TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 02: Nov/Dec 2000



part 3/4



Enchiridion of the Fiend-Sage: This column starts to settle into a routine, although things aren’t going so smoothly IC, as hunting for info on monsters is a dangerous business and it’s lost many of it’s lackeys in the last couple of months. Or maybe it’s exaggerating to get more funding than it needs, you never know with fiends. Or it killed some of them itself in a fit of rage. In any case, there are at least some new results that should ensure it’s sponsorship for a few issues more.

Animus are Ivid’s custom undead from the Greyhawk Wars. Like many an undead creature, they become a template under the new edition’s rules, giving you an even wider range of ways to build them. Statistically, they’re pretty much the same as their later appearance in Dragon 339 apart from the change in damage resistance to 3.5 terminology, so you’re not missing anything if you’ve already collected that.

Bullywug Savants, like blue goblins, get their magical powers more through fluke mutation than rigorous study. This may or may not be linked to ancient aboleth experimentation on their ancestors, which is the kind of lore the Fiend-Sage is very interested in pursuing. That framing continues to make these entries more interesting than the basic monster manual ones.

Grigaurs are (mostly) extinct eyeless predators from a bygone era, quite possibly the same one as the Faranth from the latest issue of Dungeon. A few have been brought back by wizards to use as guardians. Like Grimlocks, visual effects will be useless on them, but combining sound & smell onslaughts will leave them baffled and easy to defeat. An easy enough gimmick to prepare for and exploit once you know about it.

Valley Elves are one of Greyhawk’s big punchlines. Like Omigod! They’re forbidden from picking Seldarine deities as clerics due to their loyalty to a human wizard being more important! Statistically they’re not that different from other elves, but their human influences make it more easy for them to pass as one with a disguise roll and gives them a whole bunch of minor social penalties when interacting with other elves. The Fiend-Sage is fascinated at how quickly elves develop into distinct new subraces given their long generations & low breeding rate and very keen on the idea of studying them to figure out the mechanism, preferably in a way that’s highly unpleasant to the elves being studied. Will the PC’s care enough to save them if this happens in your campaign, or just join in with the mocking jokes?

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 02: Nov/Dec 2000



part 4/4



Dispatches: Things continue to heat up in here, as we’re up to 25 little plot points for different countries over 4 pages. A village destroyed by undead in western Adri. Necromancers having unusual problems keeping their undead under control in the Bandit Kingdoms. Two new barons appointed in Bissel to improve the northern defences. High ranking smuggler killed in Divers, will the guild retaliate? Crop blight in Furyondy. Civil unrest between Geoff & the Gran Marches. High profile thefts in the city of Greyhawk. Poisoning at the highfolk wine festival. Mysterious incurable illness afflicts count in Keoland. Revolts over tax increases in Ket. The royal mail expands it’s delivery area in Nyrond. Assassination attempt during a tournament in Onnwal. Ancient Pholtian religious artifacts uncovered in the Pale. Electioneering in Perrenland grows very heated, not helped by unpredictable weather. Humanoid hordes gathering at the borders of Ratik. Meanwhile, the sea princes are actively hiring humanoids to attack that upstart Utavo the Wise. Mysterious disappearances among the refugee camps in the shieldlands. Dwarves & humans join forces to retake the citadel of Num-Theraz in Sterich. Spies from Turrosh Mak found in Ulek. Duergar cause trouble in the County of Urnst, but are thwarted, in the process discovering a new path down to the underdark for adventurers to exploit. Meanwhile the Duchy of Urnst is full of internal political wrangling, but light on external threats, although they’re still working on an alliance with the nearby elves anyway. Veluna has been having trouble with mail tampering. Verbobonc manages to recover items last seen in the assault on the Temple of Elemental Evil many years ago. Finally, the Yeomanry & Keoland continue an uneasy relationship as they figure out how to co-exist peacefully without the smaller state becoming little more than a vassal of the larger again. A lot of problems, some of which sound much easier to solve than others.



