TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron issue 144: October 2000



part 5/6



The Palace of Passion: It’s been a few issues since they did a feature on a Raven’s Bluff temple, but they’re back and this time they remembered to take the metaplot into account. Followers of Sune played a big part in the battle against the machinations of Glasya, and although they eventually won, the temple was destroyed in the process. Some hard work rebuilding later and here we are. It’s still not one of the official civic religions, because some people are stick in the muds about the hedonism that goes on there, but her portfolio is both popular with the common people and very profitable, and with more worshippers than ever after the very public Baatezu beating, it’s obvious any attempts to ban them on grounds of indecency won’t be gaining traction without at least another generation of subtle manipulation. The temple itself is pretty much what you’d expect, an opulent place with a river on one side and wooded gardens round the back that offer plenty of niches for people who prefer a bit more privacy for their pleasures, although it’s also been built more for defensibility than the previous version as well. The various clergy are also pretty interesting, particularly because they’re still built using the 2e rules when everything else has already been converted over. They also manage to get a humorous dig in at the tendency of Living City players to use Cha & Comeliness (when that was still a thing) as dump stats, which hopefully will be somewhat reduced in 3e since it’s actually significant to the powers of several classes. Overall, this manages to be well above average for an entry in this series in both usefulness and consistency with previously established facts about the city. That’s good whether you’re playing in 2e, 3e or some other system entirely.



Bare Bones: They said they’d be incorporating elements from Polyhedron UK when they merged them and here’s the first one. A general roleplaying advice column. The trouble is, unless it’s a serialised one, the advice tends to be pretty basic and repetitive, aimed at people who haven’t been doing this for decades and seen the cycle play out over and over, helpless to stop it. So it proves here. A reminder that you can draw inspiration from anything, you just need to keep your eyes open and maybe mix it with something else you also saw recently to come up with something new? That’s not a new idea at all. The specific example is decent enough, a cyberpunk dystopian Hawaii being used as a backdrop for murder mysteries. Agatha Christie would definitely be a fish out of water there. But overall, this is another article that’s way too low CR for me to gain any XP for defeating.



The Polyhedron Review: Another of the attempts to be a more general gaming magazine from the UK side. Well, Dragon stopped doing reviews a couple of years ago, so it’s not as if they’re stepping on their toes anymore.

Three Days to Kill is one of the first third-party d20 adventures. A pleasingly gritty little adventure where you have to infiltrate and disrupt a meeting of bandit lords, preferably terminally. The compromises involved may be a bit much for stalwart paladin players, but that just shows how many adventures never made it into Dungeon not because of quality, but because they didn’t have an unambiguously heroic resolution and why the OGL will be a net positive to the diversity of supplements for D&D despite the amount of shovelware.

Ork! The Roleplaying Game is basically the same joke as the old GAZ10: Orcs of Thar, only with a stripped down system better suited for a jokey beer & pretzels game that isn’t intended to last more than a session or two. Four attributes, a bunch of humorously named skills and wildly fluctuating difficulty levels facilitate you living fast and dying horribly with plenty of collateral damage along the way. Shouldn’t be too hard to convert the two adventures from Dungeon based on the concept if you’re short of ideas either.

The JLA Sourcebook for the DC Universe RPG tries to quantify the ridiculous power levels of Superman, Green Lantern, Plastic Man, et al. This requires a lot of dice! While the art is good, they’re not so keen on the rules. Surely there must be a more elegant way of representing those powers that doesn’t require fistfuls of dice and a ton of counting for each action? Erik is also not a fan of including the irritatingly kiddified Young Justice team either. It’ll still be quite some time before they get a well written cartoon to elevate them with intelligent long-running storylines. Overall, not terrible, but could definitely be improved.

Harnmanor takes us to pretty much the opposite end of the realism scale, giving us a detailed system for tracking the development of your manors and the surrounding villages. If you want to know how to cook authentic medieval bread, get deep into the logistics of smithing and exactly how many fighting men a place can support before you don’t have enough to keep the day to day food growing running properly it does an exemplary job and has enough system free historical detail to be useful in any other game set in the same era. Not for every group, but highly recommended if you do want to play a game like that.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron issue 144: October 2000



part 6/6



Web Wanderings: Internet 101 decides that we’re all probably familiar with the basics by now and rebrands, but the format remains pretty much the same. We’re off to explore the wild! Of course, small map sites have been thoroughly superceded by google maps so the link rot is strong in this one. easynet’s personal profiles are long gone. mungopark.com now redirects to an expedia booking link for the place. herper.com sends an invalid response. fuse.net still exists as a legacy email client in the same way that hotmail has now been incorporated into outlook, but the personal websites on it are gone and the trademark taken by the european attempt to promote nuclear fusion. Only the Byrd Polar Research Center still exists, and even there the website address has completely changed. This turns out to be one of the least useful entries in the series yet. Thoroughly frustrating.



