TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron UK Issue 8: August 2000



part 5/5



Reviews: Diablo II: the Awakening takes the monsters from the computer game and converts them to D&D. 16 dungeon levels of hack and slash brutality should be enough to satiate the bloodlust of nearly any player. People who are in it for the roleplaying, worldbuilding, ecology or other such things should look elsewhere.

Die Vecna Die! gets a very positive review, as it is a pretty epic story, the production values are high, and it provides more nuance to Iuz and Vecna. Any concerns other people have with the railroading or way it changes multiple settings are not going to be allowed to intrude in here.

Gamma World 5e for the Alternity system gets a very positive blurb but only a 75% score. They want it to succeed, but must still have some misgivings under there somewhere.

Reverse Dungeon takes an idea a couple of adventures have done in Polyhedron and makes a full book out of it. Three different sets of monsters of very different power levels have to defend their homes from adventurers. The perfect palate cleanser for when you’re sick of your regular gaming formula or someone hasn’t showed up and you need a one-shot to fill the evening.



Megabyte is entirely devoted to coverage of Diablo II, as should be no surprise since WotC are doing a tie-in with them which we saw just a couple of pages ago. Also unsurprisingly, they give this high marks in all categories apart from a few minor grumbles. The story isn’t particularly deep, it’s behind the times in terms of online connectivity and the save system restarts you way back at the village with all the monsters respawned no matter where you stopped so you have to clear each big section in one go. Apart from that, it’s a top notch action RPG that gives you plenty of choices in how you build your character and lots of replayability as a consequence. Besides, if you add too many quality of life accommodations you’ll destroy the old school dungeoncrawling flavour anyway.



With hardly any D&D material at all (it’d just be made out of date in the edition change anyway) and a plethora of stuff for other systems, some of which we’ve never seen before, this feels like a big last hurrah for non WotC coverage. Very soon it’ll be all 3e all the time, which did get a little tedious last time around. Oh well, at least with the minigames it’ll be coming in more flavours than the basic dungeoncrawling. Let’s see how much I enjoy the adventures and experiments they have to offer.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 00: August 2000



part 1/4



14 pages. One side quest ends, another begins. Between the Trumpeter, Polyhedron UK and this the journey has turned out somewhat longer and more complicated to keep track of than I thought at the outset. They definitely seem to be taking the whole step up in production values idea seriously though, as this is in full color inside and out, with a cover depicting the Circle of Eight. (and their pseudodragon pet) Let’s find out what balance of administrative detail and new IC lore they strike and if any of it will still be useful for home games many years later.



Campaign News: Let’s set the stage. It’s august 2000 and you’re at Gen Con, eager to get a first peek at the hotly anticipated new edition of D&D, maybe even play a game. This little pamphlet is one of the first things you’re likely to have got to read. So it’s aimed at people who may well not be members of the RPGA and haven’t read the past few months of Living Greyhawk teasers and there’s a fair bit of repetition for those of us who have. The Oerth has been divided up and your real world country is linked to where your character lives. You’ll be getting issues of this and Polyhedron on alternating months and between them, that’ll keep you up to date on the various Living setting developments. But there is some new news too. The full-sized Living Greyhawk Gazetteer will be out in November giving you a more detailed look at the setting. (although still not as much as previous editions) In the meantime, you can play the first three adventures right now! Who remembers Dragonscales at Morningtide, The River of Blood or The Reckoning? Did they have good stories and did the rules have any 2e holdover glitches?

