TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 139: December 1999



part 2/5



Table Talk: This years's decathlon draws to a close, and here's a load more winners, along with the last few events of the year. CARP were the only group to even try for the Most new Certified Judges at Gen Con this year. They also did pretty well on the best report front, although FBS managed to pip them at the post. GEAR won the proposal for best new Living campaign idea with Living Rokugan, which comes as no surprise knowing WotC and AEG will partner up to do 3e Oriental Adventures and feature Rokugan heavily in it. Still up in the air are Most Classic tournaments played, most tournament rounds judged and most service to the network. I guess we'll find out next time if enough people bothered to enter those to give out a full set of 1st, 2nd and 3rd places for each.



Service Points: Speaking of services to the network, that's another thing that gets a bunch of changes in what services give how many points, and more importantly, letting you redeem them for various things. This comes with a big catch though. Only service points earned since the WotC takeover are eligible for spending. No matter how much you did for TSR between 81-96, it doesn't count, which does seem a bit churlish, but they admit that if everyone cashed out all those old points at once it'd crash their finances. Mildly irritating. I guess that's an example of the problems you can face when you've been going too long under multiple owners and have a bunch of legacy features few people use, but enough that you can't just scrap them. You never when one'll turn out to be a loadbearing feature and removing it will cause a domino effect of people quitting.



Ordering Policies: Unlike the Living City rules, these remain pretty similar to last time they printed them. Events are divided into Conventions: 25 or more tables over multiple days, Game Days: smaller but still open to the public, and Private Shows and what your even is classed as affects which modules you can order. Events are divided into Classic & Campaign, as well as 4 tiers of expected character level that affect how many points you get, plus the additional tags of charity benefit and Judge only. You can request up to 4 things per day, but only 2 for any particular setting. If you're only requesting already approved modules turnaround is pretty fast now, 2 weeks online or a month through snail mail, but if you're writing your own exclusive adventures and getting them sanctioned you need to start the wheels rolling at least 6 months in advance. Once you've done all this, make sure you have someone to collect all the scoring forms and get them back on time so the points are added to people's memberships. Lots of repeating the basics here. Looks like it's going to be one of those kinds of issues. :sighs:



2000 Club Decathlon: This year's decathlon isn't over yet, but they're already trying to get more signups to the next one. Since one of their competitions this year was new ideas for more competitions, they have lots of new creative events on the roster. Best Legendary Weapon, Building the Perfect Game Master, Best New Faith, and a multi-round event called the Monster Mash where you design new monsters and then pit them agains other people's designs at Gen Con. These join old favourites like best newsletter, best one & multi-round tournaments written, most rounds played/judged and most new members recruited. As usual, it does seem to be a disproportionate amount of effort for something only entered by a few dozen groups, but i guess it does give them lots of new things to put in the newszine if they're ever short. Slightly more new ideas worth noting than the last article, but still a lot of repetition going on.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 139: December 1999



part 3/5



Adventurer's Guide 2000: The procedural stuff grinds onwards. You no longer have to pay for adventures in their Retail Play Program, as they make sending you .pdfs over email default. Just make sure you have a host that can deal with attachments of at least 2MB and a printer, then run the games at your FLGS to earn your rewards. (filling in all the forms correctly afterwards) Each month there'll be a new exclusive premier adventure for you to enjoy. Don't let us catch you running them at home or not actually telling the public about it and just using it to gain points for your friends. Another good example of how the internet is making a lot of things quicker and cheaper, and as ever, I hope someone still has these adventures stored way back in their inboxes for archival purposes.



Member Spotlight: Rich Osterhout is a network admin, who appropriately loves his Shadowrun. While he started with D&D like nearly everyone else, he soon found the Living City frustrating and devoted most of his energy to Virtual Seattle. He's rapidly become a big fish in a small pond, writing lots of adventures for it and also doing database work. In his ideal world, Shadowrun would overtake D&D as the biggest system around, but that doesn't seem likely. Still, if he can keep it a viable alternative at lots of conventions, maybe make them a little bigger so Gen Con actually feels the challenge to stay on top, he's doing his job right. In the meantime, he slips bits of shadowrun lingo into his day job, because sysadmins do have their little in-jokes and it's easier to incorporate decking terminology than D&D stuff without the muggles noticing. The kind of person you might not notice, but you'd soon see the effects if he stopped doing his job. It's important to make them feel appreciated every now and then.