On The Trail: Our final UK import is the convention recaps column. This is suitably international, covering not only the original Gen Con, but also their UK and Benelux branches, which are staggered enough that you could visit all three if you had the finances. Unsurprisingly, getting to play 3e for the first time was the big draw in all of them, but there were still plenty of attendees for the 2e Living City Stuff, the LARP hybrid Living Death and entirely different systems like Ork!, Hero Wars and Warhammer. The UK gamers were particularly fond of their Vampire:tM stuff, while the european ones had a particularly impressive set of Pokemon tournaments & trading area, but all were massive and very positively received, although the Benelux one was only 2 days compared to the full weekend+ of the other two. Not a huge amount to comment on here, but it’s good to see the overall number of attendees continues to grow in all of these countries.



The survey pays particular attention to making the formatting look stylish, with the writing switching from white to black at just the right point to maintain readability against the background gradient. Since knowing if they got this one right or not is extra important to them, everyone who fills in a survey has a chance to win a copy of the new Forgotten Realms monster compendium.



Some of the blandly positive promotional stuff is quite irritating, but otherwise this is a solid step up from the old newszine in both production values and proportion of useful crunchy stuff, while not completely abandoning non D&D material like Dragon has. I know this incarnation won’t last long, but let’s hope it keeps up this kind of showing while it does.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 83: Nov/Dec 2000



part 1/6



132 pages. In all but the most fantastical of fantasy worlds, dentistry won’t be as good as in the real one and that’s if you can afford it at all. You’d better take care of your smile if you want it to last through both the physical and mental challenges of adventuring. Otherwise you’ll end up in an asylum like the wretch on this issue’s cover and the treatment in those places is not remotely reliable. Let’s find out if you can do any better to help them than the staff, or if the madness will be the kind that makes them more of a danger to you when they do escape and you’ll need to bring them back.



Editorial: Just because they’re going back to the dungeon, doesn’t mean it has to be at the expense of personality. If you’re doing it right, you can give the dungeon itself a personality, or at least a theme, as many a CRPG will demonstrate. There’s the undead themed ones. There’s the elemental themed ones. There’s ones devoted to a specific religion or revolving around a particular class. Then once those simple, often repeated themes become stale, you can come up with more subtle and complex personalities for your dungeons and see if the players can still figure out what’s going on. This also has the advantage of making you come up with descriptive detail for the bits that aren’t significant to the plot, so they aren’t instantly suspicious a floor is trapped or a statue is going to come to life just because you mention it in more detail than anything else in the room. Fairly familiar advice, only done in a slightly different way because the game itself has changed, changing it’s context in turn. They’re still an RPG, just one a little more focussed on tactical combat and a little less on extended exploration and ecology. The ability to make open-ended choices and make setting lore significant is still what distinguishes them from a game run by a computer. You’d better keep on satisfying that need if you don’t want them to lose interest and play a game they can pick up and put down any time.



Letters: First letter has plenty of praise for them, but also notes the struggles they sometimes have thinking of fresh ways to get PC’s involved with adventures. If you give them a mentor or make them part of an organisation that sends them on missions, you can bypass that whole mess because they have to take the orders and it gives you more regular characters to roleplay with. Much simpler.

Second is a deliberately contrasting one that thinks the new look is a big downward step. The move to full colour has come at the expense of cleanness and ease of readability. They’ve had quite a few like that, which is why the most extreme parts of the dungeonpunk revolution faded pretty quickly in subsequent issues.

Third praises A Race Against Time highly. The editors are pleased enough by this to give 3e conversion stats for the major characters in it.

Fourth is another one who thinks that just because they can make everything full colour now, doesn’t mean they should make every page filled with bright clashing ones. It makes it more difficult to actually use, particularly when you want to photocopy part of it.

Fifth also wants to see more substance, less style and more attention paid to maps. If they don’t have a proper scale how are you supposed to use them for your battles?

