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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8252409" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 53: May/Jun 1990part 2/5The Bard's Corner: This column doesn't have a song for us, instead doing a Marx brothers riff where a dragon intentionally mishears everything the valiant knight who's come to rescue the princess says, bombarding him with puns and malapropisms before revealing that the fair maiden wasn't kidnapped at all, she decided to live with him of her own free will, and probably isn't a maiden anymore either. (no kids on the way though, as it's still a few years before Council of Wyrms makes that an option) By the time they decide he's gone from amusing to boring and actually get around to killing him, death seems like a mercy. It's all very whimsical. If they got the submissions, it looks like they'd do this every issue just like Dragonmirth. Torrand's Tribulations: Hmm. This is a turnup for the books. A 0th level adventure designed to take the PC's from regular joes to 1st level characters over the course of their challenges. While still not exactly common, they've definitely become more of a formalised thing over the years, with Dungeon Crawl Classics in particular making the 0th level meatgrinder funnels an integral part of their system design. Was this the first of it's kind, or can someone point to an even earlier one? Not that this is particularly meatgrindy, as this is another of their irritatingly whimsical, heavily scripted tournament adventures where you're given pregens with very on the nose names and led from one encounter to the next with very little freedom of choice, if anything even less than usual because you're all so underpowered. Despite being 0th level, the characters do have more hit points than a regular 1st level one, and many 2nd or 3rd level ones who rolled poorly too, so you won't be falling to a single unlucky hit like in a normal game. The PC's were originally the hirelings of a group of adventurers being trained by the eponymous Torrand, who does this sort of thing regularly. Their masters got killed, and now they have to pluck up their courage, think of clever uses for the mundane skills they picked up as blue-collar workers and do it themselves. Over the course of it, they'll encounter Torrand several times, sometimes in disguise, sometimes helping them subtly and sometimes testing them. Basically, this is an adventure designed both IC and OOC as training wheels for complete newbies. It feels more than a little patronising to those of us who started off by being thrown into sandboxes and expected to sink or swim, and managed to figure it out for ourselves. I can see how some people might find it useful, but this is another one I'll be passing on. When the whole point of tabletop RPG's compared to computer ones is the freedom of choice, why would I want to introduce someone with something so linear?</blockquote>

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