City Stories: The last Polyhedron UK had us breaking into the temple of Tymora in Arabel. It does seem an odd stroke of luck that they'd decide to cover the Raven's Bluff branch so soon afterwards. But then again, luck is what she's all about. Since they can finance themselves by gambling as well as donations they're actually richer than the average temple and have bought out a bunch of the adjacent buildings as well. Now they have two halls of residence, three gambling halls, three "halls of hazards" where you can hone your skills against mostly illusionary threats aimed at different XP tiers, a storage warehouse and a nice garden shrine in the middle of all this. Worshipping her is evidently more like attending an amusement park than the solemn praying & hymn singing Jehovah expects of you. Her clergy are pretty much what you'd expect, whimsical approaches to their duties, complicated love lives, lengthy adventuring sabbaticals and one paladin vainly being LG in the middle of it all because it's a broad church. Another decent but unexceptional entry in this series that's easy enough to use, as they're more likely than the average clergy to get into troubles and then have adventurers coincidentally come along at just the right time to help out.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Oeble is a particularly multilayered town, so it gets another instalment devoted to it. On top of the streets and underground network, there's also a network of bridges between higher storeys called the rainspans. Some of them are pretty rickety, so you can definitely get some dramatic fight scenes if things go sour up there. Once again, although it's a mostly human settlement, it feels more like a megadungeon than a regular shaped town, existing in three dimensions, layout regularly changing and precisely who or what is occupying each building changing even more frequently. Like Waterdeep and many other places in the Realms, the ruler goes masked when performing official duties, keeping their identity a secret, which is pretty sensible in a world full of powerful magic that can scry & fry you from a distance. If you want a home that's almost as dangerous as the places you go adventuring to, there's rarely a dull moment here. I pity the rival border kingdom that tries to attack it - all this activity is probably pretty good for gaining levels. As long as there's all sorts of things to buy and sell you can't get hold of elsewhere, it's survival seems pretty assured.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 139: December 1999



part 4/5



Glyphs of Devotion: We just had one religion special back in april. I guess they had a whole bunch of submissions that didn't quite make the deadline, because there's multiple godly articles in this issue as well. Any dungeoneer worth their salt will probably be familiar with how annoying magical symbols & glyphs can be when triggered unexpectedly. It's no surprise that various clergies would develop exclusive ones relevant to their interests.

Tymora's Tythe is generally put on small stones to give the carriers good luck. A few random donors after a service will find fortune in their future endeavours. Low-key, but probably gets a lot more use than ones trapping the treasure vault.

Milil's Musical Scrolls let anyone imitate the effects of bardic music simply by breaking the seal and releasing the song recorded. The kind of one-use effect that's handy, but most groups will probably hoard indefinitely rather than actually using.

Lathander's Candle is more traditionally glyphy, activating when undead come near and causing ongoing damage until they go out of range. Since it glows brightly when active, it's a good warning system both at home and when dungeoneering.

Mystra's Spellblessing temporarily counteracts Wild or Dead magic zones. If you're expecting to encounter them, stock up on glyphs at your local temple beforehand.

Tempus' Rage is cast on weapons, and sends the user into a berserker rage automatically when they hit something. This is handy both in getting the hit & damage bonuses for yourself, and tricking an enemy into doing something rash. All of these actually seem pretty useful as long as your party has the right composition.