Sixth is another one that thinks that while the rules of the new edition are an improvement, the look is not, and the first two introductory adventures were pretty snooze-worthy. They still have plenty more room to refine things.

Seventh says much the same thing but in a more positive way, praising the second two adventures last issue. It’s good to see that they still have plenty of room for politics and noncombat solutions.

Eighth is also not keen on the basic dungeoncrawling adventures last issue, and thinks the Robin Hood one felt too generic as well. Only Eye for an Eye was something they’d actually use.

Ninth does actually like their new look, and just wishes they’d gone into more detail when creating Nottingham Castle. Finish what you started, instead of leaving it up to us.

10th wants them to do single prefab dungeon rooms like Polyhedron used to, as we already have plenty of wilderness side treks. If they can get the submissions, they’ll happily make a regular column out of it.

11th is yet another who thinks the new full colour look is too busy and harder to actually read. They are listening to this feedback and paying attention, honest!

Finally, one from future contributor Amber E. Scott, praising the swashbuckling action of Fortune Favors the Dead. It didn’t seem like her cup of tea at first, but in actual play it worked perfectly. It’s often better to try something at least once than just reject it from looking at the cover.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 83: Nov/Dec 2000



part 2/6



Deep Freeze: Our cover story does indeed send you to an asylum which is being mismanaged in a particularly peculiar way and expects you to solve it. The director found the ruins of an ancient alien civilisation buried in the ice near the asylum. Unfortunately, it’s mind-control artifacts are still fully functional and now he’s taken all the inmates to be enslaved as well and dig the place up. Someone soon notices that the place isn’t operating as usual and hires the PC’s to investigate. When you get there, it’ll be almost empty and the owner will fob you off with a plausible but not particularly clever excuse in the manner of the magically mind-controlled. Figuring out something is fishy is pretty easy, but no amount of questioning or intimidation will get a straight answer out of him. The few remaining inmates will be more honest but don’t have any solid answers either. Probably the most obvious options would be exploring the glacier in the direction the other inmates were taken, or waiting for the doctor to leave and stealthily following him to the ruined city. Most of it is still frozen, but there’s enough weirdness to be a challenge. Can you destroy the mind-controlling artifact and free everyone from it without either being taken over by it yourselves, or killed by the people already controlled for interfering? The dungeon-crawling part of this adventure is pretty short, and the whole thing is definitely much easier if your characters use their brains and stealth skills rather than trying to hack their way through everything. Fairly average in terms of overall quality, but it does introduce an interesting new monster and remind us that 3e will lean more heavily on the lovecraftian horrors set of influences than the previous editions. Now the rules themselves are less humancentric it’s much easier to create truly ancient civilisations filled with creatures capable of matching or exceeding us in flexibility.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 83: Nov/Dec 2000



part 3/6



Iriandel: After one adventure that feels very contemporary in it’s design, this one hedges their bets by being a romantic fantasy influenced one that feels more like it was written in 2e then converted by the editors. While passing through a village, the PC’s hear a particularly longwinded story about a horse that is supposedly a unicorn that lost it’s horn over 300 years ago. If someone found said horn and reunited it with him that would be a big boon for the forces of good. Since it wouldn’t be much of an adventure otherwise, if you pursue it this rumour will turn out to be true. If you search in the right place near the village you find a talking owl which can guide you to the tomb it’s in no problem. You could also find it entirely on your own, although there’s several other challenges around you’re likely to blunder into in the process. The tomb itself is fairly linear, but has a decent mix of traps, undead and other summoned creatures guarding the central chamber. Then once you get back to the village, you’ll find it’s under attack by a gang of orcs & ogres from the hills. This gives you a good opportunity to sneak or dramatically force your way through to the village, unite the horn with it’s rightful owner and spectacularly turn the tide with the aid of the unicorn’s powers for a happy storybook ending. So there’s some distinctly cheesy elements here, but the overall adventure design is still sandboxy enough that you’re not forced to engage with them in precisely one way and order. If you’re one of the people who abandoned vanilla brand D20 for Blue Rose & True20 when they came out this is pretty much an ideal adventure to use in a campaign like that with a little conversion. If your tastes run more towards the Nisarg end of gaming you should probably avoid it like the plague.



