TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 81: Jul/Aug 2000



part 5/5



Khazefryn: Last adventure gradually became more old school as it went on. This one is old school to the core all the way through, but using different influences, being a deliberate throwback to the D series that packs all the details for a full underdark city into 14 pages and then lets your players do what they please in response without any of that intended plotline nonsense. Once a duergar monastery, the cavern containing the settlement of Khazefryn is now half-flooded, with six little islands each occupied by a different race and the whole thing ruled by a mated pair of Deep Dragons. With living space at a serious premium, tensions can run high sometimes, but as long as the dragons can play the other races off against each other, their position on top is pretty secure. Of course, the PC’s could upset that balance of power in a number of ways. They could play politics and get some groups fighting against others to weaken the city as a whole. They could go for the stealthy theft and assassination route. If they’re extremely high level they could hack their way through everything. Or they could just try and pass through the legal way while paying as little tax as possible and be on their way if they have a more important mission. This is one of the purest and densest sandboxes they’ve done in a long time, making the stats of the monsters extra-abbreviated so they can pack more in. It’s aimed at high levels, but could accommodate a wide range as long as they know their limits and don’t try to fight through everything. This is another pretty neat way to say goodbye to the old ruleset that’s particularly handy for the really long-running campaigns that need big complicated challenges taking you far away from opportunities to recharge. Whether you’re heading for the demonweb pits or trying to overthrow the kingdom of the ghouls it’s a nice addition to make the journey even more epic.



Skulking Below: No side treks this time around, but the final adventure is still the smallest and feels like it was chosen to fit the allotted page count neatly. The thieves guild is irked by a group of skulks in the sewers who are breaking the law without their permission. They arrange things so they’ll attract the attention of the law, which’ll take down the competition, let the watch feel smart for solving more crimes than they actually have and generally solidify their hold on organised crime in the area. Unless the PC’s hired to do the dirty work of venturing into the sewers to capture them are much smarter than expected. So this is a short and easy mission for low level PC’s that’ll take a session or less, but with two hidden optional objectives that they could succeed at or fail to even notice independently. In addition to the political underside, there’s also a hidden trapdoor which leads to a sealed off temple of Mask now only inhabited by ghouls. Finding this nearly doubles the length of the dungeoncrawl part and gives further hints to the dark history of the city. Another bit of competent filler that gives the DM plenty of room to expand in ways that suit your campaign, it’s very much the same formula as the previous adventures this issue. I guess since they’re moving on, leaving us a bunch of adventures with more open ends than usual is useful for the people who aren’t planning to switch straight away.



With an above average number of high level, open-ended and heavily customisable adventures, this issue turns out well above average overall and makes for a decent note to end this edition on. They’ve set themselves a pretty high standard and now it remains to be seen if they can keep it up through the challenges of persuading their writers to switch to the new one and the increased time pressures when they switch to a monthly schedule. But first, there’s still a little more RPGA business to take care of……

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 143: August 2000



part 1/5



36 pages. From the victoriana of last issue, we’ve moved onto the 30’s, as your basic loinclothed pulp hero fights a rather large gorilla with only his wits and a sword. What improbable twist of fate will he win with, lacking a party of wizards, clerics & rogues to back him up? Time to turn the page and see if we’ll get all our questions answered this issue, or a new challenge will turn up just in time for another dramatic cliffhanger at the end.



Before we even start, we have another call for regional directors. Are you willing to do a whole ton of work organising people and answering questions? We are actually going to pay you now! Sure, it’s only $250 per month plus an all expenses paid trip to Winter Fantasy each year, but that’s still a big step up from what they used to pay. Think you can fit it in on the weekends and evenings without burning out?



Erik's Editorial: The new edition is nearly upon us, and that means big changes. Fortunately, they’ve been gaining a lot of new members recently, which means the changes include a big increase in page count and production values, making the magazine truly international again and combining the best bits from their various regional newsletters. They’re not going to go monthly, but alternate months will be filled with the Living Greyhawk Journal so they might as well be. It’s all a time of tremendous optimism. Of course, just by looking at the numbering I know the journal only lasts 5 issues, and polyhedron gets merged with dungeon shortly afterwards, so something must go dramatically wrong with their plans between now and 2002. Will it be one person proving a weak link, upper management forcing a course change, or an unpopular decision causing lots of regular members to revolt? Still, it’s pretty obvious that next year is going to be interesting times, just not in quite the way they intended. All I can do is keep on going forward and see if I can pinpoint the precise moment they realise they’ve written checks that aren’t going to clear.