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 00: August 2000



part 2/4



Character Creation Guidelines: For a good decade, the RPGA has been leading the way in using point buy rather than rolling for stats as the default. It’s no surprise that Living Greyhawk is strictly point buy as well. However, instead of a flat total of stats that encouraged minmaxing, 3e point buy is a little more sophisticated, with a minimum of 8 points in everything and escalating costs for scores above 14. They’re going for the “tougher campaign” setting, giving you 28 points to allocate. This means your total can range from 76 if you go for an all-rounder, to 68 if you pile it all into as few scores as possible, giving you an 18, a 16, a 10 and three 8’s. Any race/class combo from the PHB is allowed, as that’s been one of their big selling points all through the promotion, everyone starts with max gold, you can start at any adult age, be any height/weight in your race’s range without rolling and worship any nonevil deity in the book. It’s all a lot more open than the finicky set of house rules Living City accumulated around kits and specialty priests. There are still some limitations compared to a home game though. Clerics have to worship a specific god to get powers, not some vague philosophy that’d let them switch alignment willy-nilly. Crafting powers and masterwork equipment are currently not allowed, so anything above regular quality needs to be found in adventure, and while your character can choose to not be from the country linked to their real world location, that means they’ll suffer the social penalties for being a foreigner. The selection of what is linked to where looks somewhat lopsided as well, with some countries linked to half a dozen different states, some to only one, (Wisconsin & Michigan are obviously overrepresented, being so close to the birthplace of D&D) the whole of Australia & New Zealand lumped into Perrenland and Africa, Asia & South America getting ignored, showing there’s still no significant RPGA presence in those continents at all. So this indirectly winds up showing where D&D is and isn’t popular, although you’d also have to take population density into account. Lots to think about here, and it’ll definitely be interesting to see if they manage to open up any new regions, or have to ban more things that turn out to be a bad idea in actual play in future issues.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 00: August 2000



part 3/4



Wheels within Wheels: Since they’re our cover stars, it’s no surprise that the real meat of this issue is an 8 page (of course!) article on the history of the Circle of Eight. They’ve been going for a good 30 years now both IC and OOC in various incarnations. Originally a group of (mostly) heroic adventurers of all classes, they’ve wound up becoming more of the Mordenkainen show, plus whatever wizards are currently following him and his credo of militant neutrality at the moment. Most of the spellcasters who have spells named after them in the PHB have been members at one point or another. (which means the state of magical knowledge on Oerth has advanced dramatically in a single generation, so much for being a static pseudomedieval setting) They’ve certainly had their setbacks, all being killed 10 years ago by Vecna (but brought back by cloning) and then betrayed by Rary during the wars 8 years ago, but the organisation as a whole survives and the average level of the members continues to rise. All 9 current members are named, Bigby, Drawmij, Nystul, Otto, Mordenkainen himself and 4 newbies who stick out like sore thumbs, with a completely different naming convention, making it obvious that while they are trying to incorporate lore from the old days, the current writers can’t even remotely match it’s tone with their new characters. All are high level single-class generalist wizards, (apart from Otto, who has a few cleric levels) with no specialists, sorcerers, prestige classes or any of the other interesting things you can do with class builds in 3e. Although the edition change is upon us, this shows that the staff writers still haven’t remotely caught up with it’s possibilities, still building the characters in the old AD&D way where you pick a class and usually stick with it until death/retirement and even specialists have stringent ability score requirements that make most people not bother. If they’d done this a few years later, they’d look a lot more interesting mechanically and have incorporated the things described in the backstories into the mechanics (it says he’s a Loremaster right there! Surely you know about that prestige class at least?! ) So this is very interesting article of much greater ambition and significance than usual, but I can easily see ways it could have been improved on both a fluff and mechanics level in hindsight. Departing from canon for your home game is definitely of use here.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 00: August 2000



part 4/4



Dispatches: One of the important but also challenging parts of a Living setting is making it feel alive, changing things enough over time that it doesn’t feel completely static, but also not making the metaplot so overbearing and out of the player’s control that it ruins the experience. Hopefully they’ve learned enough from the excesses of the 90’s as to avoid destroying entire countries. (although looking at what they did to the Forgotten Realms in the 4e changeover maybe not) Anyway, here’s 6 little bits of news from various countries (giving them a chance to show off their heraldry in the process) crammed into one page. A magical helix over Obag, a tiger-coloured basilisk in Perrenland, a big celebration of the king’s 5th anniversary in Nyrond, a new upcoming Sea Prince, a newly discovered megadungeon in Onnwal, and gnomish unrest in Verbobonc. Plenty of opportunity for adventures that I’m sure had modules connected to them. Anyone have any stories of what their PC’s did in those?