Nodwick finds duct tape a far more reliable way of keeping horns on than the randomness of magic.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 83: Nov/Dec 2000



part 4/6



London Calling: We have visited london before under the D&D system, in one of the adventures in Dragon shortly before Dungeon spun off from it. This is not an update of that concept for the new edition though, but an Alternity one for the Dark Matter setting. A diabolist is trying to summon Kali to earth. Since ritual murders are a big part of Kali’s thing, he has to kill 4 people who were born on precisely 12:01am on the 22nd of December, in a quite specific way. Fortunately, someone spots a pattern after just two murders and the PC’s (who are presumed to be secret agents in the X-files tradition) are called in. Not only do you have to deal with the murderer and his summoned Rakshasa minion (which is just as hard to kill under these rules as in D&D), but also the local Fox Mulder expy, who’s already figured out what’s going on, but isn’t taken seriously by the police department, as they think he’s mad. Figuring going to prison is better than the end of the world, he’s decided that the logical thing to do to prevent Kali from being summoned is to kill all the potentials before the other murderer can get to them. Fortunately, not being a natural killer, he winds up imbibing large amounts of alcohol for dutch courage beforehand, so it’s not actually that hard to stop him and talk him down if your investigators are on the ball. Either way, you’ll probably be in close vicinity to the victim when the diabolist strikes, whether it’s to finish her off or get revenge for having his plan foiled. Survive that and you can all go home for tea. A fairly linear sequence of 6 scenes that do have multiple ways to solve them, but you’re still pretty likely to wind up heading in the same direction however you handle it, this is ok if you like tournament style adventures, but is pretty underwhelming for me. It’s hard for them to be as strict on the quality control for non D&D adventures when they get so few submissions in the first place and at least they’re still trying.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 83: Nov/Dec 2000



part 5/6



Depths of Rage: Back to adventures that feel like a showcase for features of the new system. You’ve hit 4th level, you might think you’re starting to outgrow goblin encounters. But now, even upgrading them from 1st level warriors to 1st level barbarians is enough to keep them challenging for a while longer, particularly if you mix in higher level ones and other classes and actually use their various class features intelligently. This would in itself be a decent gimmick to build an adventure around while it’s still fresh. But no, the adventure goes the extra mile by combining it with a second gimmick that we haven’t seen before. Halfway through the adventure, there’ll be an earthquake which dramatically alters the dungeon map, including sealing off the way you came in and forcing you to hunt for another way out. That’ll definitely raise the tension, especially if you’d already used up most of your spells for the day. So this is a combatfest, but one which will test your brains as well, with a jagged uneven layout to the caverns that’s easy to get lost in if your mapper isn’t on the ball and multiple twists along the way. I strongly approve of this one, as it’s well written and it’s very unlikely we’ll see another one using exactly the same elements.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 83: Nov/Dec 2000



part 6/6



Alterations: We’re even more unlikely to ever see another one quite like this again, as they do a tie-in adventure for the Greyhawk 2000 stuff in Dragon 277. In the overall scheme of things, that’s a setting variant even more obscure than Council of Wyrms or Jakandor. Because they also have the mandate to make everything usable in a generic setting it’s not too hard to transplant though. A pair of wizards were doing magical experimentation to create something capable of sniffing out the rare element of millexium, sponsored by the Cabal of Eighteen. (see the results of inflation over the centuries) Not getting results the conventional way and with the deadline fast approaching, one of them decided to take a leaf from Shou Tucker’s book and put the brain of the other in a Gibbering Mouther body, which went very poorly as it immediately went mad, escaped and killed him. Now you’re the schlubs hired to do delivery service about to get a nasty surprise. When you reach the dropoff spot and no-one comes out, you’ll have to venture into the seemingly abandoned building, where you face zombies, rats, a few surviving squatters, possibly wandering monster encounters from orc bikers or wererats coming up from the sewers and eventually the insanity of the Gibbering Mouther itself, which is a very tough encounter for a group of 1st level PC’s, particularly if you realise catching it alive rather than killing it will probably be the most profitable course of action. Another one that’s firmly a dungeoncrawl despite the city setting, but a fairly interesting one that’s easily transferred to a D20 Modern Urban Arcana game, or with a little more effort a medieval D&D one or Shadow Chasers instead. There’s still plenty more setting variants they could try without departing from the core premise of the game too much.



Submission Guidelines: This is pretty much the same as last issue, only with most of the example statblocks taken out, trimming it from 12 pages to 9. They still evidently need to encourage more submissions, while wanting to maintain their strict standards at the same time. Going from years worth of slush pile to nothing definitely puts some more pressure on them to come up with the goods in the offices.