Notes from HQ: Following straight on, Robert Wiese shows us one of the ways expanding ambitions can wind up sucking the fun out of your gaming. You’re in the middle of organising a convention and you have way more people planning to come than you thought you would. You’ve got to either say we’re sold out and can’t take your money or book a bigger venue on short notice. Some of the people you were running it with have come down sick, or backed out, or are being generally flakey without even having called to say why. You’re running around panicking trying to do too many jobs at once, wind up judging on every slot instead of getting to play yourself and by the end of it all you’re exhausted. You might be able to get away with that for a while, but soon you’ll hit burnout. If you find yourself in that situation, you need to either recruit more help or scale back your ambitions to something you can achieve sustainably. A lesson I suspect many in the RPGA find much easier to preach than actually follow, and likely a hint as to the problems they’re currently experiencing behind the scenes.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 143: August 2000



part 2/5



Member Spotlight: This column goes way yonder down under to interview Craig Anthony Walker. He’s been a gamer since 1979 and can give us plenty of insight on australian gaming and how it differs from the USA. Some things are the same - schools & universities are prime places to find other players. However, D&D is somewhat less dominant, with a lot more freeform and live action roleplaying filling the gaps. This even extends to the Living campaigns, with the Living Death in particular adapting to the mixed format adventures because they couldn’t get enough players otherwise. Another reminder that what works in one country may not work in another, so giving the regional branches leeway in what games they run and how is better for growing the RPGA than total standardisation. This is particularly true in australia, where the cities are even further apart than the USA and the countryside even more deserted, giving each one room to evolve it’s own culture because travel between them is so much more hassle. Of course, now everyone is just an email away and people are congregating to interest based websites this gulf will soon be decreasing again. I hope someone is keeping track of these little cultural differences before they get eroded.



So you want to run a Convention?: Like the call for regional co-ordinators, trying to increase the number of conventions out there is a regular concern for them. It helps grow the hobby and get people connected to the network if there’s lots of little ones, preferably not all happening on the same weekend in the same region. So once again it’s time for a bit of general logistical advice for first time convention runners. Don’t set impossible ambitions that’ll only collapse under their own weight. Make sure you know how many people around you are likely to pitch in and just how helpful they’ll actually be. Remember that advertising costs a fair bit of money and also has diminishing returns so don’t over or underdo it. Make sure you decide how long it’s going to be and book the venue way in advance, as that will save you a tremendous amount of hassle. Official RPGA sanctioned events and demonstrations of new games are both big draws, so reaching out and getting those properly booked well in advance is also a very good idea. If you’re going to run again next year, say so, because at the event itself is one of the best times to promote the next one and get people signed up. Start packing up when things are winding down rather than waiting until the finishing time on the poster, it could well get you home several hours sooner. Don’t be so busy setting up and breaking down stuff that you don’t talk to people, get an idea of the general mood in the room, what’s working and what isn’t. The kind of advice you get from someone who’s done this a lot and learned by doing rather than just reading a book on event management then boiling it down to three pages for the newszine. Useful, particularly for the many new readers but nothing mind-blowing for me.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 143: August 2000



part 3/5



A funny thing happened on the way to the dungeon: Random encounters have been on a long slow decline over the years and that’s one thing the edition change will only accelerate, as the faster XP advancement gives you less leeway before you have to recalculate everything. So this list of 50 encounter ideas is somewhat of an oddity in here at this point. The specific entries also feel like a throwback, with many of them whimsical or railroady in assuming the player’s reaction to them. That makes this a more interesting read than just another list of wandering monsters, as it also includes environmental effects, combinations of creatures and other odd happenings, but it’s not one where you can just roll it and use whatever comes up as is without considering if it’ll work with your current campaign & party. There have definitely been better examples of the type.



