Polyhedron #145

Welcome to the last official D&D magazine of 2000. I know there were some unofficial ones (Alarums & Excursions was still running back then), but if I tried to get into all of those, this would take a hundred years.

So, Polyhedron #145 starts with a note that The Fright of Tristor is in the mail. It was a free, member-exclusive adventure which I will look at later; I don't have a physical copy, at least not yet, but I'll get it eventually.

Membership dues in the RPGA are rising (damn inflation!), and it costs $10 US to order official RPGA scenarios. There are conversions for the Living Death and Living Jungle campaigns coming as well; I assume those would be free for everyone. Then there's some news from different parts of the world talking about what's going on in the various RPGA campaigns.

Letters to the Editor are next; the Polyhedron column doesn't have a fancy name like Scale Mail or Out on a Limb. Nothing of note here, except for the guy whose copy came shredded in the mail. He got a new one, of course.

Alright, now on to the meat of the magazine. First of all, we get a Living City Conversion Guide. Actually, we get three pages of text about the Living City campaign and several digressions. It's a wall of text, believe me. Then we get the conversion guide from 2e to 3e. Was there anyone who actually played enough RPA scenarios to get over 3.1 million XP? How was there that much to do in a single city? Especially with thousands of other people adventuring there as well?

And I just noticed that this is actually version 3.02 of the conversion guide. Just how complicated was it to do this, anyway? And if you do get to 20th level (that 3.1M XP I mentioned earlier), you can't play in Ravens Bluff anymore. Well, that pretty much sucks. All that work to build up your character, and you get kicked out. These rules are pretty arbitrary.

After that, we get rules for creating characters for an entirely different RPGA game: The Living Force, using the new Star Wars game. And they set it one year after the Phantom Movie. Dear God...I mean, I get it; the movie had just come out the year before this, and we hadn't yet been subjected to the horrific crap stew that was Send in the Clones. But, that's what they decided to go with. I don't know anything about the WotC Star Wars game, so I'll leave it at that.

A few issues back (#141, before I started this project), Polyhedron ran a contest for people to create monsters for the new edition of the game. Some of these were actually updates from the old Fiend Folio, apparently. And they are included here. First up is the Cifal, which is basically a swarm creature made up of thousands of inects. It's a Huge Aberration with 8 HD and CR of 7. Its semi-solid form gives it damage reduction, and it can poison its targets. Some of these swarms get really big; Gargantuan size and 32 HD. Be afraid.

Next is the Death Lion, a Large Undead with 6 HD and a CR of 5. It's basically an undead lion, with the pounce and rake attacks, with paralysis as a bonus and the other undead abilities thrown in for the fun of it. They're usually found as guards of death temples and the like. They can be up to 18 HD and Huge size, too.

The Iron Maiden is not a heavy metal rock band, but is rather a Huge Construct with 6 HD and a CR of 7. It's a 16-foot tall statue of a woman in robes, with a seam running right down the middle like she was cut in half at some point and glued back together. Remember that agent at the beginning of Kingsman that Gazelle slices in two? Like that. Anyway, their main ability is the spiked death blow. It sounds nasty, because it is. In medieval times, the iron maiden was a torture device in which the victim would be placed inside a closing 'coffin' that had a bunch of spikes inside. Well, guess what? This lovely lady has that, too. Except she'll actually grab you, spring her seam wide open, toss you in, and close up tight before you can get out. You take 2d6+5 damage from the initial spiking, then 1d6+5 per round until you escape. Once you're at zero hit points, the iron maiden will hit you with a coup de grace and kill you on the spot. That's not very sporting. Oh, and there are Gargantuan versions of this with 18 HD in case the normal one doesn't scare you enough.

The Living Door is next. Yes, it's a door with a 12 Int score. It's a Large Construct with 4 HD and a CR of 1. These things can be programmed to do lots of different things, like scream warnings when intruders are near, or attack their hands when they try to knock or turn the door handle. Yes, these doors actually will bite you. Or, they'll open and shut rapidly, slamming you as they do so if you're standing in front of them. And they can also be Huge size with up to 12 HD if necessary. Giants with these doors in their fortresses would be interesting, wouldn't they?

