TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 98/157: May 2003



part 4/8



What's all this then?: Another year, another big shakeup. The polyhedron editorial explains what this means again from another perspective. Sure it’s scary, suddenly having to step up the amount of material you’re producing, but it also means they can cover current events in a more timely fashion (although they’ll still be several steps behind the internet forums) provide more variety of D20 material, and still deliver a full-sized minigame every other month. The Living Greyhawk stuff is returning to its proper home, they’ll be covering the RPGA in general more again and they even have room for a new comic. What’s not to like? Well, that depends if any of it is good. A wide variety of rubbish is still rubbish, as I found all too often in the Polyhedron UK’s. Many a formerly good thing has been ruined by stepping up the schedule to the point where they can’t come up with enough good ideas and get repetitive, or get sloppy on the editing. But I’ll keep on going anyway and hope that the last year and a bit of Polyhedron will have plenty of good bits mixed in, even it doesn’t please enough people to last forever.



Bolt & Quiver take a personality test. The results are completely unsurprising.



The Game Mechanics: Most of First Watch is missing, but they are still doing interviews of D20 companies. This definitely turns out to be a case where they’re trying to put a positive spin on a tough situation, as their interviewees are The Game Mechanics, a new company made up entirely of WotC’s most recent round of layoffs. Rather than go back on the tedious roundabout of job applications and interviews they decided to pool their skills and remaining cash and whip up some .pdfs to get back in the game. After all, they’ve still got all the skills they honed over years of working at TSR, then WotC. What they produce should still be good. True, but the same can be said of Monte Cook and Chris Pramas’s companies and they have several years headstart on you. Another illustration of both the good and bad parts of the OGL and D20 boom. Every time WotC drops developers who’ve done enough that they have recognisable names in their own right, they’re basically creating more competition for themselves. In a few years Paizo itself will be in that position when they end the Dragon and Dungeon licences and have to produce their own material, sometimes even beating WotC in sales. So this is really a demonstration of worker solidarity against the bean-counters. Just because people get fired, doesn’t mean they stop being friends and supporting each other on a personal level. Looking ahead, the company lasts until 2006, and even after that the individual writers still have gaming credits with other companies so while they might not have made as much money as they’d liked, it was enough to keep going and even when the company fails, a bit of networking and you soon come back as a freelancer or join a new one. RPG writer might not be the safest of careers, but it isn’t at the bottom of the pile either.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 98/157: May 2003



part 5/8



Winter Fantasy 2003: The look back on this year’s big RPGA meetup is also presented positively but with signs of trouble underneath. All those attempts to convert 2e Living City material obviously became such a headache that the new owners nuked it and started an all-new version called Ruins of Raven’s Bluff where everyone has to start out with new characters. Doing a little googling, this turned out to be a bad idea that was very unpopular and caused them to haemorrhage players, resulting in it being shut down next year. But since both Living Greyhawk and Living Arcanis are going quite nicely it’s hardly as if you’re lacking in opportunities to play D&D. Living Arcanis in particular exceeded expectations, with a massive 6 hour event that sold out easily and had to be expanded to other rooms to fit more people in. Living Force also did pretty well for itself. However, they don’t mention any of the other Living campaigns at all, making it look increasingly likely that they’ve been pruning the smaller ones. WotC really are cutting quite a lot at the moment, and though some might be outsourced to third party companies, their survival isn’t assured there either. Just because you have the name of a formerly big setting, doesn’t mean there’s an audience now, particularly if the first product in the line gets bad reviews.



Unusual Suspects: Our first smaller D20 modern article goes to a pretty familiar and popular well. Ninjas! Sneakily engaging in crime and sticking it to the government is adaptable to any era and modern technology opens up a whole new set of opportunities to confuse and distract. So here’s an example of an elite yakuza team, recruited from the most promising young criminals. A team of 6, all 8th level characters, with very generic codenames built to work together effectively as a team. Hand-to-hand muscle, all-rounder, stealth, vehicle expert, shooter and face, all of them are multiclassed and all basic classes apart from Dedicated are represented in their builds, along with martial artist, infiltrator, daredevil and gunslinger advanced classes. Depending on your PC’s group size and competency they could be a challenge even for teams several levels higher when working together, or used individually against weaker groups. Or you could use them as pregens for a one-shot adventure if you can’t be bothered to come up with your own. So this is all pretty useful, being much better put together in terms of making them customisable for various campaigns and used in actual play than the old Rogues Gallery adventuring parties, with the little bits of new crunch being better balanced as well. As the number and variety of settings drops it’s important to appreciate the bits they do handle better now.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 98/157: May 2003



part 6/8



i, Jensaarai: They’ve finally managed to get some Star Wars material through approvals. We’re off to Suarbi 7/5 to stat out one of the alternate jedi orders from the novels. The Jensaarai reject the rigid binary of light and dark side and use powers from both. Reaching this balance wasn’t easy though, plus they had to deal with extermination attempts by both the old jedi order and Palpatine’s regime. This kept them in hiding until Luke Skywalker’s heroics finally convinced them to engage with the wider universe and send a delegation to his new academy. Unsurprisingly, their unique mix of powers is represented by a new prestige class, the Jensaari Defender. They can block force sensing, scramble electronic surveillance devices, launch telekinetic projectiles plus plenty of things from the corebook selection of powers and bonus feats. On top of that they can create special armor that shorts out lightsabers that hit it, forcing the opponent to waste actions turning it off and on again every single time. Definitely the kind of cheesy and irritating thing that a novel writer would come up with when trying to one-up previous stories without consideration of how that would affect game balance. A decent enough conversion of the source material, but also a reminder that the source material was very inconsistent in quality and increasingly convoluted & ridiculous as time went on. It doesn’t give me any desire to play in that universe.



Starships of the Galaxy: A little more Star Wars material before they move onto other topics. The Wayfarer class medium transport may not have a particularly cool name, but is easy to customise, with a detachable section that you can swap for different modules. Unfortunately, the company that created it went out of business and some of those modules can be pretty hard to find. That sounds like an adventure hook to me! So this is much shorter and more low key than the previous article, but also one I’m more likely to find useful, focussing on the day to day space trading rather than the increasingly cheesy secret orders of space wizards that managed to survive the so-called purge in such great numbers that their absence in the movies loses credibility.