A Hunting we will go: If you’ve been travelling in the wilderness for any length of time, you will inevitably have had to do some hunting to eat. But along with random encounters, that kind of logistics has become increasingly downplayed in favour of starting you out straight at the dungeon or other main event. Plus the real world history of hunting is focussed on avoiding “fair” CR appropriate challenges in favour of catching as much good meat as efficiently as possible. Outnumbering the quarry, using dogs, guns, traps and other technology to further stack the odds, the methods of reducing human risk have only become more elaborate over the years. Greg Detwiler gives us a surprisingly detailed 6 page article covering hunting practices around the world, including some of the most massive and genocidal organised ones. Funnel them into a confined space and you can wipe out literally millions of herd animals in one go. But although it doesn’t fit the traditional adventurer party format, there’s still plenty of adventure potential in here, between the politics of organising hunters, various nobles restricting hunting on their lands (apart from them) things going wrong (and intentional “accidents” ) on the hunts, encountering something rather more dangerous that you weren’t looking for and bleeding-heart environmentalists trying to stop hunting altogether when any druid could tell you that would mess up the ecosystem just as much as the opposite extreme. So this is a system-free bit of advice heavily informed by real world practices that manages to tell me stuff I haven’t seen before and create ideas for adventures they haven’t done yet. It’s always nice when they manage to find some of those, particularly when they include the bibliography of full-length books at the end where you can get even more detail. I definitely approve of this one.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 143: August 2000



part 4/5



Fire Island: We haven’t had any adventures in here in nearly a year, so I’m mildly surprised to see one last Alternity one. Doubly curiously, it’s for the Gamma World setting. We’re off to Argentina, where floating cows radiate auras of serenity that protect them from all but a very particular caste of mutants which radiate auras of repulsion, which means they can charge high prices for their services but no-one likes them. They haven’t shown up this year, which means the village is getting worried about starvation. You need to find out what’s going on. Turns out that with their already misanthropic inclinations from being social outcasts, they were easy prey for the rhetoric of Robo-Hitler, who’s brain was saved after the end of WWII, kept in a jar for several centuries and recently put in a new cyborg body. He’s promptly set out to establish a new reich, which predictably means more obvious mutants need to be exterminated. (but psychic powers are just fine because nazi hypocrisy) You won’t find this out until the climax of the story though, and if the DM does it right you might well still be wondering what the hell just happened. (and your characters who lack any knowledge of pre-bomb history definitely will) So this marries the traditional gamma world wackiness when it comes to mutations with a surprisingly large scale pulp premise and also manages a greater emphasis on thinking about the ecological ramifications of all these mutant powers jammed together in one world. You’ll have to not only beat the more obvious combat challenges of nazi robots with nuclear bombs, but not kill all the nazi gaucho mutants, as their powers are essential to the survival of society as you know it. It manages to work decently as both a single session tournament adventure or slowed down a bit so you can pursue the more complex political ramifications of all this. I definitely approve of this adventure. Now more than ever, it’s important to punch Hitler on a regular basis in fiction, but also remind ourselves that we can’t simply kill all our political opponents without becoming the monsters we’re fighting against.



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: The turbulence of the Border Kingdoms is underscored here, as having spent a couple of issues setting up a status quo, Ed changes it again. The mage-king spent less than a decade in charge before his big new school of magic was mysteriously nuked by unknown forces. His secret police weren’t seen for several months, then popped up again as tyrannical as before as if nothing had happened. Ondeme himself hasn’t been seen at all since then, and anyone asking about his fate faces their wrath. Is he really dead or is he merely lying low? Was all this destruction an external attack, or part of some big ritual to transform him into a lich or something even more powerful? Are the Slee the same people as before or something else disguised as them moving into the power vacuum? How are normal people supposed to make a reliable living when the law is essentially the whims of the highest ranking secret police in the vicinity? Despite all this, some people are coming in from neighbouring lands hoping they can take advantage of the opportunities here, but just as many are leaving, or only staying because they’re afraid of what will happen to them if they’re caught while trying to leave. Definitely a place in need of some heroic adventurers who not only solve the problems, but tell people about what happened afterwards even if it opens them up for retaliation, because without any resolution, the conspiracy theories are just going to grow and get ever more improbable even if the amount of immediate danger is reduced. Another entry that has a lot of adventure possibilities, but still leaves a lot open for you to decide in your own campaign. Even if the players read the newszine avidly, they’ll still have to do all the work of investigating the answers IC rather than knowing them OOC and conveniently making the right decisions for their characters based on that foreknowledge.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 143: August 2000



