Issue #17 of Polyhedron (May 1984) is immediately notable for its cover, which features an uncredited 19th century engraving rather than an illustration by one of TSR's staff artists. Nevertheless, the engraving is being used to illustrate one of this issue's articles, a long "Encounters" piece by Kim Eastland about which I'll speak shortly. Because of hos different this cover looks compared to its predecessors, it's one that I remember well, even if I didn't recall anything about the article to which it's connected.

The issue kicks off with a long letter in which a reader comments that he is "not a member of the RPGA Network in order to get a second helping of articles every month. DRAGON does a good job monthly." Instead, the reader wants to hear the opinions and ideas of RPGA members rather than "professional writers." It's a fair criticism, I think, though, as I noted last week, it's not one I shared. Editor Mary Kirchoff explains that the preponderance of articles by TSR staff members is due to a lack of submissions by RPGA members. Reading this now, I must admit to some surprise at this. I would have imagined that members would have jumped at the chance of writing for Polyhedron, but apparently not. (Of course, given that I never submitted anything during the time I was a subscriber means that I have no room to criticize.)

Kim Eastland's "Encounters" concerns a ruined temple that the characters came across while traveling elsewhere. Outside the ruin is the servant of an adventurer whose employer left him outside while he ventured within to investigate. That was more than a day ago and the adventurer has not returned since. What then follows is a three-page description of the temple, its contents, and denizens, accompanied by illustrations that (mostly) are in the same style as the cover. Though lacking a map, the temple is quite fascinating, since it includes a number of tricks and traps within it, as well as some valuable treasure. I think it'd make an intriguing side encounter for an ongoing campaign.

The Knights of Genetic Purity are James M. Ward's "Cryptic Alliance of the Bi-Month" for use with Gamma World. Pure strain human supremacists, the Knights fall squarely on the side of villains, at least in most of the GW campaigns with which I am familiar. The article thus devotes most of its two pages to details of the alliance's personnel and weaponry, so as to aid the referee in using them as adversaries. We also get a couple of legends associated with the cryptic alliance, such as "Pul Banyon," a seven foot-tall mutant slayer and a king named "Art" who was betrayed by his "human-looking mutant" wife. I remember liking this article more than is probably deserved upon re-reading it. I don't think it's bad so much as uninspired, which is a shame, because I think the Knights of Genetic Purity make great adversaries for a Gamma World campaign.

"Variants, House Rules, and Hybrids" by Roger E. Moore, on the other hand, is a terrific article. Over the course of three pages, Moore looks at the merits and flaws of introducing variant rules into your ongoing RPG campaign, as well as presenting examples of such variants (critical hits, new classes, etc.). What's most remarkable about this piece is not Moore's advice, which is indeed good, but the fact that it appears in the pages of Polyhedron at all. Moore acknowledges, at the start of his article, that TSR's policy is that "it's better to game with the rules as they are," but he nevertheless feels that "everyone has different ideas on what makes a game fun." From the vantage point of 2024, this might seem non-controversial, but, at the time, for people like myself, who hung on every word that proceeded from the mouth of Gygax, it was a Very Big Deal and I am grateful for it.

"The Fighter" by James M. Ward is the start of a new feature, intended to present an "archetypical [sic]" example of a Dungeons & Dragons character class "to give a general idea of what characteristics and/or quirks a superior, balanced character in a particular character class would have." Ward presents Ian McPherson as his example of the archetypal fighter, detailing his personality, skills, equipment, and holdings. It's notable that the article is light on game mechanics, which surprised me. I would have thought we'd at least get game statistics for Ian, but we do not. Instead, the following article, "Two New NPCs," presents two brief write-ups of unique fighters, one a dwarf and one a half-orc, written by Ward and Roger E. Moore respectively. These write-ups do include stats and are thus more immediately usable.

"Disguised Weapons" by Nicholas Moschovakis presents six hidden weapons for use with Top Secret. This is a no-nonsense "meat and potatoes" gaming article of the sort that used to fill gaming magazines at the time. Likewise, Kim Mohan's "Wishes Have Their Limits" also belongs to a hoary gaming magazine genre, namely, articles about how to constrain and otherwise rein in the power of magic wishes in D&D. Mohan attempts to present, over the course of three pages, a series four "laws" for adjudicating wishes. His laws are all fine, if you feel the need for such things, but, these days, I'm generally quite lenient with wishes and reality warping magics, because I see in them the opportunity to inject a little chaos into the status quo of a campaign. Maybe I'm weird.

"DM Talk" by Carl Smith looks at the various approaches to refereeing D&D, offering thoughtful insights and advice. Though obviously geared more toward novice DMs, I think he still says things of potential interest to more experienced ones. In particular, I like his division of RPG players into one of three "levels," each of growing sophistication, with Level 1 being "roll playing" and Level 3 being a high degree of immersion. He then tailors his advice for the referee based on the current level of the campaign and the needs of its players. It's not a world changing article, but it's solid and looks at the subject from a slightly different perspective, which I appreciate.

