TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 80: May/Jun 2000



part 5/5



Side Treks - The Trouble with Trillochs: Time for another adventure that puts the spotlight on previously overlooked monsters. What people think is merely a haunted battlefield with the usual complement of undead to clear out is actually the lair of a necromancer. Unfortunately for him, his summoning of creatures from the negative energy plane turned out fatally and now there’s a Trilloch trapped here, making all the other creatures in the vicinity increasingly aggressive. These include Pech, Galeb Duhr and an Xag-Yi, as well as the expected undead, making sure your cleric won’t dominate the entire adventure. Packing a wilderness bit and 10 rooms into 3 pages, this is a pretty dense little adventure, which is nice to see, and the unusual monsters require unusual tactics to fight effectively. This can go into the solidly above average but not exceptional category which I’d have no problem dipping into if I needed a quick adventure that wouldn’t fill a whole session.



The Scar: Ah, here’s a tie-in I remember from the first time around and have been looking forward to actually seeing. Ray Winninger’s example setting gradually built up in Dragon over several years, culminating in this adventure. We’re catapulted into an epic story of an ageing nature goddess and the machinations of evil forces who want to replace her with an evil daughter in the belief that will let them dominate the world. Unfortunately, you’re just 1st level slaves being held in a crumbling ancient temple digging for the macguffin they’re after. Like many a slavemaster, they’re not overly concerned with giving their property enough food & sleep to do this indefinitely, which means you need to figure out how to escape before you lose all your HP to the exhaustion rules. If you can get your equipment back, do some general damage to them (although you definitely won’t be able to beat the Death Knight who’s set up as the big bad for the plot arc in a straight fight yet) or uncover more info about the larger scale story along the way, those are all bonuses. So you have a mildly irritating railroading start to the adventure, but from then on out it’s a very open-ended one which is played in a nonstandard way and designed as not just a single adventure, but seeded with long term plot ideas that could result from it and how to make them work not only in Ray’s campaign world, but various other ones as well. The temple itself is unusually large for a dungeon location these days, with lots of twists and turns and easily repurposed into a more conventional dungeoncrawl. This is all well above average in both design rigour and density of useful stuff and very welcome to finally see.



An issue filled with good but not exceptional adventures, this is one that doesn’t break any new ground, but at least does what it’s trying to do well. They obviously have a lot of choices for these last few 2e issues. Let’s see if the final one maintains that standard, and just how dramatically things change after that point in both style and quality.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 142: June 2000



part 1/5



36 pages. The Red Death spreads it’s malign influence all around the world, including France, as the cover adopts the fashions of the era, including the regular threat of a bloody death for the upper classes. Time to see if this issue contains anything genuinely revolutionary, or just tipping my hat to the new constitution, then picking up my pen and getting back to reviewing, same as yesterday.



As we approach the edition change, they make another attempt to clear out their back stock, with a big list of still available issues on the cover sheet along with their most exciting articles. You can still get hold of 107 out of 141 if you act fast! That’s a lot of useful stuff for your game to try in one go. Why, it’d take years to sort through it and pick out the good bits.



Notes from HQ: We already saw the problems they’ve been having in Polyhedron UK to get the databases all combined worldwide. Not only do they have to deal with each country’s different data laws, but the fact that each country does things slightly different in general, and that includes how many points you get for each adventure. They’re getting there though, and they’re not too proud to admit that there are some aspects of the system that the UK does better. Hopefully by the time 3e is out, they’ll have a standardised system they can rank everyone under using the best of both worlds. This does also mean some people may go up or down a level as they standardise the point thresholds but they’ll try to minimise that kind of disruption and keep your previous XP totals valid even if you would have earned different amounts under the new system. Well, it’s more continuity than your characters’ll get when you convert them from 2e to 3e. Another of those reminders that an edition change is a huge hassle and you don’t want to do it too frequently and without making sure that the changes you’re making are substantial improvements, as otherwise you’ll lose players simply from the confusion. Get that audience feedback, run tests, it may take longer but it’ll save you changing things back again, which doubles the expenses.