part 5/5



Internet 101: Going back to the dungeon is supposed to be one of the big changes of the new edition. But what exactly is a dungeon? Just as importantly, what wasn’t originally intended as a dungeon but could be used as one? So this column is a bunch of links to places that could be used as an adventure location with very little alteration. A hospital? They’re already nonlinear and multilevelled in a way that makes for good dungeons, all you need is for some secret medical experiment to go wrong and bioengineered monsters to be released or a disease turning the patients into ravenous zombies. A military base is similarly useful (and dangerous to try and fight your way through even if everything is working normally) and you can even combine the two, since many military bases have hospitals of their own. The maps linked too here are no longer publicly available though, another victim of increasing online security. The website for the 2000 Olympics that provides detailed topological information about the area has also expired. (although google maps can probably handle most of that now anyway) However, the next suggestion, abandoned subway stations, do still have the maps findable with only minor changes to the URL over the decades. The submarine link is even more unchanged, to the point where it’s marked as not secure on my browser. (but hey, at least there’s no annoying GDPR consent popup either) The final link to www.caves.org is also still active and healthy, which makes sense. Caves have been around far longer than any of these man-made structures and will probably outlast us as well. Exploring them and figuring out how to live comfortably in them is far cheaper than building new houses and it wouldn’t hurt to do more of that. A little genetic engineering to give us infrared vision and we’re halfway to becoming a goblin ourselves.



The survey wants to know what your favourite animal is. Will you go for something common they can run statistics on, or pick a choice no-one else has even heard of?



Project Catalog: The ongoing attempts to convert everything in the Living City to 3e wind up revealing what a monumental task it’s going to be. 10 years of adventures, in which they switched owners and moved across the country, with several complete overhauls of the computer system. This means they don’t actually have a full list of all the adventures they sanctioned in the early days, let alone copies of them. Those fires in the Trumpeter weren’t just IC losses of information, evidently. So if you want your character to keep any unusual magic items from the pre-certificate days you really need to act now, because the deadline is only a few months away. It’s hard work maintaining continuity over lots of staff and technology changes. Maybe it would be easier to start again from scratch after all.



A pretty fun issue, with the admin stuff buoyed up by the general optimism from expanding membership and oncoming new edition, and the game material of above average quality and general usefulness as well. Let’s see if they used up all their best submissions on this one and will struggle to get ones for the new system for a while, or they’ll hit the ground running and show off all the coolest aspects of 3e and the plethora of character building options it offers.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 8: August 2000



part 1/5



72 pages. Raarg! Beefy Barbarian smashed backdrop and will now smash you! We might not quite have all the 3e rules yet, but they’re already adopting one of the less pleasing aspects of the era - covers that are just static close-ups of a single character scowling at the camera. Those were irksome enough first time around with Dragon’s higher budget. Time to see what kind of submissions they’ve got in here and just how different the UK’s tastes continue to be.



Network News: Just as they did in the USA edition, they have to break the news that they’re combining the various regional magazines back into one big worldwide one that hopefully uses the best bits of all their formats. Since that means a bigger change here they work harder to sell this as a positive thing. You’ll still be getting plenty of material delivered to your door regularly (or will you?), thanks to the capable hands of Erik Mona. To underscore this international focus, they do short bits on each of the regions, showing how the RPGA has been growing in South Africa and the general Australasian region and the charitable things they’ve been doing along the way. So this isn’t goodbye, but hello to a whole bunch of new potential friends. Just try to make sure those noisy yanks don’t drown everyone else out, erasing all that gradually worked up diversity for a chain store monoculture.



Fiction - The Hunters by Anthony Preece: A trip to the Deadlands setting here, which is another game they never did an article on in the USA editions. Our group of 4 PC types (texas ranger, sharpshooter, preacher and gambling expert) have been sent to investigate supernatural happenings in the small town of Sycamore Grove. Both cows and people have been disappearing, then coming back several days later without their heads. This obviously has everyone on edge, but not being adventuring sorts they’re too scared to investigate themselves. As is often the case in these stories, it turns out it’s because their miners dug into indian burial grounds, and these superstitions have a lot more bite in a world where ghosts are real. Despite this, the profiteering owner of the mines doesn’t want to shut them down, and the adventurers & indians need to work together to defeat the walking dead. This unfortunately lets the big bad get away to trouble them another day but at least the town is saved and she’s a wanted criminal now. This all feels like a pretty direct adaption of an actual adventure for the game and is pretty cliched, but at least it sketches out the characters and makes them feel distinct enough in it’s short runtime. Not great literature, but perfectly functional gaming fiction that works as a good example of how a campaign of this is likely to go.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 8: August 2000