Living Greyhawk Contact List: Once again a modest percentage of the regional directors drop out and are replaced for reasons they don’t go into here. Rainer Nagel replaces Bjoern Mayer as our German-speaking liaison. Catie Martolin takes governorship of the Pale from Jason Singleton. Mark Somers replaces Paul Schmidt in the way yonder down under position. And Rick LaRue is now in charge of the Shieldlands, ousting Brandon Kaya. As usual, any further information about why these changeovers happened and how acrimonious they were behind the scenes is welcome.



Like the last issue, this is much denser on immediately useful game material than Polyhedron, even if not all of it is great and there are some distinct glitches in how well it was preserved. Still, it gives you more stuff to work with and definitely has more flavour than the corebooks. For now, it’s a pretty decent way to break up the regular cycle of one magazine, then the other.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1



part 1/6



68 pages. Never waste time dividing up the treasure until you’re certain the adventure is over and you’re safely out of trouble. Another of those lessons that’s easy to teach, but also easy to forget in the heat of the moment, particularly with companions of the more roguish sort you’re not certain you can trust. Time to find out how reliably they can deliver the contents of another issue.



Network News: Dragon used the edition change to put the price up. It’s a little trickier in here because memberships paid are yearly or even several at once, but they’re also feeling the combination of inflation, WotC cutting the budget to their department, and the cost of putting up production values while simultaneously releasing a second magazine on off-months and adding several new Living settings to their roster. If your membership is running low, better renew it before the new prices kick in in March. Converting Living City, Living Jungle and Living Death to 3e all at once is also definitely putting their workload way up. To top that off, they just lost regional director Tom Ko and have yet to appoint a replacement. Overall membership is still growing and they’re still trying hard to be optimistic in general, but at some point this year reality is going to take it’s toll and their ambitious schedule will need to be downsized. This is just the first sign of the growing cracks in their system.



Letters to the Editor: First letter complains that their cover was ruined in the mail. It’s a constant balancing act between providing protective packaging and cost, which obviously they got wrong this time, since they’ve had quite a few complaints like this recently.

Second complains about the silly names and general whimsy of Living City settings & adventures. That’s not very high fantasy of them! Oh, honey, have you seen how often Ed Greenwood breaks the 4th wall. Like it or not, lighthearted silliness with a big topping of horniness is the original tone of the Forgotten Realms and people trying to make it dark and serious are the interlopers missing the point, like Smash Bros players playing Fox only, no items, Final Destination.

Third very specifically wants an epic adventure featuring the githyanki, preferably written by Bruce Cordell. That’s more Dungeon’s thing than Polyhedron, but very worth considering. Maybe for a big anniversary or something. We shall see. Not until after the new psionics rules are out though, as you kinda need to know how they work to do them justice.

Finally, some short but sweet praise to end things on a positive note.



Living City Conversion Guide: Proving how complex the conversion process is and how many headaches it’s causing them, this takes a full 12 pages, considerably longer than either the old Living City rules or the new Living Greyhawk ones. 10 years of development, making the Vast increasingly divergent in tone to the outside Forgotten Realms. Several different editorial regimes of varying generosity when it came to handing out cool magic items. At this point it’s a teetering mess of patches that’s perpetually one wrong move from collapse. They’re hoping to cut a few gordian knots in the process of conversion rather than going for the most accurate one possible, even if that annoys some hardcore members. Class levels can go all the way up to 20, so you’ll probably wind up a similar level to before if single-classed, but multi or dual classed ones will have to make some hard choices about their new build. On the plus side, since the Forgotten Realms is generally a higher power campaign than Greyhawk, you have 32 points to assign to ability scores instead of 28. You have a wider selection of races, including the possibility of keeping nonstandard ones won in special events from the old game. HP are max roll at 1st and 2nd level, then 75% of your max dice for subsequent ones, which is a step up from the old 50%. Since the wall of the faithless is now a thing, everyone needs to choose a patron deity regardless of class or be unable to come back from the dead, with a whole load of little restrictions on who from where can choose what. How many people will continue to take a stand and actively choose atheism in the face of that? The downtime log sheet has been made more granular, going from 73 fivedays to a full 365 units per year to allocate. You can craft magic items if you have the cash & feats, but you can’t sell them to NPC’s and trading between players is very strictly regulated. Don’t be surprised if they further restrict precisely what you can make in the future. Alignment restrictions remain the same, and anyone not working together with the team and playing the game in the spirit intended can be kicked out. While there are a few little differences to Living Greyhawk, the restrictions are similar enough that it feels a bit redundant having both. Just because they’ve hashed out the rules, doesn’t mean those tensions in the playerbase will be going away.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1