The Regional Triads: Another single pager finishes things off, letting us know exactly who the Circle of Six and various regional triads are, and more importantly, their email addresses. I wonder how many of these are still alive and using the same ones? Maybe I should send out an email to see if I can get any of them to tell their stories of that era. Some of the European positions are still unfilled despite their best efforts, showing that even there, they aren’t nearly as popular as the USA. Another area where I should keep an eye on new additions and departures, as it might turn out to be significant long-term.



A short issue, but one packed with significant information that’ll likely remain so throughout the lifespan of the Living campaign. In that respect it’s a welcome throwback to the first issues of their other magazines, where the production values might not have been all there yet, but they had greater freedom to create what they wanted. But we all know that can’t last. We’re through the pilot episode, now it’s time to see how the regular series differs from it. How will their rapidly improving system mastery but also greater management rigidity shake out in terms of providing fun for us?

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 01: September 2000



part 1/4



35 pages. Looks like the issues proper are going to be somewhat larger than the introductory one, although still smaller than Polyhedron itself. They’re already adding significantly to their workload by releasing something every month and they’re only getting so many submissions. Actually, looking at the table of contents those are still mostly from the staff as well so they’re really working overtime on this. Let’s see if what they’ve come up with gets me excited to play.



Campaign News: Well, it’s only been a month, but they’ve already got started with a bang. They ran 305 tables of Living Greyhawk at Gen Con, easily eclipsing the old Living City and Classic tournament entries. Hopefully that performance will be replicated at other upcoming conventions and the plotline started in the first Core adventure will run for many years. But to do that they need to get you at home signed up. Time for another repeat of the character creation rules. Only now there’s a bunch of new stuff in light of the release of the DMG. Some, but not all the demihuman subraces are now allowed, as well as the 4 nonevil prestige classes in the DMG. Knowledge skills are now further tightened up to avoid anachronisms. Holy Water is added to the things you’re allowed to buy with money. The downtime system from Living City is being copied over, but using 52 real world weeks rather than 73 realmsian fivedays as your measure of time. Wizards learning spells other than the ones they get for free with level advancement costs a time unit. Once again, they’re being pretty permissive with what they allow in, as we don’t have tons of supplements to examine for unexpected synergies yet. If that’s still not good enough for you, they’re doing a competition which’ll let your character have one unique thing not normally available. Send in your concept and the 5 most interesting (non-game breaking) ideas get their wish granted. I look forward to finding out what they consider acceptable options.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 00: August 2000
The Regional Triads: Another single pager finishes things off, letting us know exactly who the Circle of Six and various regional triads are, and more importantly, their email addresses. I wonder how many of these are still alive and using the same ones? Maybe I should send out an email to see if I can get any of them to tell their stories of that era.

Well, I gave it a shot, anyway. First results, 32 out of 58 emails just got an automated undeliverable message straight away. That leaves 26 that are still on the database, but may or may not actually be checked regularly and my message may or may not have gone into the spam filter on.

Edit: Another 7 error messages tricked in over the past day, leaving just 19 potentials, none of which have actually replied. Doesn't look like this is going to be very fruitful.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 01: September 2000



part 2/4



Places of Mystery: Ed Greenwood has been filling the Realms with vast amounts of lore for many years now, appearing in nearly every issue of both Dragon and Polyhedron, sometimes more than once in the same issue. By contrast, Oerth still feels pretty sparse. But not if Erik has anything to do with it! So this is the start of several columns that’ll appear in Dragon a little later when this stops working as a standalone thing and gets folded into the bigger magazine. They’ve got a lot of catching up to do and won’t quite make it, but it’s not as if we can’t use ideas from either setting in our own one, so as long as some of them are good it’s all a net positive to our gaming experience.