Remembering Dan Cunningham: Someone who probably would have appeared in the member spotlight column at some point gets bumped up the schedule due to sudden unexpected brain aneurysm. Dan had only been a member for a few years, but had already made himself invaluable as judge and notable as a player of high action swashbucklers, with his main Living City one already up to 10th level from frequent play. If there was a shortage of judges he was just as willing to step up and run something every timeslot and managed to make a good impression on nearly everyone. He seems like a thoroughly good egg, so this is another reminder that although they’ve really cut down the number of random senseless deaths in game over the years, real life remains full of them and there’s no takebacks or resurrections, just picking up the pieces and carrying on, hopefully trying to honour the good they did and keep their memory alive.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 142: June 2000



part 2/5



Table Talk: All about resolving previous contests rather than any actually new news in this column, as we take a look at the top two entries for the legendary weapons contest. Will they actually have stories worth recounting, or just lots of kewl powerz for the players to lust after?

The Makah Whaling Spear is an ancient inuit weapon passed down through the generations. In the shadowrun universe that makes it a powerful magical item not just in combat, but also with the ability to detect all whales in a half mile radius, which won’t be useful in every adventure, but very handy indeed when it is, and anchoring incredibly strongly when driven into things, which means it’s also helpful for tricky climbs. That’s an interesting selection of powers that also make sense with the concept. Just don’t kill all the whales you see, because the supply grows increasingly limited these days.

The Tools of the Common Man are a staff, shovel and pitchfork that give their wielders powerful fighting abilities, and boost the morale of everyone on your side, but only in defence of community. If there’s a larger scale threat to it you can justify using them on an adventure, but their real place is once again doing the everyday work that keeps a settlement alive rather than killing enemies, so probably best to give them back afterwards because they’ll stop working for you anyway if you’re just wandering around killing things and taking stuff. These definitely seem more likely to have their legend passed on than something that’s been sitting undisturbed in a treasure hoard for centuries.



Fear Theatre: Our cover story unsurprisingly takes us to Gothic Earth to look at the Grand Guignol theatre. Despite it’s name, it was actually a pretty small place, but that freed it to be much more experimental in it’s choice of repertoire than broadway. So they indulged in increasingly shocking displays of horror and dark comedy, which unsurprisingly earned them a strong cult following and plenty of notoriety even from non-attendees. Equally unsurprisingly, there’s a supernatural underside to it in this universe. The owner has psychic powers, while the fear elicited by all the shows goes to nourish a greater Feyr, which regularly buds off smaller ones but remains mostly inactive … for now. Of course, if any adventurers investigate, particularly spellcasting ones, that could easily change, giving you an obvious adventure hook. One of those articles that’s pretty interesting, but barely scratches the surface of what you could do with this place. Since it ran for more than 60 years, you could make studying all that history and the vast number of plays put on in that time a special interest in itself. How many of those still have surviving scripts and could be put on again now? How many of them could easily be adapted into RPG scenarios? Another esoteric area of study I could see eating up years of my time in an alternate timeline where I’m not preoccupied by finishing off this enormous journey. Oh for immortality so I could pursue every dream to it’s proper conclusion.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 142: June 2000



part 3/5



Putting life back into the Undead: After a highly specific article that opened me up to a whole new area of study I knew nothing about before, it’s time for that repetitive old canard about making monsters scary by emphasising description over numbers, with a particular focus on the undead. A bit of a letdown, but they have to repeat it every few years for the newbies. It does seem a bit odd to have multiple horror themed articles in a row this time of year though. I guess they’ll be so busy with edition change stuff come October that they decided to move it forward this year. Still, this is three pages of boring filler that tells me nothing new. I do wish they’d put something a little less obvious and overdone in it’s place.