part 2/6



Living Force Character Creation Rules: If your eyes hadn’t glazed over after all the details of Living City character creation, you can enjoy the somewhat lighter 4 pages of changes for their d20 Star Wars living games. Time period is just after the Phantom Menace, since that’s the latest one out. Both races and prestige classes are mildly restricted, with jedi in particular getting extra limitations on multiclassing like D&D monks. They’re not going to focus on money so all the profession & craft stuff is being simplified. No double-bladed lightsabers, and even the regular ones have to be earned in adventure rather than purchased as a starting character, as do ships, droids, vehicles and various legally restricted items. Expensive items can be acquired on credit, but watch out for legbreakers if you don’t earn enough each adventure to keep up payments. No dressing up in stormtrooper armor even if you kill one in play, only the heroes of the movies can pull that off. If you’re a high enough level Force Adept, you can have an apprentice, but it’ll require a whole load of extra bookkeeping. Special favor class features are also somewhat nerfed. As usual, a mix of things that seem pretty sensible with a few that are weirdly specific, but must have been a problem in actual play at some point. Hopefully we’ll get some more news on how it’s going for them in the future, although given the sheer quantity of Living settings they have but barely mention now I’m not that optimistic.



Adversaries: Cifal are one of the many Fiend Folio monsters people are determined to bring back even if the official WotC writers are dragging their heels on it. The closely packed swarm of insects in a humanoid shape can take some limited damage from regular weapons, but you really do not want to try grappling them. (not that most characters ever want to use the grappling rules in the first place.)

Death Lions are undead with ghoul-like paralysis, plus all the fun of the rake attack if their regular one hits. Not too much more dangerous than their living counterpart to a properly prepared group, but a solo character can be incapacitated and stripped of all their hit points very quickly if they fail even one save.

Iron Maidens aren’t from the fiend folio, but very much in it’s spirit. They look like your typical statue of a woman, but can split open from the middle and stuff you into their spike-filled interior. Not a pleasant way to go, but another one that’s disproportionately deadly against a single character rather than a group.

Living Doors are another fun one that are mainly a roleplaying encounter, but also have some interesting tricks if anyone thinks they can just waltz right through without permission. Certainly plenty of media examples of this one and it’s surprising you don’t see more of them in D&D.

Tauthar are winged reptilian humanoids that mix shadow and fire. Basically for if you want the balrog aesthetic, but low enough CR that low-mid level parties have a decent chance of fighting a group of them. Yet again, they can rend with their hind legs after a successful strike with both the front ones, making that a weirdly common gimmick this time around. At least it makes this distinct and all of these seem usable. I’m not going to complain.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1



part 3/6



Illicit Wages at Blade's Point: Brigands, Pirates, Thugs, Corsairs, all staples on the old random wilderness encounter tables. But why did they decide to take up such a risky profession instead of staying at home working a job with a regular paycheck? Did they want to be adventurers but couldn’t hack the dungeoncrawling, so they settled for preying on their fellow man? Were they soldiers or mercenaries who found they couldn’t adapt to the peacetime life once war ended and went independent to carry on doing the only job they know. Are they a small group that evades the authorities by stealth and staying on the move or big enough to be a political force unto themselves, with places controlled by them and camp followers who aren’t directly involved in the fighting? A fairly typical bit of advice to put a bit more thought into your worldbuilding, as answering these questions can lead to further questions that help you build a more coherent history and economy for your world. As is often the case, they include a couple of examples, the sneaky Robin Hood style Men of the Fox and the more urbane crime syndicate the Guild of Blades, complete with statblocks that show us how even low level characters can have much more interesting builds under the new edition. A few multiclass rogue/sorcerers or mixing up fighter, ranger and barbarian levels and you can pull some very interesting tactics that’ll make the players think twice even if they’re individually higher level. The concept may not be new, but the implementation is nicely fresh, making this a very useful article for people still getting to grips with building their own adversaries in the new edition.