Powers that Be: Turns out the cover is linked to this column, as we look at Xan Yae, the closest thing Oerth has to a god of ninjas. This is because her portfolio is a particularly subtle and complex one, that just happens to include lots of things also associated with ninjas. Dusk, shadows, martial arts, internal discipline, psionics, they're all parts of seeking connection with the Universal Mind and achieving Internal Peace & Perpetual Harmony. This may involve stealthily shiving people of all alignments who are disruptive to those ideals, but hey, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. So it turns out that she's actually a pretty significant part of Greyhawk's axis of active neutrality, making sure neither good or evil ever become supreme and spoil the world for everyone else by subtly putting a thumb on the scales of justice. This means her specialty priests don't fit the visual stereotype of clerics at all, with no armor, mostly small sharp weapons allowed as well as plenty of skill at stealth and unarmed combat. They can easily be used as allies or adversaries and catch the players off guard with the range of tricks they have up their sleeve either way. Surprised she wasn't among the ones included in the 3e core set, but I guess they wanted ones with simpler, more iconic portfolios for the casual players.



Practical Tournament Play: Speaking of info aimed at casuals, here's another couple of pages of your basic roleplaying advice. Remember that RPG's are a group activity, don't hog the limelight, don't split the party, encourage the quiet players to participate, give people room to actually roleplay rather than just going straight from one combat encounter to the next, make their backgrounds and contacts meaningful. All stuff we've seen before and a strong reminder how much tournament play struggles with that, as people who've never met each other are thrown together and have to figure out a functional group dynamic in 4 hours or less. It's easy to see how people would simply not bother, letting hack & slash prevail. I have no doubt we'll be seeing this advice repeated yet again in the future, as you'll never get everyone agreeing on exactly the same playstyle and implementing it perfectly every session.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 139: December 1999



part 5/5



Marybelle Visitor's Information Grid: Also somewhat repetitive is the info on the Living Verge, which is exactly the same as last time, only boiled down into a flowchart which gives us the facts without all the waffle of an IC newscast. Population, gravity, major cities, the basics of their legal system, all of it is pretty familiar to me by now. It's been over a year since they first announced it and they haven't got any external submissions adding to this, which is slightly concerning for it's health whenever they do finally get around to launching it.



Living Verge Hero Creation Rules: Turn the page, turns out the time is now, which makes the repetition on the previous one slightly less irritating. They do have a fair number of restrictions to put on your characters on top of the basic starting level point allocations though. All equipment must be tech level 7 or lower. We reserve the right to expel your character from the Verge Confederation for performing criminal acts at any time. Races are corebook only. No robots either. No brooding lone wolves, we want characters who work well in a team. You can't start as a member of a military organisation, but you can join one in play if you get the chance in an adventure. You can only have one of the three sources of psionics. Some cyberware is illegal or only allowed if you're in the military. Certain Perks & Flaws are banned, and make sure your points add up properly. Some social groups don't like other ones and if you join them you have a ready source of conflict. Contacts work like this, and not like that. You definitely have a lot more options as a starting level character than D&D ones, so this is a longer list than the Living City one. Let's hope that having had plenty of time to think about this in development, they won't have to add more anytime soon in response to players finding abusive combos. Or the opposite extreme of course, where no-one cares enough to make characters in the first place, which would make worse reading for me.



Internet 101: The column stays in theme and looks at resources for various gods in the internet. Pantheon.org is still going strong and probably covers considerably more mythologies from around the world than it did in the 90's. On the other hand, Bulfinch's Mythology no longer has an online version - you'll have to actually buy the books to consult that old classic. Ancientsites.com and apbnline.com have also become merely history themselves. But sacredsites.com is still going, and even more importantly, so is the marvellous Planescape resource mimir.net, although new entries are very thin on the ground these days. That gives us a batting average of around 50/50 that have stood the test of time or not. We've had worse months.



The survey can't resist making a tomb of horrors reference. Pity the hirelings sacrificed by the PC's so their own characters could live through the experience.



Some interesting IC stuff here, but also a lot of repeating and updating the basic rules. Obviously that would have become inevitable when the big edition change hit, but it does feel a bit too soon since the last time. I guess the amount of content this year was less than last so it would go by quicker in general. Let's find out how quickly the new millennium passes and how much fun there is to be had along the way.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 78: Jan/Feb 2000



part 1/5



92 pages. Purple reign, purple reign. Why are these giants purple and what is the male one with a fabulous beard (which is how you know they're not drow) king of? Apparently we're starting the year off in shakespearean style, which should at least ensure an interesting story, even if the adventure part is railroading and mechanically unbalanced. Let's see how dramatic we get before the edition change sends us back to the dungeon again.