"Dispel Confusion" presents the usual assortment of questions and answers related to TSR's various RPGs. The most notable questions this time around are one concerning the fact that the monster Zargon from The Lost City is stated to be "no god" and yet his clerics have spells. How is this possible? According to the answer, "there is in fact a greater evil force behind Zargon" and it is this mysterious being who is granting spells to his cleric. I have to admit that's quite intriguing! Another question concerns whether there are female dwarves, which the questioner apparently doubted. Obviously, the answer is in the affirmative. Did anyone seriously doubt this?

Issue #17 also includes another mini-module, "The Incants of Ishcabeble," by Bob Blake. It picks up from the mini-module included in the last issue and takes the characters to the abandoned tower of the ancient wizard, Ishcabeble. I have an affection for abandoned towers of all sorts, so I'm naturally inclined to like this one, too, which features a good mix of puzzles, tricks, traps, and combat. 

The transformation of Polyhedron continues, though, as I theorized previously, not all of its readers are entirely happy with its new direction as Dragon Jr. Of course, Polyhedron was, to my recollection, always in a state of flux, never quite knowing its niche within the larger constellation of TSR gaming periodicals. As a result, each issue was, to some degree, an experiment to determine what worked and what didn't. This one is no different in this regard and, as we shall see in weeks to come, quite a lot didn't work, hence the regular need to launch new columns and features that soon disappear, only to be replaced by others. 

Of course, the company's likelihood of success might have been greater had its inaugural first (and only) original roleplaying game hadn't been Cyborg Commando. Published in 1987, Cyborg Commando is a near-future science fiction RPG written by Gygax, Frank Mentzer, and Kim Mohan. Its premise is that, in the year 2035, Earth is invaded by extraterrestrial beings called Xenoborgs. In order to combat them, mankind turns to the nascent technology of cybernetics to create the titular cyborg commandos – human brains placed inside advanced robotic bodies arrayed with the most advanced weaponry available. Players assume the roles of these commandos as they attempt to rid Earth of the Xenoborgs and drive them back into space. (Since the initial boxed set is subtitled "Set 1: The Battle for Earth," I can only assume there were plans to expand the game's scope beyond this planet.)

Cyborg Commando consisted of a 48-page player's book (CCF Manual), a 64-page referee's book (Campaign Book), a 16-page booklet of introductory scenarios, and ten-sided dice in a box. This arrangement closely mimics TSR's own products at the time, but that should come as no surprise since New Infinities seems to have been staffed almost entirely by ex-TSR employees. That said, the game materials are noticeably less attractive and professionally done than those of TSR of the same era, particularly when it comes to the artwork. I wouldn't describe anything as awful, only a bit less "slick," no doubt due to the smaller production budget of the company.

The CCF Manual provides a brief overview of the game's setting and history, as well as the purpose of the Cyborg Commando Force to which all the player characters belong. The bulk of the book is devoted to the game's rules, which are a bit of a mess. The game uses ten-sided dice in a variety of ways: simple (1d10), added (1d10 + 1d10), and multiplied (1d10 × 1d10). The last use is particularly interesting to me, because I would have expected the game to use a straight percentile roll, but, perhaps in an attempt to "innovate," the designers opted to go another route. Helpfully(?), the CCF Manual includes several probability graphs to show the likelihood of results of each type of die roll. Though I am sure some players would find information of this sort useful, the inclusion of these tables is sadly representative of the game as a whole: too much detail about some things and not enough about others.

Character generation and combat both come in "basic" and "advanced" versions, with the latter building on the former. In principle, Cyborg Commando is completely playable using either version of the rules. However, much of the game's text and presentation seems to favor the advanced version, if only because of the additional detail it offers. A good example of this can be seen in the skill lists, where the advanced rules included many, many more skills than the basic version. Of course, the advanced version includes such skills as "general creativity," "domestic arts I," "domestic arts II," "obstetrics & gynecology," and "error avoidance," so I'm not entirely sure much of value would be lost by sticking to the basic versions. I mention all of this not mock Cyborg Commando. Rather, I hope it gives you some sense of the game system's strange obsession with minutiae that I can hardly imagine would ever come up in play at the table.

Of course, this obsession is not limited merely to the rules. The Campaign Book abounds in this level of useless detail as well. For example, nearly half of that volume consists of information on the populations of the countries of the world, along with their latitude and longitude coordinates, major cities, and CCF bases. Yet, for all that, this information consists of little more than tables and maps. It's a lot of heat but not much light for the referee hoping to get a sense of what the Earth of 2035 is actually like for the purposes of running adventures and campaigns in Cyborg Commando. 

The other half of the Campaign Book is more genuinely useful. It details the Xenoborgs, including their biology, society, and culture. In addition, this section delves more deeply into the aliens' polymorphism, revealing that their leaders, the so-called Masters, are a type of Xenoborg not yet seen on Earth. The Masters are directing the invasion of the planet for its resources, hoping to make use of them to further the expansion of its star-spanning empire, which consists of hundreds of worlds across the galaxy. There are also sections about the FTL Q-drive the Xenoborgs use, which, as I noted earlier, seems to suggest that New Infinities hoped that Cyborg Commando would eventually expand beyond Earth.