Without a Trace: The generally horrifying theme continues with a new monster for Dark Conspiracy. Keyhole Stranglers are basically Victor Tooms from the X-Files, human-shaped monsters with rubbery flesh capable of squeezing through the smallest gap and a fondness for killing via strangulation. They’re not that dangerous for a fully armed and ready to fight group, but of course they’ll never fight fair if they can get away with it and they’re very difficult to corner if they want to retreat and strike again later with surprise. Best thing to do is chase them into a pipe that’s blocked at the other end then apply large amounts of fire, poison or electricity. You can definitely run a good murder mystery adventure using one of these as the villain.



Men of the Basilisk: Ed is absent this month, but Eric Boyd has another bumper-sized bit of realmslore to give us, filling a full 8 pages with info on another of the many secret societies that compete for dominance of the Realms. The Men of the Basilisk are definitely more on the Zhentarim end of the spectrum than the Cult of the Dragon one, as they don’t have any particular ideology beyond working together to get richer, which means they’re pretty much all on the neutral or evil end of the alignment spectrum. Once just a single adventuring party, they now have more than 150 members plus their various minions, mostly found around the inner sea region, secretly colluding to maximise profits and not averse to the odd assassination when someone is getting in the way of that. They could be responsible for a lot of obstacles in PC’s way without you ever finding out about their existence, or just as likely to be mysterious employers sending you on missions that’ll pay well. (but be even more profitable to them long term) We get stats for 6 of the more powerful members, mostly hovering around the upper single digits and low teens in terms of levels. So they’re fairly flexible in how you use them, but eventually you’ll outlevel them in a long term campaign and be able to take over or destroy them, unlike larger organisations like the Red Wizards who have a whole country backing them up. A pretty solid entry, but not one that’s going to dramatically change the world whether you include it or leave it out. (if it was, they probably would have put it in a book rather than here)

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 142: June 2000



part 4/5



Evil is as evil does: We have a surplus of Erics this month, between our fine editor, Mr Boyd, and now Mr Benner all writing for the newszine. Although it turns out that this isn’t newszine exclusive material, but an excerpt from a weekly column he started late last year on the website. Doing some checking in the Wayback Machine, the titles of the columns have been saved, but most of the specific links to the individual columns lead nowhere, making this yet another thing erased by WotC’s bad habit of throwing all the old stuff away with the edition changes. But since it looks like fairly basic general gaming advice, I don’t feel I’m missing a huge amount. The question of if you should allow evil characters or PvP in general in your game? We’ve seen that debated many a time with different conclusions. The Living settings have near universally banned them, and they’re pretty rare in Classic tournaments too, but there are also many games built around the whole idea of player competition that make it mandatory and both can be fun. In the end he has no solid answers, but accepts that the debate itself is interesting, just like the actual battles between good and evil within the games themselves. Nothing new here then. Dungeoncraft is definitely doing the whole gaming advice column thing better.



Member Spotlight: This column decides to go for one of the most infamous RPGA members of all, Donald J. Bingle. He’s won more tournaments over the past 20 years than you can shake a stick at and hasn’t lost his touch yet, having won the 1999 Best of the Best at Gen Con last year. He’s the top ranked Classic player and no slouch in the Judging department or writing his own adventures either. However, he doesn’t touch the Living side of the RPGA at all, being strictly old school in his tastes. (and besides, it wouldn’t be fair to everyone else if he was top of all the tables) He definitely didn’t get where he is by being shy and retiring. His large personality also comes in handy in his day job as an attorney, where both attention to detail in knowing rules and making a strong impassioned case for your side are definite strong points. On top of that, he also manages to find the time to run his own game company publishing Timemaster, Chill and other bits & pieces. Even if someone managed to overtake him in terms of points, his position in gaming history is pretty secure by this point. A particularly interesting instalment, since it’s someone we’ve already seen plenty of times rather than people we’ve never heard of before and are unlikely to ever see again. May he have many years of fun gaming ahead of him.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 142: June 2000