Editorial: Unsurprisingly, the announcement of 3e has provoked a flurry of questions. No, they're not accepting any more 2e adventures, they already have more than enough. They'll still listen to proposals, but you'll need to rewrite them using 3e rules when they come out. Yes, they're still accepting Alternity adventures. The number of campaign world specific adventures (apart from Greyhawk & Forgotten Realms, which are basically generic anyway) will be way down, partly because they won't have all the rules for them under the new edition anyway. You can still influence the little details with pressuring letters and good submissions, but the big one is set in stone: 2e is going away and it ain't coming back. You should feel lucky that WotC spent three years coming up with the new one rather than rushing something out just to make D&D feel more theirs after the takeover. There have been many far more hostile and less successful transitions over the years, including some of the biggest social media sites.



Letters: First letter is also concerned about the 3e transition, which gives them the chance to answer more questions straight away. They're going to get over the gap without a hiatus by publishing adventures written by playtesters in the first few 3e issues. There's actually quite a lot of them and you could have been one if you were paying attention in the RPGA. It's hardly going to be a staff-only affair.

Second is generally complementary of issue 76, but thinks the end of Edge of Midnight is a bit too neat, and the mapping for Fruit of the Vine wasn't great. They use this opportunity to add some minor errata of their own unprompted.

Third thinks the sewer pipe in A Day at the Market is ridiculously positioned. It probably made sense when it was built decades ago, but without proper civic planning, all kinds of weirdness can add up.

Fourth & Fifth offer the typical contrasting opinions on Stephen Danielle doing all the art for an issue. It certainly looked nice, but is it cutting off opportunity for new artists? Rest assured that they're still looking for fresh faces, as it takes ages for one artist to do a whole issue and probably costs more too.

Sixth is annoyed at them doing a nonsensical deathtrap dungeon last issue after spending so long telling us not to submit adventures like that. Despite every effort by the official writers to push more refined tastes over the past 10 years, they're still actually really popular with the general public. It's about time they gave the people what they're asking for.

Finally, a short piece by James Wyatt on how to increase your odds of being published, which of course contradicts the last letter in some respects, as he's not with the whole back to the dungeon and keep everything generic agenda, but the old lessons of persistence, working on your SPG and taking editorial suggestions without getting angry always apply.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 78: Jan/Feb 2000



part 2/5



Lear the Giant-King: In 1995 they did two shakespearean adventures in quick succession. Now they go back to the well a third time to blow the story of King Lear up to Storm Giant sized proportions. Even if you've spoiled yourself on the story, you'll need to be pretty high level to have a chance of influencing it to have a better outcome. By the time the PC's have a chance to get involved, he's already banished Cordelia and gone quite mad, which since he's a storm giant has dire consequences for the rest of the world, as a cataclysmic perpetual storm brews around his castle that will just spread and spread until he's killed or cured. You'll come across a severely wounded Cordelia, who will deliver the necessary exposition unless they kill her straight away without listening. (bad idea, but the adventure is built with enough flexibility that that wouldn't completely ruin it) To have a decent chance of getting a good ending, it'd be best not to go straight to attack him, but seek out other giants and get them on side. Can you cure the blinded Gloucester, intimidate Edmund into switching allegiances, find the disguised Edgar and get through his madness, solve the riddles of Clotpull the jester, find your way to Cornwall's undersea castle, get up to Goneril's cloud island, before finally making your way to Lear's castle for the final confrontation? Not much dungeoneering in this one, since each of the locations has relatively few, but giant-sized rooms, but a lot of room for dramatic roleplaying, epic battles and some serious environmental challenges in the overland bits between, as you'll need to be able to deal with both flying and underwater sections, all while enduring severe weather penalties. This puts together several different ideas that have been the whole gimmick in other adventures and expects the PC's to be able to cope with them all in quick succession. It's all pleasingly massive in scale, variety and ambition and I can quite see why they picked it as the cover story. Top marks. Now I just hope everything else in the issue won't feel like an anticlimax by comparison.