You Rogues Want Some More?: A very quick follow-up to issue 141’s collection of mostly nonmagical tricks you can use to even the odds with a little prep work. Flour bombs to detect invisible things. Mixing fire seeds with mundane lamp oil for greater damage. Using hot wax as a preservative for any poisoned needles you find in traps so you can use them in your blowdarts later. Brown Mold bombs. (these do need some magical protection to harvest safely in the first place) Hypodermic projectiles. Your basic timed explosive controlled by candlewick. Oil of slipperiness on discarded items as a decoy. Coins that can be bent into caltrops. Leaving behind cryptic symbols on the walls that mean nothing, but will delay anyone else exploring the place trying to figure them out, or distract them from another trap. More stuff that’s usable but not particularly groundbreaking, particularly so soon after the last article with the same theme.



Convention Hitchiking: We’ve had plenty of articles on both the success stories and failures of running a convention over the years. It can be pretty tough starting one from scratch, finding a town hall that’ll take you, promoting it, trying to get enough players and judges to run a decent number of games, then figuring out how to get a bigger venue when you outgrow the existing one. Here’s a handy cheat they’ve discovered in recent years. Instead of starting one yourself, find a an already existing convention that doesn’t have gaming, but is a compatible topic like your sci-fi or anime conventions, ren faires, wargaming, etc and ask the people running it if they’re interested in adding a few tables of RPG tournaments to the schedule. This was particularly effective for them in the Pacific northwest states, allowing them to go from virtually nothing to something nearly every weekend in the busy season in just a couple of years. So this is essentially a primer on effective proselytising, (going knocking door to door doesn’t work very well for religion and it would probably be even less effective for gaming) finding an audience that’s already likely to be receptive and demonstrating your value to them, having anticipated many of the potential pitfalls and come up with answers to them. A pretty interesting idea that demonstrates WotC’s willingness to try new methods to grow the hobby and could easily be applied to other areas of life as well, I definitely approve of this. It’s often much easier to solve an intractable problem by coming at it from a different angle and this is sufficiently different from all the other times they’ve done this topic.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1



part 4/6



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: While Oparl is a playground for the rich, it’s actually exceedingly unfriendly to the poor and casual tourists. There’s not a single inn, restaurant, tavern or other such public convenience to be found, and anyone caught sleeping rough will be escorted out of town by the security detail of the closest mansion for ruining the view, with all the rest coming to help if you fight back. If you want to stay, you need to know someone and wrangle an invitation, or be rich enough to buy/build a place of your own. A depressing example of how effectively having no real government results in public services that help people being cut, but you wind up spending a whole load of money on things to hurt people that become de-facto public services simply because none of the rich people want to be the one with all the beggars on their doorstep through underspending on security. This may wind up costing them more in the long run but oh well. There is one bit of public property though, a manor that’s used for the wildest parties so people don’t have to worry about their own property being wrecked and rented out to travellers who know the right people. It also winds up being the place where the servants do most of the day-to-day shopping for things that keep the manors functioning behind the scenes. Overall, a very interesting example of how unregulated hyper-capitalism devolves into feudal private law that’s not particularly nice to live in unless you’re one of the people on top, but definitely gives PC’s plenty of opportunities for adventure and conflict, whether they’re on the underside just trying to survive or coming in laden down with treasure and able to play in the political games.