part 5/5



Internet 101: We just saw a Dark Matter adventure in Dungeon. Polyhedron is also getting in on the game with a bunch of links to conspiracy theory stuff. No surprise that some of these are long since mysteriously vanished then. www.conspiracy-net.com is still around, but obviously not the same website, with all the more specific internal links replaced by a basic wordpress site with only half a dozen posts and no actual meaty info. I dread to think what happened to the previous owner. xoom.com is also obviously a completely different business that’s taken over the name since then. ufomind.com now redirects to the personal website of Glen Campbell (not the old bandleader), although at least some of the old content does seem to be available in this case. pbs.org is still around, but the internal structure has also been reorganised since then, so the hand feature showing just how destructive a nuke would be on YOUR city has disappeared. The Starchild Project has lost it’s hyphen, but the truth is still out there for those bold enough to google. The National Transportation Safety Board database of aviation accidents is also still there under a slightly different name. Only the joke conspiracy website catsarefrommars.com has completely vanished without being replaced by someone …… or something else. Despite ubiquitous cameraphones debunking many of the old conspiracies, there remains plenty of interest in the concept as a whole. There’s always going to be limits to our knowledge and wacky theories about what lie beyond it, no matter how much we expand the size of the lighted up areas.



The survey is also in theme with the recent release of Dark Matter for Alternity and wants to know your favourite conspiracy theory. You WILL fill out the form and send it in promptly. fnord



A somewhat strange issue, as it feels like an out of season halloween one. There is a decent amount of useful info in it, but it illustrates just how much the edition change is disrupting their regular day-to-day routine, with the smaller magazines more seriously affected than the bigger ones. Well, I guess we’ve got a good few more months of that before they can even think of settling things down again. Time to get a good look at it from several more different angles.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 81: Jul/Aug 2000



part 1/5



108 pages. Beauty may or may not be in the eye of the beholder, but this beholder is at least pretty impressively rendered, although the Behir just behind it is in somewhat worse shape. I suspect the PC’s may need to talk or run fast if they want to avoid the same fate. Let’s find out what its selection of eye rays will be capable of and just how powerful your party will need to be to survive it.



Editorial: With one of the biggest landmarks in their history looming up ahead, Chris takes the time to list a bunch of previous issues that went above and beyond the call of duty. First sequel. (issue 17) First co-ordinated tie-in with Dragon (issues 19/148) First non D&D adventure. (issue 25) First guest editorial. (issue 44) First time a single artist did the whole issue (61) First comics. (67) First Map of Mystery. (68) First full-length adventure series (69-73) Plus several where they had a big centrefold special feature to make the adventure a little less confined to your imagination. Many of them are still available for back order so if you’re a new arrival daunted by the prospect of sorting through all these old adventures, they’re good ones to get first. Can they keep on coming up with ways to top them, or at least think up some new gimmicks to make issues stand out? Well, that’s as much your responsibility as ours. Keep sending those adventure ideas and hopefully some’ll be worth giving the big budget special effects treatment to.



Letters: First letter complains that there are not just one but two adventures recently where Kenku talk, when their MM entry clearly says they can’t. They’re so good at mime, you’ll often forget they aren’t talking! And that’s when they’re not even polymorphed! I guess the advantage of cutting down on the amount of ecological lore in the next edition is also reducing the odds of these kinds of complaints happening. (although the odds of getting the math wrong once you start stacking class levels and templates on creatures goes way up so it’s swings & roundabouts overall.)

Second is very much in favour of their new features. More series of adventures and more maps of mystery please! One of these things is much easier to create than the other, but more of both will be forthcoming.

Third is full of praise for Bad Seeds. Even at low level, you’ve got to have plenty of variety in the things you fight.

Fourth is a long one with lots of specific opinions on recent adventures. Overall, they have a definite preference for gritty old school generic adventures without any jokey nonsense. No poking the 4th wall, it’s covered with deathtraps.