Side Treks - Veiled Threats: Oh man, it's been a loooong time since we last faced Juiblex cultists. The frequency of old-school callbacks continues to increase. The lands of Baron Kendric Rodham (or suitable substitute in your own campaign) have been dealing with them for a while now and he's hiring you to take care of them. They're not about to just sit in their dungeon and wait for this though, and they'll disguise themselves as another band of supplicants to get near and attack, trying to kidnap him and get out rather than fighting to the death. They've planned this well in advance and are heavily buffed with various magics, so it's not impossible they'll succeed. Whether they do or not, that's an easy lead-in to another adventure, and this is where having read this for many years comes in handy, as I can recommend In The Black Hours (Polyhedron 22-23) or The Dark Conventicle (Dungeon 11) as particularly well suited to be joined up into a larger story here. So this is a demonstration of how to keep the whole get adventure hook, pursue plot formula from getting too boring and formulaic. It takes conscious effort to keep it from being a mysterious guy in a tavern every time and I'm glad the Dungeon editors go to that effort to mix it up. Useful on it's own and extra useful to a long-term reader like me.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 78: Jan/Feb 2000



part 3/5



Peer Amid the Waters: After a big adventure that expected you to take multiple challenging terrains in stride, it is indeed a little tiresome to go back to a low level one where dealing with being underwater and in the dark is a big deal for the PC's. Through an extremely implausible and somewhat comical series of events, a nixie wound up opening a portal to an ancient egyptian style tomb. Since she was underwater at the time, this acted like a big plughole, flooding the tomb and sucking her in in the process. Other nixies followed, but failed to return, so now they're doing the traditional routine of asking the nearest passing adventurers. The result is short and somewhat comical, but also a serious challenge at that level, as you have to deal with the juxtaposition of various aquatic creatures sucked into the dungeon and the very confused and annoyed undead that were already occupying it, while having to worry about the duration of your water breathing powers and lighting spells, plus the possibility of the portal closing behind you. At least many of your opponents will also be suffering the penalties to attack and movement for not being used to underwater combat. Not original, but a decent enough combination of unusually juxtaposed elements that it doesn't feel redundant, even if it's not as cool as the previous two adventures this issue and it once again makes an effort to make the dungeon feel alive rather than something that'll just sit there unchanged no matter how long the PC's take to explore it. Another one I'd definitely consider using.



Nodwick's bandage disguise probably won't last long underwater, but as long as it lasts long enough to fool the mummies of the tomb, that's one fewer combat encounter to worry about.



Side Treks - Unexpected Guests: Time for another familiar formula - the short adventure that's just an excuse to introduce a new monster or magic item. Regular bags of holding are useful, but they're limited by having no air supply when closed. What if there was one that not only had it's own air supply, but also comfortable lodgings, magically generated food & water and stable gravity inside? You'd still need to watch you don't get trapped inside and carried who knows where, but it'd make extended wilderness travel and dungeoneering a lot more pleasant. Well you're in luck, because you're about to find one in a treasure hoard, abandoned on the sidewalk or wherever else your DM decides. The catch is you can't just open it by force without breaking it, and when you do find the command word it turns out to be occupied by a bunch of derro trapped by it's previous owner. They'll try to ambush you if you go in there, or just get out if you leave it open for any length of time. Either way, it's a decent enough combat encounter where the enemies use their powers cleverly and don't want to fight to the death, then once you've cleared it you have a new magic item that'll be a significant improvement to your quality of life. If you're getting tired of all that tracking encumbrance and rations annoyance it'll make your players very happy.



