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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9254183" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron 94/153: Sep/Oct 2002part 10/10Encounters: While the other parts of this feel reasonably complete despite their brevity, the info on monsters & NPC’s does feel the squeeze a bit and could have stood to be a bit bigger. Monsters updated are Thinker, Warrior & Worker androids, giant weather controlling dog-people called the Ark. Badders, typically cranky mutant badgers. Blaash, radioactive moths that may look pretty, but are very bad for the health of anyone who isn’t radiation-proof. Hissers, psychic snake people with sonic blasts. Hoops, intelligent humanoid rabbits who have the very irritating power to turn metal to rubber. Hoppers, somewhat larger, ridable rabbits. Latterbugs, giant beetles that are terrifyingly fast, but vulnerable to cold. Orlen, which are basically two people smushed together. Having two heads and four arms definitely gives them some serious advantages in combat even before you add their dual-brained psychic powers. Podogs, giant ridable dogs that are also excellent mimics. Sep, sharks that can dig through the ground. Not quite as dangerous as D&D Bulettes, but hey, nothing’s stopping you from including them as well. Spider robots, stalker robots, and the gargantuan unstoppable Deathbot, which is way more powerful than anything else here by many orders of magnitude. So most of these are calibrated with the 10 level advancement limit of standard play in mind, but then there’s one deliberately unfair one at the end to remind us of the stunts Jim Ward used to pull whenever players got uppity. The cryptic alliances stuff feels even more abbreviated, cramming 13 of them onto a single page, which leaves no real room for nuance. You’ll definitely have to hunt down the old books if you want more detail on that bit. Finally, three more pages full of random encounter tables, which once again reinforce that this game is designed to work well even if the GM doesn’t have a plan and the characters just wander around to see what they can find. You could encounter savage tribes, which generally tend not to communicate too well with outsiders so be ready to fight or run. Explorers, which cover the whole gamut of levels and could be friendly or hostile depending on if you’re after the same treasure. Domes, which contain the treasures of the ancients, but often a whole lot of other trouble too as everyone knows this and wants some for themselves. Finally, 9 adventure seeds for if you want your characters to find slightly less random trials & tribulations and you lack inspiration this session. Putting it all together, that makes this the easiest minigame to run straight out of the box so far. You could do so entirely procedurally for quite a few sessions, with both characters and challenges created by the roll of the dice before having to add scripted elements back in to keep it from getting repetitive. That definitely makes it valuable if you can’t play your regular game and want something you can get started with quickly. Godlike shows us the accomplishments of Cien, who can lift nearly any weight with his shadow. Many tanks and soldiers fell to him before he was finally pinned down and finished off by overwhelming odds. No happy endings here. A medium quality Dungeon side, but the Polyhedron one is probably the best yet, seeing them being increasingly adventurous in reintroducing old school elements while not totally sacrificing the game balance parts of 3e. This is one I’m particularly keen on trying out at some point if that’s at all possible. Maybe crossing over with the content from next issue, since Gamma world had its fair share of giant mechas back in the day. Time to see what cool synergies the next crop of d20 material offers.</blockquote>

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