Fifth thinks they’ve done too many underwater adventures recently. Chris is inclined to agree and will give them a break for a bit. Blame the Seattle weather for keeping water constantly on the mind.

Sixth praises issue 79 for precisely the thing I grumbled about, lots of low level generic adventures in quick succession. Characters should start at first level, so there should be more 1st level adventures than ones for higher levels.

Seventh nitpicks the geometry in Peer Amid the Waters. Although they’re marked as 5’ wide on most maps because that’s the grid size, normal doors aren’t nearly that wide. You can’t squeeze around the side of the portal into the treasure room.

Finally, a lengthy letter that lists their top ten of most overdone ideas and sincerely hopes they’ll do more high level adventures and more ones in general that stray slightly further from european medieval genericness to avoid this kind of repetition. You’ve got to go back to the classics sometimes, particularly at the start of a new edition but they’ll try not to wear out their welcome too much.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 81: Jul/Aug 2000



part 2/5



A Race Against Time: The advantage of capturing enemies rather than killing them is that they can escape, letting you reuse villains, which makes it much easier for the PC’s to develop an emotional attachment to them. Just a couple of issues ago we ran up against inept robber “Bruiser” Holloway and the easily bypassed series of traps leading to his hideout. Hopefully you captured him and returned the coin moulds to the proper government, setting things up for this adventure. Now his second in command wants revenge! While in the marketplace one day, they get a special delivery from a messenger snake. When opened, it turns out to be an explosive crystal and a series of cryptic riddles. They have 30 seconds to get it somewhere that’ll cause minimum damage to the surroundings. There are 7 more hidden around town, due to explode in 3 hours. Can you get all of them? Can you also figure out who’s responsible and capture him on top of this, or will he be left free to riddle another day? No two ways about it, this is a Batman ’66 plot, taking the degree of shortcircuitable silliness in the previous adventure and turning it up a notch. If you have a diviner in the party you’ll find it a lot easier than otherwise, although time constraints will still make it a challenge. It’s also one of the few times splitting the party actually seems like a good idea, as the challenges are mainly puzzles and social ones so one character can solve individual ones just as quickly as all 5. So this is very firmly a somewhat comedic single session tournament style adventure, but a good one that lets you tackle the objectives nonlinearly, succeed or fail at a full 9 different objectives independently and get various degrees of reward for doing so. It’s definitely pretty entertaining even if it wouldn’t fit the tone of many campaigns and has a decent number of ideas for further adventures as consequences for your actions in this one. Maybe we’ll see some of them built on further in here some day.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 81: Jul/Aug 2000



part 3/5



Divisions of the Mind: Our cover story takes itself somewhat more seriously, but still manages to have some quirky elements in it. A beholder has indeed been rampaging at a nearby village, but although it caused a fair amount of property damage, there were no casualties, which should definitely arouse suspicion from anyone who knows how deadly they are when they go all-out with their eye rays. Nevertheless, this definitely deserves investigation by some high level adventurers. The nearby entrance to the underdark is easy enough to find, but to reach him you have to go through a whole load of twisting mazy natural caverns with plenty of minor challenges, plus the petrified behir from the cover, which hopefully you won’t be dumb enough to depetrify. When you do catch up with the beholder, you’ll find out that fighting you isn’t his objective. He’s found a magic-proof floating citadel in a massive cavern a little deeper in and wants you to investigate. In return, you & the villagers get to live and you can keep 50% of the stuff you find in there. Unless you think you can take him in a fight, you probably ought to take the deal and hope he does not decide to change the terms later. The contents turn out to be a lot more than yet another wizard doing research in seclusion. It’s owned by an Ulitharid who’s been taken over by the personality of the body of the person it was implanted in due to a unique accident while experimenting with psionic circuitry. Now she’s doing her best to keep that a secret while doing as much harm to the other illithids in revenge and keep the other personality from taking control of their body again. If the PC’s don’t blunder in attacking everything she’ll be quite willing to talk and point them in the direction of further adversaries while supplying them with the products of her research. Of course, there’s still plenty of lesser minions who will not be so inclined to talk, plus said research is pretty creepy looking illithid biotechnology so the PC’s might not take her at face value either, which means you may well wind up hack & slashing through this section as well. If you don’t, the beholder will not be pleased about you coming back without treasure even if you give him a good explanation, so you’re probably going to face a big stand-up battle against magically powerful opponents either way. The kind of adventure where in theory you could kill everything, but it’s both easier and more interesting if you talk to the monsters and engage in a little politics, figuring out who you want to side with to defeat the other one. With plenty of moral ambiguity and weird elements that draw upon the monstrous arcana books for both creatures, this is all pleasingly advanced in design and doesn’t feel like a retread of something else. One of those instances I can definitely see why they picked it out to make the cover star.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 81: Jul/Aug 2000