part 2/5



Alternity Planet Generator: Last issue they gave us a system for random stars. Now they zoom in a bit and add the planets. Probably should have done it all in one go since both are just a few pages long but such are the whims of editors. Unlike the previous one, where I could immediately see where the science was wrong even by the standards of their knowledge back then, they are at least trying to reflect the latest discoveries, which show that our arrangement of small planets close to the sun and gas giants further out is not any kind of hard rule, and there are some very large ones very close to their parent star in other systems. (although the math on the tables does not account for the hot neptune desert, so it still definitely has it’s inaccuracies.) It also includes orbital eccentricities, which is somewhat of an improvement over just assuming everything is in neat circles with no overlaps. I’m still pretty sure I could whip up a better one easily with a bit of study of the current known exoplanet data, but this doesn’t irritate me as much as last issue.



A Walk in the Forest: The Delta Green adventure continues in much the same way as last time, with several bits of weirdness that all ultimately turn out to be connected to Yellow Musk Creepers. First, you’re sent off to Dingle in Ireland, where Tsathogga worship seems to be springing up amongst the bored teenagers. This turns out to be the least of your worries, as puppet masters currently control the standing stones, using the ley line energy for their weird science. This is a threat to the yellow musk hivemind, so it sends a squad of infected paratroopers to blow the whole thing up. The puppet masters will respond by having all the controlled townspeople go full zombie and head to the circle immediately to stop them, making your attempts at subtle investigation moot. The paras will mow down the waves of townspeople and you’re faced with the dilemma of who to side with and how to minimise damage, while still probably not knowing exactly what’s going on. To top it off, the cultists have chosen tonight as the right time to summon as Formless Spawn, which if not stopped will turn this into a 4-way fight that leaves the village mostly destroyed. That’s a lot of plates to juggle at once and many groups will have a tough enough time just surviving through it all.

However they get through that mission, when they get back, they’ll be called by one of the survivors from the last one. More weirdness is going on in Hollesey and being covered up. Investigating it will lead to eventually lead to the RAF Woodbridge base, which has been taken over by the Yellow Musk. Once again the people will be slow of speech and reaction, which should make it pretty clear something’s up. At the same time, two Puppet Masters pretending to be regular uninfected soldiers are also infiltrating the base with the aim of blowing it up. You’re supposed to run into them and find this out, which then puts you with the dilemma of deciding which group of mind-controlling parasites to side with over the other, which is predictably bad for your SAN score. Whatever you choose, you’ll now be more aware of just how many alien forces are manipulating the world and how even well armed special forces agents are no match for many of their powers. Well, that’s definitely in the Cthulhu mythos spirit, so this works decently as a story. However, once again some crucial maps are missing from the adventure so it works less well as an adventure, needing the GM to figure out a layout that fits with the room descriptions before they can run it properly. That’s a pretty annoying bit of basic carelessness.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 8: August 2000



part 3/5



In Defence of the Realm: A bit of light relief as we head off to Castle Falkenstein for some steampunk fun. How could the British Empire protect itself from an invasion of Bavarian airships? What new technological tricks could they employ with their current arsenal of raw materials and magic? An early warning system of giant stone pillars along the coast, each with a massive compass on top to detect any magnetic disturbances? Then a rapid response train system that gets to the intrusion point fast and launches rockets carrying equally massive nets to ensnare and ground those pesky zeppelins? That’ll definitely do the trick, but only if money is no object, because the prices are ridiculous even at 1800’s numbers. So this serves as a demonstration of just how gonzo you can go with their crafting system, creating pulp superscience that functions on an army scale. That’s actually a pretty decent incentive to get me to want to play. D&D very rarely lets you go that big with your imagination and sometimes you want a lighter system and a setting that encourages higher power ridiculousness. The sheer breadth of games they cover in here continues to be very pleasing even if not all the individual articles are hits like this one.