The Belching Vortex of Leuk-O is definitely one Ed wouldn’t have written, reminding us that Oerth has more crashed spaceships and general sci-fi influence than Toril. It’s a magical portal to another world where the air is poisonous, but the players at home will recognise that the key to open it is more of a keycard and the things on the other end are very clearly the products of advanced science. Whether they break the 4th wall or not in response is up to them. The kind of place you aren’t going to explore and come back from without serious protection, although that could be magical or big clunky spacesuits. You don’t need to go to another plane to have high level ultra-deadly adventures like that.

The Fabled City of Dar-Kesh Anam is Oerth’s own bottled city of Kandor, currently owned by a very eccentric merchant in Dryleaves. For a small fee he’ll use a magic ring to shrink you down and send you into the place. Getting out alive and returning to your normal size on the other hand is up to you. Unsurprisingly, it’s a crumbling, dangerous place, filled with a motley collection of people from across the universe and their descendants. You’re less likely to die immediately if you enter this one unprepared, but it’ll still be the start of a long, tricky pulp style adventure without the ability to recharge your supplies in the middle so once again best aimed at high level parties.



The Kingdom of Keoland: The centrepiece article doesn’t take up more than half the issue this time, but is still a good 12 pages. We’re off to the Throne of the Lion, which will particularly please anyone in New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania since those are the real world states partnered with it. First they cover general stuff, the monarchy, the courts, their particular fondness for heraldry, their knightly order, the regulations they have on both clerical & arcane magic and the dominance of their merchants. Then they have individual entries on 13 of their major provinces and 7 shorter looks at a few of their smaller ones. This gives you substantially more info than the short country entries in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, but still nowhere near as much as all the sourcebooks for individual countries the Realms got in 2e. It feels like a precursor to the format they’ll use for the Demonomicon and Core Belief articles later on, being a similar size and following a similar formula. It does look like there’ll be plenty of stuff in these issues that’ll never appear anywhere else that people playing in Greyhawk would find useful.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 01: September 2000



part 3/4



Enchiridion of the Fiend-Sage: Oh, it’s of the fiend-sage! When I saw this column in Dragon first time around I thought Enchiridion was it’s name due to the way the writing was stylised. Turns out our considerably smarter than the average Molydeus narrator is actually called Rel Astra. (which turns out to be an editing error as well, as that’s a city in Greyhawk and there should be an of in that title as well. I guess confusing people about your identity so they can’t use summoning spells is a fine fiendish tradition, so it’s just about possible to make sense of this IC, but from an OOC writing and formatting level it’s all very sloppy. ) Anyway, as those of you who read Dragon in this era will know, this is going to be our regular monsters column, bringing back Greyhawk specific creatures that aren’t appearing in the books and adding new ones as well, with our narrator’s IC observations allowing slightly more ecology stuff than the new format has as standard. (although still not as much as 2e) There’s definitely a vast number of creatures to update at this point so let’s see what they picked and if they’ll manage to screw up the math editing as well.

Greyhawk Dragons have greyhawk in the name, so you can’t really file the serial numbers off them and put them in an unrelated book. They serve as a reminder that even relatively weak dragon types have been massively jacked up stat-wise compared to previous editions. (and 2e was already a decent bump compared to 1e) Like their 2e versions, despite not being the strongest or toughest of dragons they are very powerful spellcasters, exceeding even gold dragons in caster level and able to assume other forms right from hatchling age. This is very handy for them as most actively prefer living in humanoid form amid the bustle of urban life, and it would be very inconvenient to have to disappear for a generation if you want to have kids. Highly resistant to both magic and poison, they serve as a reminder that not everyone is as they seem and trying to destroy a city can make you some powerful enemies. But if you’re nice, who knows what bits of awesome lore you could learn.

Nauskiree are our only new creation, and as far as I can tell, never appear anywhere else either. Creepy naked carnivorous giraffe humanoids with arms, legs & neck way too long for their bodies, they camouflage themselves amid arctic forests and ambush you using their disproportionately long reach. Fighting them seems an exercise in showcasing the new reach/facing/attack of opportunity rules. Hope you packed your polearms or missile weapons.