Bare Bones: Over the years I’ve read many an adventure that’s intended to be your first one, or at least your first with those characters, presuming they have no supernatural experience or equipment that would make the adventure easy to solve. This column decides to go back a little further than usual though, asking what adventure hooks you could construct around birth. You probably aren’t going to be able to actually play the newborn babies, (and definitely not under D&D rules, which don’t have enough granularity at the bottom end to distinguish between babies, various ages of childhood & teenagers) but there are plenty of plots involving dealing with someone else’s pregnancy, from dealing with cravings, to the gradual difficulty of doing normal things as the bump grows, then the birth itself coming at an inconvenient time or having complications and needing your help to make sure both baby and mother survive. If one of the PC’s is the mother this adds a lot of complications to adventuring, particularly if the adventure is the epic kind where you can’t take time out without the world being conquered/destroyed. The kind of adventure they can’t really do in Dungeon because they generally can’t presuppose the nature of the party playing them beyond recommended character level and even with the Code of Conduct officially repealed, leaping into forced gender-swaps and fanfic style m-preg storylines is still several steps too far for their editors. (can’t be putting actual families in our family-friendly entertainment) A reminder that D&D has lengthy and complex rules for the taking of lives, but none at all for making new ones. You could make an RPG that revolved around pregnancy and the development of young children and make it fun but it would be a very different beast. In the meantime, you’ll have to live with any plots involving topics like that running entirely on GM fiat and hope you can still make a good story out of it that way. Hey at least that leaves this column well above average in it’s degree of thought-provokingness.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1



part 5/6



The Polyhedron Review: The Sword & Sorcery Creature Collection gets unsurprisingly compared to the Fiend Folio. Do you favour careful design with concern for game balance, or a bunch of weird ideas which might be cool in the right setting, but with CR’s that don’t fit the stats and stats that might not fully line up with the official creature types? Hopefully at least a few will become classics in turn, but most will definitely be forgotten like so many other things in supplements.

Sketch! is a lighthearted little game where your stats are derived from your drawing skill and the votes of the other players. It’s designed so you can play entirely without a GM, creating characters quickly and pitting them against one-another. Just the thing for introducing young kids with short attention spans to gaming, or filling a session where not enough people show up to run the regular campaign.

All Flesh Must Be Eaten also seems very suited to one-shots, since only facing one type of monster in a campaign could get boring quickly. It’ll take a while for people to realise the full potential of long-form zombie based storytelling, with the aid of plenty of supplements and several TV shows. Definitely one where it’s interesting to look back and see how our perspectives have changed.

NeMoren’s Vault is another early d20 adventure from Firey Dragon Productions. While it is a 32 pager aimed at starting level characters that doesn’t use any particularly unusual monsters, the rules are noticeably more solid than ones rushed out before all the corebooks arrived and the story and production values are pretty decent as well. If you want to play something in the Gygaxian style you could do a lot worse.

The Horror Beneath from Nightshift Games, on the other hand, completely fails at d20 rules, with both the combats and the skill checks miscalibrated or using nonexistent stats, and the writing a stream of consciousness mess that leaves out important details if you don’t do exactly what the writer would have in that situation. Definitely one to avoid if you see it in the shops.



Web Wanderings: Our internet links this time take us out to look at animals both real and fantastical. The real world stuff mostly links to university pages, which have long since changed their internal structure even if the institution and top domain level have survived. No cool pics of incredibly deadly australian spiders for you this time. The cryptozoological creatures are similarly lacking in live links, either linking to nothing or a blank site that gives me an insecure warning. Only herper.com has survived, and even that doesn’t have the ebooks they talk about here anymore. A pretty disappointing entry given the potential of the topic.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1



part 6/6



Clubline: This is particularly large, as they cover the conclusion of this year’s decathlon, the start of next year’s one and all the events in it, which as usual have been tweaked in the hope of increasing engagement, plus a 4 page listing of all the active clubs around the world. Reports of their meteoric growth have not been exaggerated, as now they’re up to 158 officially registered ones, although only 34 of them have participated in the Decathlon this year. In hope of getting more next time, they’re simplifying it back to 10 events, with every club automatically entered into the most rounds played & judged categories if they run any official tournaments at all. The joys of increasing database automation eh. You’ll still need to put active work into the other categories like writing scenarios, creating an adventuring party or sponsoring events in the community if you want to win, but hopefully that’ll result in a lot more clubs having at least a few points on the leaderboard. They evidently think there’s life in the whole idea yet despite the consistently low turnouts.