part 4/5



The Door to Darkness: After their first adventure series finished, there was a fair amount of discourse on what to do next. One idea that was thrown around more seriously than the rest was a series of low level adventures revolving around the Sleeping Dragon inn. In the end, they’ve kept it a one-off, but it’s still obvious that more work has gone into the design of this little adventure than usual. Anyway, the PC’s are staying at the inn when an illusionist decides to prank the inn staff & patrons. Unfortunately, the inn was built on an an ancient ruined elven city and certain magic works at boosted effectiveness there, causing his spells to spiral out of control. Each room has a different flavour of weirdness as people panic and you run from one side of the inn trying to figure out what’s going on. When you do corner the guy responsible his overuse of illusion magic tears open a gate to a mysterious shadowy realm filled with the illusionary monsters encountered earlier in the adventure, only they’ve got rather more bite this time around. Better make sure you’re on the right side of it when the spells expire and it closes. A short and light-hearted adventure, but one designed to leave a lot of questions still open at the end that could lead to further adventures as you try to figure out how to operate the portal intentionally and what’s on the other end. It also has an unusual amount of attention paid to scaling, with three different sets of stats for every encounter depending what level the PC’s are coming in. Like Ray’s adventure last issue, this has a lot of uses both as is and as components for your worldbuilding. It’s a fitting note to say farewell to the most worldbuilding heavy edition on and quite likeable overall.



The centrefold is a massive full color poster map of the Sleeping Dragon inn, so you can take it out, unfold it and use it as a full-sized battlemat for your minis. Having been rather underwhelmed by it’s appearance in Dragon first time around, it all makes much more sense in here, after reading the regular rumination in the letters pages about building a setting and adventures around it.



Ashtar's Temple: After three adventures that have all pushed the envelope in various ways, it’s time to give 1st level characters yet another basic introductory adventure. A ruined temple taken over by bandits? It would be very helpful if you cleared that out so the a new priest could move in and renovate. There’s also rumours that the temple is haunted. Unfortunately, the ghost is confined to the lower levels, which explains why she hasn’t already taken care of the bandits for you. This turns out to be an adventure of two halves. The aboveground bit with the bandits in the temple, where they’re watching in shifts, respond to your actions intelligently and are willing to negotiate if it looks like they can’t beat you in a fight. Then once you venture underground, it’s more of a static dungeoncrawl where you fight the various mostly mundane creatures that have moved into the rooms, giant frogs, centipedes, spiders, weasels, etc. Once you’ve got rid of all of them, the ghost will be able to pass on peacefully and reveals the location of the treasury key as a parting gift. So this manages to work decently as an introduction to both 2e and 1e style adventuring, although putting the biggest and most tactically interesting fight near the start of the adventure makes the rest feel a little anticlimactic. I guess mixing up the order of encounters is another way to keep things from getting boring as a designer when we already have so many other adventures covering similar ground. Usable but unexceptional.



Nodwick experiences the classic cartoon method of getting rid of unwanted bandages.