Last, we have something I've never seen before, the Tauthar. This is a Large Monstrous Humanoid with 4 HD and a CR of 4. They are winged reptilian humanoids that have some of the abilities of the shadowdancer prestige class. They're not nice, being neutral evil, and the hunt both humans and goblinoids. Nice to know they have some variety in their diet. The toughest ones can have up to 12 HD and be of Huge size.

After the monsters, we get an article decrying the PR benefits orcs have compared to the lowly bandit. It's a valid point; bandits and brigands should be fairly common opponents, particularly for lower-level characters. After all, bandits are a classic of villainy. So, this article discusses brigands and thugs and ways to make them more interesting and memorable so they can be used in games to best effect. I like this; it's not something that has been covered very much in the history of D&D, so this is fresh and interesting.

Then we get some devices for rogues to use for various purposes. Non-magical items, these are things you wouldn't expect to be able to get hold of outside of a thieves' guild. There are incendiary bombs, brown mold bombs, copper coins bent into caltrops and poisoned...stuff like that. It's interesting, and it also encourages players to come up with creative items of their own. Good stuff.

Next is an article on convention hitchhiking, which I guess is about hopping from con to con to get in lots and lots of gaming. Well, some people can afford to do that, I suppose.

Ah, Ed is back with another edition of Elminster's Everwinking Eye. We are visiting (for the last time) the curious town of Oparl, capital of the nation of Bedorn. I've never heard of that country, so I have no clue where this is supposed to be. As usual, it's just a couple of pages of fluff about the town with some hints of adventure ideas. Meh.

That Bare Bones column is back this month, and this issue it's all about...birth. As in, using the circumstances of pregnancy and birth in your campaign. Yeah, I don't see too many people being interested in role-playing a nine-month pregnancy. And that's just the humans; imagine a pregnant dwarf lady and how surly she would be. Yikes.

We then get some reviews of various gaming products. The first one is particularly noteworthy, as it is the Creature Collection from White Wolf Publishing/Sword & Sorcery. The reason it is noteworthy is because it is the first supplement made available under the Open Gaming License. I don't think I've mentioned that before. It's a thing WotC put in place when 3rd edition was released that allowed 3rd party publishers to produce and sell D&D content without owing royalties to Wizards, and not get sued. Quite the change from TSR's old policy. Anyway, not only was this the first OGL product ever published, it actually came out before the Monster Manual itself. Yes, you could have used this to run full-on adventures a week or so before the MM came out. However, the quality was a bit sketchy, and since they didn't actually have the MM to use as a template, there were some issues. Challenge Ratings were way out of whack, and the monster types and terrains weren't always very accurate. They did put out an errata sheet shortly after the release of the MM, which was nice.

There's a page about 'web wanderings', basically more websites from back in the day for people to check out. This month, they started on actual webs. The spider kind, I mean, with a site about various arachnids. Sure, why not? There's also a website called herper.com that had a bunch of books available for download in PDF format. Remember when you actually had to go looking for a PDF reader online? Ancient history in computer years. Anyway, the websites they mention are long dead, of course. Too bad; the descriptions look pretty interesting.

Good Lord, there's more? Something called a Clubs Decathlon, which is where a players' club will participate in various RPGA events, including Living Force games, to earn points toward a trophy of some sort. Then there's a list of the various clubs that were participating, from all over America.

Finally, there's a review of August's GenCon, focusing on some con games that were happening during that weekend. There were a few other cons reviewed as well, but obviously GenCon is the grandad of them all.

And that's it! 2000 is just about wrapped up, and it's only the 10th of the month! I'll have plenty of time to work on the campaign setting after all. But first, there are a couple of other things I do need to cover, even though I don't own them physically. I'll do the first one of them next time. Cheers!