On The Trail: This column does it’s best to keep up the international flavour. Lisa A. Chippendale gives us her perspective on Gen Con this year, with several valuable lessons learnt. She decided to go for a bunch of the big multi-round tournaments, with mixed success, but got to seriously stretch her roleplaying skills and test her real life stamina in the process. You have to get out of your comfort zone to grow, and the biggest collection of gamers under one roof definitely gives you space to do that. Mark Middleton talks about the somewhat more rustic charms of Camp Con (ooerr matron!) in Ohio. The sleeping arrangements may be pretty DIY, but that kept the costs down, and they had plenty of cabins with proper amenities to make sure people weren’t too stinky by the end of it. Now they just have to worry about how they can scale it up effectively without massive queues and having to bring in a bunch of gross portaloos like a music festival. UK head Ian Richards gives us a short one on Fallcon in Oxford, which was a particularly RPGA heavy event full of material for Sarbreenar, other Living settings and Call of Cthulhu. Finally, Massimo Bianchini talks about Lucca Comics & Games in Italy. Many of the buildings have been there since medieval times, making it a perfect backdrop to get some gaming in. (although comics still dominate, as you’d expect from the name.) From fresh stuff like Living Greyhawk to classics like Warhammer there were plenty of choices for the 40,000+ attendees and the growing power of the internet let special guest Alan Dean Foster appear remotely via webcam. Wouldn’t have the same impact these days, but nice to see the technology already solving logistical hurdles that would have been prohibitively expensive just a few years earlier.



The reader survey is particularly upper-class in it’s phrasing this time around.



An issue that took quite a bit of effort to get through, as I really felt the increased size this time, but was mostly pretty interesting, with several different fresh takes on the 3e mechanics as people get used to designing with them. People are still deciding what they most urgently want to put back into the new edition, while also putting all new ideas in that wouldn’t have worked before and seeing how they fit together. Let’s see which ones they manage to get through over the course of the next year.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 84: Jan/Feb 2001



part 1/6



148 pages. Cor blimey guv, this is a big one and it’s not even any kind of special occasion. They’re getting to the point where they could go monthly and still be a decent size delivering the same overall amount of content. Let’s see if any of the adventures within will be similarly oversized, or they’ll use the page count to give us lots of smaller ones instead.



Editorial: The new edition has made some steps to reduce the amount of low level lethality, but there’s always going to be some campaigns that are more deadly than others, whether through DM cruelty, player recklessness or pure luck o’ the dice. Chris talks about his own campaign, and the one guy who dies so much more frequently than the others that his name has been verbified and become a running joke whenever someone dies in some inventive and unpleasant way. (since it’s D&D, they get better afterwards as often as not) A reminder that although players may win or lose particular fights, D&D as a whole is not a game which you’re playing to beat the other side, (which the DM can always do easily if they really feel like it) but to have fun along the way. If a character dies, don’t go all Marcie & Ms Frost on the group, just roll up a new one, work out an amusingly flimsy reason why the replacement would join the party and go on with the game. Much more fun that trying to treat your gaming as High Art and getting stressed when everyone else doesn’t follow the story you had in your head.



Letters: The first letter is from a group that ran through the introductory adventures in issue 82 neatly in order and found they were a quite effective combo. Now they just need to decide what to do next.

Second is the much more negative counterpart, annoyed that issue 83 had not just one but two nonstandard adventures and also being generally grumpy about the new art direction.

Third is irked by the increasing number of female pronouns in recent products where the identity of the character is generalised or otherwise not detailed. They’re just trying to be a bit more progressive. Now that’s foreshadowing for the much larger flamewars about pronouns and gender identity going on in the internet in the modern day.

