole new kind of monster to challenge the PC's just because they've gone up a level. Chris's tenure continues to encourage that kind of thinking, which I definitely approve of.
A curiously self-aware issue, with lots of adventures that feel like intentional exploration of and commentary on D&D tropes. Sometimes the adventure part is good as well, and sometimes it feels a bit underwritten compared to the meta bits, but they have definitely given me more to think about than in the average issue, making this review longer than average as well. Too much self awareness may get irritating at times, but it’s still better than being completely lacking in it. Let’s see what lessons next issue will have to impart, and if they’ll be good enough to melt the heart of a hardened scrooge.
part 5/5
Earth Tones: After all the heroic nonsense of the last adventure, this one has the somewhat more neutral motivation of exploring a recently discovered abandoned dwarven steading for treasure. Of course, when the person who discovered it sends out a general call for adventurers there's a distinct possibility other ones will get there before you and take most of the obvious treasure. There's also the risk of dwarves turning up claiming to be relatives of the original owners, (whether they actually are or not) which means they're entitled to take over the property by inheritance. So it turns out here, where the dwarves are actually duergar that have been looking for this place for ages, and not above using theft and causing trouble for the human settlement nearby in the process to get the treasure they came for. This means there's not a huge amount of actual dungeoncrawling here since the place is already mostly mapped out and the treasure claimed by the time you get there, but there is plenty of interesting stuff going on, between the social wrangling and attacks from burrowing creatures in the village like purple worms, bulettes and umber hulks. So this turns out to be mostly an exploration of the politics that happen in a world where dungeon-crawling is a common thing and there are lots of groups of adventurers competing for the same treasures, some independent wanderers, some sponsored by various nobles who will bring down the full force of the law upon you if you try to take stuff found on their land without giving them a good cut of the loot. If you're high enough level, you can still get away or kill them and take over, but either of those will probably lead to further consequences somewhere down the line. (which hopefully can be fun in themselves, but it'll take a bit of work from the DM.) If you want to put a bit more realpolitik in your dungeon crawling as players go up levels and attract more attention from powerful figures in the world, this is a pretty good example of how to do it. The kind of thing they should have done years ago, before the whole attracting followers and domain management thing was mostly forgotten about, as we really need more adventures covering this phase of the adventuring lifecycle to ease them into it without the campaign stalling.
Fruit of the Vine: Our final adventure also sticks to the mildly warm end of the colour spectrum, as it looks at what happens when Olive Slime and Yellow Musk Creepers combine. Rather than the slime simply eating the creeper, they reach a symbiosis that makes them more deadly than the sum of their parts, although the zombies probably don't stick around as well long-term. Someone the PC's know has been infected, preferably a merchant or other well-connected figure they have regular contact with between adventures. (so hopefully they'll look for a cure instead of just killing them straight away when they start acting weird) When confronted by you or a bystander who's seen them acting suspiciously earlier they'll release a bunch of slime infected rats and try to get away. Asking people about their recent movements will lead you to the abandoned house where the plant itself is growing. Explore it and root out the cause of the problem. Fortunately, all the infected creatures are still linked to the master plant, and destroying it will free them as long as you don't dawdle and let them plant new seeds elsewhere. (and hey, you can always say it happened offscreen anyway if you want to set up a sequel) A short adventure, but one packed with little setting details that are ripe for expansion and follow-ups, this is another example of the kind of monster design they'll use a lot more next edition, turning some things into templates that can be combined with all sorts of other things, advanced with class levels and generally customised instead of having to make up a whole new kind of monster to challenge the PC's just because they've gone up a level. Chris's tenure continues to encourage that kind of thinking, which I definitely approve of.
A curiously self-aware issue, with lots of adventures that feel like intentional exploration of and commentary on D&D tropes. Sometimes the adventure part is good as well, and sometimes it feels a bit underwritten compared to the meta bits, but they have definitely given me more to think about than in the average issue, making this review longer than average as well. Too much self awareness may get irritating at times, but it’s still better than being completely lacking in it. Let’s see what lessons next issue will have to impart, and if they’ll be good enough to melt the heart of a hardened scrooge.
(un)reason
Legend
Polyhedron Issue 138: October 1999
part 1/5
32 pages. Oncoming train! Much harder to get out of the way of one underground as well, and that’s not even getting into the trouble you’ll have breathing after it passes if it’s a steam engine. Looks like we might be getting something on the grimier side of the victorian era, which is completely fine by me. As long as they don’t overdo the figurative railroading, there should be something worthwhile in this issue.
Erik's Editorial: Well, we have a new full-time editor after several issues of interregnum. It’s Erik Mona! He starts as he means to go on, by telling us he’s been a superfan for years, and intends to fill the newszine with things he’d like to see as a fan, which will hopefully also please other readers. He’s aware of the tension between people who read it for the convention & tournament stuff, and people who don’t go to conventions and read it for the articles that are useful in home games, and wants to keep on juggling trying to please both, but precisely what the balance will be ultimately depends on what you send in. Going by his tenure in Dragon, we can probably expect to see more deep lore & continuity, and a lot more Greyhawk material on a regular basis. All stuff I approve of, presuming it doesn’t get squashed by the executives who wanted everything all generic and working with corebook only all the time, which was a real problem in the early 2000’s for Dragon.