That was not to be and it's not hard to see why. Cyborg Commando contains a handful of genuinely interesting ideas but the vast majority of it is muddled, half-baked, or silly. Judged even by the standards of 1987, it's not a good game and I suspect that even the folks at New Infinities knew this. The game received a small amount of support in the form of three adventure modules and some novels, but, by 1988, the company seems to have pinned its hopes on doing knock-off D&D support material – the Fantasy Master line – that might garner attention due to the names attached to them (Gygax, Mentzer, etc.). When that didn't happen, the company, along with Cyborg Commando, was largely forgotten. I wish I could say that was a shame.  

Re-reading my original 2008 post in preparation for this one, I couldn't help but wince a little. It's not so much that I have changed my mind on most of the topics I addressed in it, but rather that I wouldn't phrase my objections so intemperately. The original post and comments are nevertheless worth reading. They're a useful window into the mindset of the early OSR and the diversity of opinion that existed within it on a whole host of topics. Valuable though that 2008 post is as a historical text, it doesn't represent my considered evaluation of Unearthed Arcana and its place in the history of Dungeons & Dragons (and the hobby more generally). 

Before proceeding into the meat of the matter, some background. I was an avid reader and subscriber of Dragon for a five-year period starting in 1982. During that time, one of my favorite recurring columns was Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll." In those columns, Gygax would often share previews of new rules additions to AD&D, many of which he said would be formally added into the game with the publication of its eventual second edition. I often introduced some of these additions into my ongoing campaign and found I liked some more than others – I generally disliked the new character classes, but I mostly approved of the new spells, for example. This was fine, because none of the options were yet "official" and I could pick and choose which ones to use.

Owing to a number of real world factors – primarily, TSR's financial troubles and Gygax's attempts to save it – plans changed. The additions Gygax originally intended for a new edition of AD&D were all bundled together, along with some additional material, to fill out a new 128-page book called Unearthed Arcana. The book was announced with great fanfare in the pages of Dragon and, of course, I snapped it up as soon as I found a copy at my local B. Dalton. I then spent untold hours poring over it so that I could incorporate its "new discoveries ... [and] a wealth of just uncovered secrets" into my own campaign.

Unfortunately, the book I took home and read that day in 1985 was nowhere near as good as I imagined it would be. To be fair, I'm not sure that it could have ever lived up to my expectations and I suspect that my disappointments then have forever colored my feelings about Unearthed Arcana. Even so, the book presents numerous problems that I do think are worthy of discussion. The most immediate of these is that, as printed, it's riddled with typos, omissions, and outright errors, probably due to the haste with which the book was put together. I still keep a two-page list of additions and corrections to UA that appeared in the November 1985 issue of Dragon inside the front cover of my copy. These problems made using a lot of its contents frustrating and led to numerous misunderstandings.

A much bigger problem is that Unearthed Arcana represents a clear and significant shift in the power level of AD&D characters. Both the barbarian and cavalier classes, for example, are very potent, with a wide range of abilities. Many of the new demihuman races are similarly more powerful, particularly in light of the wider range of classes available and levels attainable by non-human characters. Combined with weapons specialization (for fighters and rangers), mightier magic items, and greater flexibility for spellcasters (thanks to cantrips and new spells), the overall effect of Unearthed Arcana is to push AD&D in a direction that's generally higher-powered.

Now, many players might not mind this and I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with this approach. However, I think I'm correct in saying that the direction UA heralded was a clear change from the earlier presentation of AD&D. Gygax states in his preface to the book that "the AD&D® game system is dynamic. It grows and changes and expands." That's a fair point. I have no doubt that, for many who had been playing AD&D since its completion in 1979, welcomed the growth and changes Unearthed Arcana brought with it. For me, then and now, it was a step too far, evidence that, after a certain point, you can change a thing too much for it to remain the thing it once was.

In retrospect, it seems odd that I should feel this way about UA. As I explained at the beginning of this post, I loved Gary Gygax's columns in Dragon, even the ones whose content I didn't use in my own campaign. Individually, they possessed a freshness that was very appealing. They suggested that AD&D still had new horizons to cross, new frontiers to explore. When assembled together, all the little additions Gygax had released piecemeal over the years now seemed to lack that freshness that had once appealed to me. They seemed not merely stale but ponderous and even restrictive. It's difficult to explain, but, somehow, the transformation of Gygax's proposals into "official" rules laid down in a hardcover book had robbed them of the fun and vibrancy they once possessed in my mind. 

As I flip through Unearthed Arcana today, I find it difficult to dislike most of its contents. Taken individually, like the original articles in which they appeared, most of them are fine as optional additions or expansions of the AD&D rules. I can easily imagine using many of the spells or magic items, for instance, and I still think the thief-acrobat is a fun addition for certain kinds of campaigns. As a whole, though, UA remains disappointing to me and I'd never use all of its contents. Perhaps if Gygax had had more time to develop them, I might feel differently, but, as it is, Unearthed Arcana is the book that started to shake my confidence in Gygax, TSR, and D&D itself – which goes some way to explain why I've often been so immoderate in expressing my negative opinion of it.