Sons of Kyuss are one of the most brutal old school undead, mixing short term death from worm infection with long term disease on top of the basic physical threat of their attacks. Their unfair elements haven’t been nerfed and they’ll have a long interesting association with the magazines in a few years time when the adventure paths get going. Good to see them here, although it’s clear they haven’t quite ironed out the distinction between fast healing and regeneration in the rules yet. That obviously went through several drafts before reaching the published version and it’s always a headache keeping track of that stuff while writing multiple things concurrently.

Xvarts are pretty much redundant now any race can gain any level in any class. They don’t have any special gimmick to distinguish them from other goblinoids, so it’s not surprising they were cut from the corebooks and only appear in here where the hardcore Greyhawk fans will appreciate them.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 01: September 2000



part 4/4



Playing Pieces: Now here’s an attempt at a column that won’t make it to Dragon. One devoted to NPC’s, where that conceptual space is already taken by the Rogues Galleries. So here’s a profile of the Despotrix of Hardby, Ilena Norbelos and her “close personal friend”, the cleric/rogue Javka Gerneskir. Despite the title, both of them are firmly NG and trying to do their best for the town, which isn’t always easy when the political landscape is dominated by the much larger city of Greyhawk and the merchants guild is doing it’s best to dominate the area in practice regardless of who’s technically making the laws. So this is a fairly mundane bit of geopolitics, contrasting with the weirdness of the previous articles, but there’s still a decent amount of material here that could be turned into an adventure plot, plus one of the first opportunities to show off how you build PC’s in 3e. Unsurprisingly they don’t have nearly as many magic items as PC’s of the same level, but their skill & feat selections are still worth looking at as examples and it shows you how they’re building more general setting details that aren’t immediately connected to some big adventurable crisis.



Dispatches: The individual entries remain just as compact, but now there are 18 of them over 3 pages, reminding us just how big Oerth is and the sheer scope of the Living campaign. Expansionist nobles in Ahlissa, disembodied hands pulling Iuz’s forces underground in the bandit kingdoms, tax rises il Bissel, stressed out merchants in Divers due to the closing of the Gnarley road, restless barbarians in the Gran March, a cult of Incabulos discovered in Greyhawk City, humanoid attacks in the Vesve forest, ancient stone tablets discovered in Irongate, adventurers sailing ships to raid Iuz’s territory and paying the price, an earthquake in keoland, a whole squadron being destroyed by monsters in Ket, apart from the commander, who’s now been drummed out of the army under a dark cloud for this incompetence, the setting up of formalised adventurers licences in Nyrond, ongoing rebellion in Onnwal, trouble from trolls in the Pale, feuding nobles in Ratik, Utavo the Wise consolidates his position amongst the Sea Princes, the new Critwall bridge is finally finished in the Shieldlands and the Marchioness of Sterich has dissolved a barony who’s potential heirs just couldn’t stop feuding, so now none of them can have it. Whew. Definitely no way a group of PC’s could be involved with all of these at once even if they were high level enough that teleportation is routine, but hopefully at least one of them could fit your campaign. Anyone actually get to use these and whatever adventures were connected to them?



The Living Greyhawk Contact List update puts Gael Richard in charge of the Ekbir region and Pieter Slingen in the Sunndi one. Steve Hardinger takes the Nyrond position from Hohn Cho, while Matt Lau has gained Ratik from Jeff Meja. Finally, the Duchy and Principality of Ulek have merged, with Christopher Reed getting both jobs and ousting Shy Aberman from the former Duchy. Still a fair few vacant positions, but that’s definite progress. Lets hope whatever caused the three departures wasn’t too much of a real world crisis for them.



Like the introductory issue, this is notable for being much more specific than their general gaming magazines, focussing entirely on doing Greyhawk and doing it well, although it’s still lighter on crunch than it could be as they’re still not quite fully converted over in their own heads. But there is still a very high ratio of game useful info in here despite the odd mathematical snafu. Let’s see if they go through the same phases of initial dungeonpunk stylings and then settling down to become more formulaic than ever that took place in Dragon.