Despite the mandate for generic material, this actually manages to be a more varied collection of adventures than most issues in the old edition, with some venturing pretty far from standard D&D and using the new rules in quite interesting ways. Ok, so they all have dungeons in them, which definitely hasn’t been the case in recent years, but at least the dungeons themselves are also full of variety in size and layout. Let’s continue onwards and see how long the new rules and attitude stay fresh before they realise they need to switch things up again.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 02: Nov/Dec 2000



part 1/4



36 pages. It’s a shakedown, shakedown, don’t have a breakdown. Not sure what the current state of the thieves guilds is under the new edition, with all the new power sources and multiclass options dramatically increasing options for freelancers and double agents but hopefully it’s a situation that provides plenty of opportunity for adventure. Time to see what new adventure ideas they have for Living players now all the corebooks are out and feedback on the new rules is coming in.



Campaign News:The silver anniversary celebrations are over, the edition change is pretty much complete, the new Gazetteer is out so you can read all about the current state of Greyhawk, but there’s still going to be a fair bit of catering to nostalgia in here. One of their recent tournament modules was a 5 round epic prequel to the G series, showing the fall of Geoff before they struck back against the giants. I’ll bet many readers wish they could get hold of that so they could play it at home now. Next to be causing trouble again is the Temple of Elemental Evil, with it’s return adventure arriving early next year. Visit Winter Fantasy to get a cutdown preview of the adventure that fits into a single session, almost like a computer game demo. Don’t be surprised if your character doesn’t survive the full 4 hours. There’s only one bit of procedural news and that concerns playtesting. Any XP & treasure you get from testing an adventure only applies after it’s approved for general play. (any permanent negative consequences apply straight away, on the other hand) If the adventure changes as a result of said playtesting, you don’t get anything it would have been impossible for you to get in the final version. A rather specific edge case, but since they’re being quite strict about certificates in the new campaign I guess it was bound to come up at some point. Can’t have people running around with +5 vorpal weapons at a level where it would break the CR guidelines, let alone flight or something else potentially sequence-breaking.



Gem of the Flanaess: They don’t have one huge article dominating everything else this issue, with a trio of 8-pagers instead. First up, a whole load of expansion on the free city of Greyhawk, with a big poster map in the centre that’s unfortunately missing from the scan. This time they’re concentrating on the Low Market district, promising to get through all the rest in future issues. Another promise I’m pretty sure they don’t keep, given how short the run of these is. Still, that does gives us 23 short descriptions of places and basic stats for their owners, so this is still useful, just not as useful as it could be. Searching the internet, it looks like the original creator does currently host a copy of the map at his website, so this is a solvable problem. (although as we saw all too frequently in the internet 101’s, it might not be if you’re reading this in the future) All in all, an interesting but somewhat frustrating article that reminds me how incomplete and hard to get hold of copies of Living Greyhawk stuff can be now.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 02: Nov/Dec 2000



part 2/4



The Way of the Lake: Slightly more instantly usable and easily transplanted to use in other settings are a couple of prestige classes for the Rhenee Bargefolk. After all, lots of settings have nomadic people of some sort or another, and travel by river is definitely one of the easier options in an earthlike climate. Which is not to say that it’s safe, given all the random encounters you have to deal with on Oerth, but hey, at least you have plenty of opportunity to gain XP. Unfortunately, their culture is also very sexist, with each of the two restricted to one gender only. That’ll put some people off playing them. (although with adventurers, rebelling against the confines of your own society is often part of the fun.)

Darkhagard are the elite warriors of Rhenee society, although given their favoured terrain wearing heavy armour like a traditional knight is a bad idea. Their weapon skills are no better than spending all your feats specialising in spear/harpoon fighting, but their swimming skills become genuinely superhuman by the time they reach 10th level. So they’re pretty handy if you intend to do lots of water based adventures and mediocre out of that context.

Veth go straight for a real world gypsy stereotype and are all about specialising in the old crone using cursing magic career path, complete with minimum age requirement among the prerequisites. (which under 3.0 rules means you can make them lose their powers by tricking or force-feeding them potions of longevity) They make the mistake of many early prestige classes that are supposed to be primary casters - giving them a limited spell list capped at 4th level spells rather than advancing their existing spellcasting levels, that leaves them pretty suboptimal mechanically as well. Any smart players will avoid taking this one even before the problematic fluff elements are considered.