Notes from HQ: Erik might be doing most of the work on the newszine now, but Robert Weise is still in charge of the RPGA overall and doing his own editorial, giving us two for the price of one. Once again he’s talking about what they plan to do differently next year. More accessibility for everyone! Adventures aimed at home campaigns, stores and conventions. The launch of Living Greyhawk, their biggest, most multimedia Living setting yet. Converting the other Living settings to D&D 3e, like that’s not going to be a massive headache. Stepping up their program to train new Judges and finally get that player/GM ratio under control. So this lets you know they’re not going to be catering to nostalgia in the RPGA. Once the edition change hits, it’ll be all 3e all the time, unlike the very slow 2e changeover where they were still using comeliness in Living City 6 years later. This seems likely to lose them at least few players that would have stayed if they were a broader church. Will they bring in more new people than they lose? 3e was pretty successful overall, so probably, but it remains to be seen how much friction and griping letters there are along the way.
Table Talk: This column is shorter than usual, and entirely devoted to winners of previous competitions rather than setting any new ones. The adventure design contest was won by Heirs of Elemental Evil (not to be confused with the official Return to the Temple adventure that'll come out in 2001) by William James Cuffe. Star Wars adventures took 2nd & 3rd place, so it must have got quite a few submissions as well. The multi-round tournament winner was the poetically named And Pearls Do Not Dissolve in the Mud, which leaves me very curious what the actual plot of the adventure was. Googling shows it's an Al-Qadim one, which makes sense, although an actual copy remains elusive. The recent crop of conventions also gives us lots of tournament winners adding points to their decathlon scores, bringing us to a total of 22 clubs participating. The PM Players have a clear lead, making it look pretty certain they'll be the overall winners, but 2nd & 3rd are still being fiercely fought over, with just a few points between half a dozen groups that could easily shift with a few big wins. Obviously plenty was happening, but none of it is particularly useful for me now, save as as statistical analysis.
part 1/5
32 pages. Oncoming train! Much harder to get out of the way of one underground as well, and that’s not even getting into the trouble you’ll have breathing after it passes if it’s a steam engine. Looks like we might be getting something on the grimier side of the victorian era, which is completely fine by me. As long as they don’t overdo the figurative railroading, there should be something worthwhile in this issue.
Erik's Editorial: Well, we have a new full-time editor after several issues of interregnum. It’s Erik Mona! He starts as he means to go on, by telling us he’s been a superfan for years, and intends to fill the newszine with things he’d like to see as a fan, which will hopefully also please other readers. He’s aware of the tension between people who read it for the convention & tournament stuff, and people who don’t go to conventions and read it for the articles that are useful in home games, and wants to keep on juggling trying to please both, but precisely what the balance will be ultimately depends on what you send in. Going by his tenure in Dragon, we can probably expect to see more deep lore & continuity, and a lot more Greyhawk material on a regular basis. All stuff I approve of, presuming it doesn’t get squashed by the executives who wanted everything all generic and working with corebook only all the time, which was a real problem in the early 2000’s for Dragon.
Notes from HQ: Erik might be doing most of the work on the newszine now, but Robert Weise is still in charge of the RPGA overall and doing his own editorial, giving us two for the price of one. Once again he’s talking about what they plan to do differently next year. More accessibility for everyone! Adventures aimed at home campaigns, stores and conventions. The launch of Living Greyhawk, their biggest, most multimedia Living setting yet. Converting the other Living settings to D&D 3e, like that’s not going to be a massive headache. Stepping up their program to train new Judges and finally get that player/GM ratio under control. So this lets you know they’re not going to be catering to nostalgia in the RPGA. Once the edition change hits, it’ll be all 3e all the time, unlike the very slow 2e changeover where they were still using comeliness in Living City 6 years later. This seems likely to lose them at least few players that would have stayed if they were a broader church. Will they bring in more new people than they lose? 3e was pretty successful overall, so probably, but it remains to be seen how much friction and griping letters there are along the way.
Table Talk: This column is shorter than usual, and entirely devoted to winners of previous competitions rather than setting any new ones. The adventure design contest was won by Heirs of Elemental Evil (not to be confused with the official Return to the Temple adventure that'll come out in 2001) by William James Cuffe. Star Wars adventures took 2nd & 3rd place, so it must have got quite a few submissions as well. The multi-round tournament winner was the poetically named And Pearls Do Not Dissolve in the Mud, which leaves me very curious what the actual plot of the adventure was. Googling shows it's an Al-Qadim one, which makes sense, although an actual copy remains elusive. The recent crop of conventions also gives us lots of tournament winners adding points to their decathlon scores, bringing us to a total of 22 clubs participating. The PM Players have a clear lead, making it look pretty certain they'll be the overall winners, but 2nd & 3rd are still being fiercely fought over, with just a few points between half a dozen groups that could easily shift with a few big wins. Obviously plenty was happening, but none of it is particularly useful for me now, save as as statistical analysis.
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