Iron Will: Nothing to do with one of the most commonly taken feats in 3e, this turns out to be an adventure for the Hercules & Xena RPG, in another good example of the UK branch covering systems their other magazines didn’t. King Theseus wants lots of iron ore to make weapons with (secretly encouraged by Ares because y’know, more & better weapons means more interesting wars) and hires the PC’s to get it. This turns out to be more complicated than expected and sends you from one greek city-state to another in pursuit of your ultimate goal. From Athens to Piraeus to get hold of a ship & supplies. Depending on their route they could face sirens, ( which are another Spice Girls reference, because they were absolutely inescapable in the UK in the second half of the 90’s) a cyclops, pirates, or the trojan badger. (the history books say it was a horse because that sounds more dignified, but we know the truth) They can stop at Byzantum, which has plenty of interesting sights to see, but no iron ore, or press on to Synope or Trapezus, which do have it, but you have to deal with high prices or hostile natives to get some. Then you head back to Athens, with the warmth of your welcome depending on how good a deal you managed to get on the iron and if you question the suspiciousness of the whole premise. A lighthearted little adventure that’s both very nonlinear and very low on combat for a tournament adventure, with a lot of emphasis on the roleplaying of trading, the costs of buying and selling at various places and the amount you’ll consume on the journey. Not exactly what I was expecting when I heard the names Hercules & Xena but it’s definitely a nice change of pace from the usual kind of adventures you see around here, with plenty of opportunity for amusing repartee if you get into character. I can definitely see the value in this one and wish Dungeon would do at least a few trading chain based adventures, since those are becoming increasingly common as side quests in console RPG’s.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 8: August 2000



part 4/5



Welcome to the Flanaess: Another thing that we’ve been seeing from different perspectives on both sides of the pond gets a bit more info dripped out. We already knew that the Living Greyhawk setting would be linking setting locations to real world ones, so to play all the adventures you’d have to be able to travel internationally IRL as well. But making every adventure region specific would just be making tons more work for themselves with little payoff, so they’re also doing Adaptable modules, which are basically the same wherever you run them with minor flavour changes and Core modules, which are set in lands that aren’t mapped to a real world, such as monster controlled ones and the free city of Greyhawk itself. Everybody gets to go off and be a thorn in Iuz’s side, which is good because these are the adventures most likely to have metaplot consequences depending on what the majority of the groups did. Guess that idea has worked well enough in the Living Death setting that they’ve decided to keep it up. Of course, this also means that you can only get a clear picture of the last years of active timeline advancement if you were in the RPGA. I hope WotC kept track of that so if they do ever do Greyhawk in 5e it continues to build on previous editions rather than being a big reset like the Ravenloft & Dragonlance books. I know it’s harder to keep a world interesting and adventurable at all points in the timeline if it’s always moving forward, enemies are actually dying and new ones rising but giving it actual weight of history is worth it.



Mailbag: First letter is against the idea of Magic Missiles being able to detect invisible things. They should travel on erratic paths like Darkseid’s eyebeams so a deviation doesn’t immediately make the caster suspicious.

Second thinks the invisible character in the middle should roll a saving throw to see if it passes through to it’s intended target or not.

Third thinks that it will automatically fly around the invisible creature, but it’s going so fast that the user should roll a save to see if they spot that minor aberration so they might act on it later.

Fourth thinks magic missiles should simply travel too fast to see, making he whole point moot.

Fifth thinks that the appearance of travelling is merely fluff, and they go direct from caster to target via short-range teleportation, once again avoiding any disturbance from invisible creatures in their apparent flight path.

Sixth moves onto a completely different rules quibble. Does feather fall actually make you lighter for the purposes of being caught & lifted while falling, or merely decouple your mass & weight so you’re still just as hard to lift or otherwise divert from your slowed descent?

Seventh goes back to the question of how undead see. It ought to be different enough that the living are obvious to them, explaining why they instinctively hate and envy you.

Eighth wonders what happens if you cast Haste upon a pregnant woman. Does the baby age a year as well and what effects does that have on both of them? Being in an old school mood, they answer their own question with a random table, with results ranging from chestburster style instant death of both parties to the baby not only being fine, but born with permanent superhuman powers. I think this is one case where it’s a relief that they’ll be getting rid of that whole can of worms in the next edition and nerfing the power level of the spell to compensate.

Finally, a bunch of humourous last words, which definitely seems like a fitting way to close out proceedings.