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[Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon
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<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8522738" data-attributes="member: 27780"><p><strong><u>Dungeon Issue 43: Sep/Oct 1993</u></strong></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>part 5/5</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Into the Silver Realm: Steve Kurtz once again makes the cover adventure big, interesting and envelope-pushing, but also strongly story based and relatively linear, firmly marking him as one of their most 2eish of authors. What seems initially to be a simple dragonslaying mission for high level characters entangles the PC's in the aeons long conflict between the githyanki & githzerai. The 'yanks are doing their typical thing of hunting for a Silver Sword that was taken by previous adventurers a few decades ago, while also generally building up temporal power and red dragon servants in the area because they're smart enough to plan long term and you never know when it might be handy, while a single Zerth manipulates human agents under various disguises, including you, to bring about their downfall. Your strike on the dragon's lair turns out to be a lot tougher than expected due to the gang of supporting githyanki, and if you do beat them, you find that they're gathering the components to create large permanent planar gates. Your mysterious patron then turns up to deliver a load of exposition, disguise you as Githyanki, and send you through the gate to their fortress to find and sabotage the macguffins that'll destroy their gate and set their plans back by decades. </p><p></p><p>This second part is actually not too bad in terms of linearity, but it is very heavy on making it clear that you can't fight your way through a whole castleful of githyanki, so you need to use stealth and roleplaying if you want to get out alive. There's plenty of care and attention to detail put into the design of the NPC's, combining their magical and psionic abilities intelligently and working together with good tactics, which further reinforces the idea that this isn't an adventure you can just hack your way through and survive. It thinks about how the weird physics of the astral plane affects their day-to-day life, although it doesn't make the layout as 3D as I would have liked for a zero-G environment. As usual for him, it'll probably end with the PC's having to frantically make their escape at the end, and a dramatic explosion as the portal is destroyed with your enemies in close pursuit, so they'll wind up taking home only a small fraction of the treasure they could have got if they were able to kill everyone & loot everything. So he continues to have a strong, instantly recognisable authorial voice, and use a very particular formula for his adventures that most other writers don't. Overall, this is very much a Steve Kurtz adventure in both the good and bad ways. Like watching a Zack Snyder movie, that should make it clear whether it's right for your group or not. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Another issue that increases the proportion of linear adventures to sandboxes, showing that even with a few complaints in the letters section, this is a long-term trend that's probably going to get even worse before swinging back the other way. While the average quality and freedom of choice is still considerably better than the ones in polyhedron, it's still an irritating development. Let's at least hope we get a few more weird ones for specific settings out of the equation as well. Let's see what polyhedron has for us this horror season.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 8522738, member: 27780"] [b][u]Dungeon Issue 43: Sep/Oct 1993[/u][/b] part 5/5 Into the Silver Realm: Steve Kurtz once again makes the cover adventure big, interesting and envelope-pushing, but also strongly story based and relatively linear, firmly marking him as one of their most 2eish of authors. What seems initially to be a simple dragonslaying mission for high level characters entangles the PC's in the aeons long conflict between the githyanki & githzerai. The 'yanks are doing their typical thing of hunting for a Silver Sword that was taken by previous adventurers a few decades ago, while also generally building up temporal power and red dragon servants in the area because they're smart enough to plan long term and you never know when it might be handy, while a single Zerth manipulates human agents under various disguises, including you, to bring about their downfall. Your strike on the dragon's lair turns out to be a lot tougher than expected due to the gang of supporting githyanki, and if you do beat them, you find that they're gathering the components to create large permanent planar gates. Your mysterious patron then turns up to deliver a load of exposition, disguise you as Githyanki, and send you through the gate to their fortress to find and sabotage the macguffins that'll destroy their gate and set their plans back by decades. This second part is actually not too bad in terms of linearity, but it is very heavy on making it clear that you can't fight your way through a whole castleful of githyanki, so you need to use stealth and roleplaying if you want to get out alive. There's plenty of care and attention to detail put into the design of the NPC's, combining their magical and psionic abilities intelligently and working together with good tactics, which further reinforces the idea that this isn't an adventure you can just hack your way through and survive. It thinks about how the weird physics of the astral plane affects their day-to-day life, although it doesn't make the layout as 3D as I would have liked for a zero-G environment. As usual for him, it'll probably end with the PC's having to frantically make their escape at the end, and a dramatic explosion as the portal is destroyed with your enemies in close pursuit, so they'll wind up taking home only a small fraction of the treasure they could have got if they were able to kill everyone & loot everything. So he continues to have a strong, instantly recognisable authorial voice, and use a very particular formula for his adventures that most other writers don't. Overall, this is very much a Steve Kurtz adventure in both the good and bad ways. Like watching a Zack Snyder movie, that should make it clear whether it's right for your group or not. Another issue that increases the proportion of linear adventures to sandboxes, showing that even with a few complaints in the letters section, this is a long-term trend that's probably going to get even worse before swinging back the other way. While the average quality and freedom of choice is still considerably better than the ones in polyhedron, it's still an irritating development. Let's at least hope we get a few more weird ones for specific settings out of the equation as well. Let's see what polyhedron has for us this horror season. [/QUOTE]
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