Alternity Fast Play Game: The D&D fast-play adventure appeared repeatedly both in modules and standalone last year. Now they're trying to replicate the formula for Alternity, giving you 4 pregens and sending them to break another operative out of an alien prison. Unfortunately they aren't even going to give you the chance to roll to do it stealthily so you'll have to fight your way through a linear series of combat encounters with a few noncombat challenges thrown in for variety. It's slightly less handholdy than it's D&D counterpart in terms of giving you the exact numbers for every roll for every character, but it's still both very short and very railroady. Not the kind of adventure I'd use to introduce people to a game. Still, at least it's pretty clear on who to blame. Bill Slavicsek might not have put any more adventures in here in a few years, but I see his tastes in adventure writing remain as irritating as ever.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 78: Jan/Feb 2000



part 4/5



Trial of the Frog: With all the big old school callbacks they've done recently, I'm a bit disappointed that this has absolutely nothing to do with Dave Arneson's Temple of the Frog, not even a little easter egg for the hardcore. Instead, it's another short fetch quest that'll probably last you less than a session. While walking through the forest, they're asked for help by a grippli to get hold of some gems as an offering to his queen. He's found a volcanic cave that's reputed to be filled with gems, but it's sealed up tight with a new door. If you have the equipment to get in, (Knock continues to be one of the best dungeoneering utility spells) you find out it's being mined by a duergar cleric and his pet spiders & undead minions, who will obviously not be pleased to see you. Whether this is one big fight or several smaller, more manageable ones depends on how loud your entrance was. If you beat him the wrong way, you'll find out he's set up a loadbearing boss trap which will collapse the caves, preventing you from grabbing more than a small handful of the potential treasure. A pretty decent challenge on a tactical level, with opportunity for different degrees of success or failure depending on how smart the PC's are, but very much just another day at the office for experienced adventurers. Meh. If you need to stall them on the way somewhere else it'll keep them busy for a few hours.



The Winter Tapestry: Another dungeon in quick succession which has changed ownership, reminding you to keep your world living and the creatures in them doing more than sitting in their room waiting for the players. The PC's come across a tapestry that shows a bunch of heroes fighting a white dragon. Apparently it's based on real events and they only wounded it, not killed it. If you can link the scenes depicted to landmarks, they have a solid lead to pursue towards treasure & glory. But as already mentioned, it's been decades. The dragon was killed some time ago and a family of frost giants have moved in, giving you a very different set of challenges to the one you were expecting. There is still a white dragon there, but it's a very young one they've chained up outside and kept as a pet, which will be easy to kill and have very anticlimactic treasure. The real meat of the adventure will come when you venture inside the thoroughly remodelled lair and find the frost giants, their yeti servants and their selection of human slaves. (that are treated like toys by the frost giant kids) The result is a mildly comedic old school style location based adventure where everything is designed on a larger than human scale and you'd be better off using the sneaky approach than straightforward combat, but it gives you plenty of free reign how you approach it. The maps are unusually three-dimensional and comprehensively designed, giving you lots of different viewpoints of various areas to clear up any confusion. Despite putting two giant-centric adventures in the same issue, they're both high quality and sufficiently different enough that they don't feel redundant together. There's a lot of fun to be had in a world where giants are dominant and smaller races have to live in the cracks between and it shouldn't be impossible to put together enough adventures to support the concept with 50 years of D&D to draw upon.



Nodwick has an impressive carrying capacity for a "kid's toy" and is quite happy to be underestimated.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 78: Jan/Feb 2000