Fourth got the new issues without having already purchased the 3e books and was thoroughly confused by the new rules. They suspect quite a few people will be alienated by the change and quit. The editors can smugly report that this is not the case, and readership is on the rise overall. A new edition is a good jumping on point for people daunted by the literally thousands of 2e supplements. On the plus side, making scaling advice the default is an idea they approve of. If only it had happened sooner.



The Statement of Ownership follows straight on to prove their point, seeing them just push over the 40,000 mark. Not actually a huge improvement on last year, and less than Dragon’s growth but as long as the numbers are going in the right direction they aren’t complaining.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 84: Jan/Feb 2001



part 2/6



Maps of Mystery is a double bill this time. First up, Todd Morasch gives us an unusually topographic map of a peninsula with a jagged mountain range erupting on one side and a more gradual slope down to the sea on the other. Just like the real world americas then. Watch out for earthquakes in that region. Second is regular cartographer Craig Zipse, taking us to the Halls of Huhueteotl, a pyramid-dungeon suspended over lava pits. Since that’s obviously aztec based, the two maps could be used together pretty easily.



The Harrowing: The last time they broke their record for biggest adventure was back in issue 73, and that was by a very narrow margin. In contrast, Monte Cook’s latest offering blows way past their last record for a single-part adventure and goes up to a full 42 pages. It’s also aimed at 15th level characters, more than triple any of the other 3e adventures so far. You’re not going to be able to play this for a while if you started with fresh 1st level characters along with the edition change. The premise is similarly large in scale, the kind of thing they’d never have allowed from a freelancer no matter how good the writing was. Lolth’s daughter is trying to usurp her mum. Thinking long-term, this might not be such a terrible thing for the universe, as infighting amongst the drow would make both factions easier to beat, but of course the ascension ritual requires large numbers of sacrifices and the PC’s world is among those in danger so you’re not in a position to be philosophical about it. Following the very large and obvious trail of dead animals will lead to a short linear dungeon, at the end of which is a portal to the Demonweb Pits. Thankfully the linearity lets up after this, with the map being typically web-like and three dimensional, with the opportunity to either walk in the tunnels inside the web strands or the outsides if you’re feeling brave. (although at that level, you really should have some flying magic to save you from slipping off into the endless void) There’s a whole load of monsters, some of which are loyal to Lolth and some to Laveth, but none will be pleased to see you unless you’re smart enough to disguise yourselves. Will you treat this as an all you can slay XP buffet, or actually try to figure out what’s going on and ally with one side over the other, at least temporarily? Either way, Lavesh will be pressing onward with her plans, with three distinct phases that change who is encountered where and what they’re doing there if you don’t stop them. Unless you’re fast or very lucky in the direction you choose you won’t encounter her until the middle of the final ritual, where she gets progressively more powerful if not disrupted. If you kill her, Lolth will not be grateful at all, (what’s a little backstabbing amongst family?) and you can expect irregular visits from drow assassins for the rest of your mortal lives. No good deed goes unpunished, eh?

So this is a big, potentially setting changing adventure that balances between being a nostalgia trip to people who remember the original Q1, or maybe Monte’s other visit to the same stomping ground in Dead Gods, with being a whole new adventure and enough of a sourcebook to make the demonweb pits accessible to newer players. It includes quite a few new magic items, a new prestige class, (the Arachnomancer, which is typically underpowered like many of the first wave of spellcasting prestige classes due to having it’s own small spellcasting list rather than adding levels to your previous one) and converts fan favourites the Yochol to 3e rules. Even if you’re not in a position to use the whole thing there’s still probably elements you could take and use in other ways. It also puts an unusual amount of effort into it’s illustrations, with 6 pages of them at the end in the style of the old modules. It stands out from the crowd quite a bit, and could easily have been a standalone module if they wanted it to. But I guess it’s a bit too small for their current fashion in adventure design as it is, even if it is considerably bigger than the old 32 page ones. I guess that shows that this magazine still has an important place in their overall product strategy, making sure mid-sized adventures still have a place to go that’ll get them plenty of readers.