part 5/5



Deepstrike: Not just one, but two Alternity adventures this issue? This is interesting. While the same page count as the fast-play centrefold, this one should take you considerably longer to play out. It is still fairly linear and mission based though, as it presumes the PC's are members of a secret organisation that can call them up any time to give them missions, sending them off to do some James Bond style spy action at a moment's notice. Just going out into the unknown to explore simply for the fun of it is currently pretty rare even in their D&D adventures at the moment and their freshly built systems are even more story focussed. Anyway, your mission, should you choose to accept it, (and you've already been attacked along the way to the rondez-vous point just to make sure you're personally motivated) is to take out a notorious terrorist who's taken over a submarine. Time to go jet-skiing on grav-sleds, as anything larger would be easy to spot approaching. You'll still get attacked by psychic sharks on the way because these things never go smooth and it does make for an awesome looking battle scene. From there you dive down and could sneak your way it when someone goes out the airlock, try to bluff your way in, or resort to explosives or hacking the computer system. The enemy goons will not be too smart, but once you get the attention of the big bad, their resistance will become better co-ordinated. If you get beaten you'll be captured and treated to a villainous monologue rather than killed because that's the genre we're in. You'll also probably get to see a countdown being started for a big missile launch that will cause massive damage to nearby cities if not stopped. This is all pretty fun reading, but feels like it should have been a Top Secret adventure rather than an Alternity one (if that system was still alive) and requires both the players and GM to play along with the genre conventions for it to work. Whether it'll be useful to you or not depends if you like the wackier end of super-spy media. Still, it's much more useful to me than the fast-play adventure, Alternity's statblocks are easily converted into D&D ones and it's a welcome bit of variety so overall it's a qualified success.



Map of Mystery goes 3D for a nice big cathedral that'll give you a wide open plan ground floor, plus several small cramped towers and balconies overlooking it for the privileged. You can have a nice big multi-phase combat exploiting both of those, then probably put a dungeon of some kind underneath. This'll speed things along if you want to get sacrilegious.



After a couple of mostly boring issues, this one is solidly above average, with both the long and short ones using pretty interesting ideas and a very high amount of non-D&D material. Trouble may be brewing on the horizon, with the all generic, all the time policy of the early 3e years that blighted Dragon as well already looming, but hopefully it'll just be the cream of the crop for the last few 2e issues. Let's find out together as usual.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 140: February 2000



part 1/5



36 pages. Oh no, not the tentacles! You don't normally see octopi climbing trees and a good thing too, because if they could stay on land long enough they'd actually be scarily good at it with all those gripping limbs and suckers. Lets find out if they simply want to eat the adventurers or have other, more …… pleasurable uses for those tentacles intended.



Erik's Editorial: So, the Y2K bug. A whole lot of sound and fury that came to nothing, precisely because it was spotted well in advance and programmers did something about it. A good reminder that a stitch in time saves nine. Erik uses this as a lesson about filling in your forms properly after playing tournaments. If the computer records had gone down they could probably have eventually recreated most of it from the paper records, but it would be an enormous hassle. It would be much easier if all the forms were filled out legibly and with the math double-checked, hint hint. Another reminder that bureaucracy is always with us, and so are people who are bad at it or simply don't care enough, causing other people to have to work even harder to make up for it. If you want all the XP and magic items you got in the adventure to stick around, it's for your own good to get it right. The way he phrases it may be new and connected to current events, but the underlying message is one we've seen before and will probably see again. Complicated computers just provide new ways for people to screw up filling in forms.



Notes from HQ: The computers are chugging away unchanged, but staff members continue to come and go. David Wise (probably not the same one that wrote many of the best episodes of 80’s cartoons) is now the guy at the very top of the RPGA, although Robert Weise continues to be more of the hands-on director focussing on their Living campaigns. We’ve already met Erik, while Scott Magner has a grab bag of other things including retail play, online play, club games and home ones. That is, for the countries that haven’t set up their own organisational structure yet, of which there are an increasing number. I might have managed to get hold of the Polyhedron UK’s, but there are more newsletters for other languages that I don’t have and might not be properly archived anywhere. Their struggles continue, and so do mine.

More interestingly, they list the top 10 adventures of last year. Highest scoring was Three Coins in a Well, getting an impressive 99% score while it's closest rival only managed 94, but most played by several orders of magnitude over everything else were Under a Pale Green Sky and Lacquered Chest. Only one non D&D adventure made the list, Relentless Pursuit for Star Wars, which still only had a small fraction of the players any of the D&D ones managed. Slightly worrying to see no Shadowrun ones on here at all, but I guess the ones I've seen haven't been great. They need a few more top tier writers to have a chance of competing in the big leagues.