TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 04: May 2001



part 1/4



36 pages. Librarians aren’t the only ones trying to get you to shush, many religious orders are also pretty keen on it. That does not mean they’re nice, after all, the Scarlet Brotherhood is pretty keen on moving silently for underhanded reasons. I guess we’d better tread cautiously as we find out what dangers lurk inside another issue full of Greyhawk lore.



Campaign News: The results of previous scenarios is announced and new ones get released. It’s no surprise that anything Temple of Elemental Evil related would be popular, but The Fright at Tristor is also getting so many plays that their admin team is swamped with response forms and will take much longer than expected to process them all. Will new adventures A Snake in the Grass, An Afternoon Outing, A Plea From Beyond the Grave or Fires of the Storm Tower be able to match that? Probably not but you never know for sure which adventures are going to be big breakouts. The competition for unusual character quirks has concluded as well, letting the winners play an Aasimar, a Troglodyte, a Snow Elf, an official advocate for the forest and a guy who’s perpetually anonymous even to the admins. They’d better not lose the certificates for those special dispensations. Like the Living City, there’s going to be a whole bunch of one-off things that you can only get at a very specific convention and no one character will be able to have them all even if they were created right at the start.



Gem of the Flanaess: Another 6 pages zooming in on a district of the Free City of Greyhawk. This time we’re off to Clerkburg, as the key goes straight from A to C, skipping B for some reason. The place is structured like a big university campus, with a bunch of large, interestingly shaped buildings with lots of green space between them, plus enough residential places and taverns to house and entertain the student population. Definitely the kind of place many adventurers get their start, particularly the classes requiring extensive training like Bards and Wizards. Grey College is the oldest and most general purpose of them all and gets a disproportionate amount of space devoted to it. If you want to be a wizard it may be upstaged by the flashy new pyramid-shaped University of Magical Arts, but if you want an actual education rather than just learning how to blast and transform things (and have the money to pay the tuition fees) this is where you send your kids. Also very likely to be of interest to people hunting for lore to solve their latest quest is the Great Library of Greyhawk, the largest, if not the best organised collection of books anywhere in the known world. (although probably not as large as Toril or Mystara’s greatest centres of learning) Slightly less obvious as a place of adventure is the old grain mill, but even that has it’s possibilities, between the influx of refugees from Oerth’s many wars straining the city’s food supply while driving unskilled labor prices down, plus someone with a more specific grudge sabotaging the place. So this continues the development of 3e Oerth as a place where magic and adventurers are commonplace and fully integrated into society, because they’re necessary due to the number of hostile creatures as soon as you venture out of the walled city-states. There are some comfortable and cosmopolitan areas, including a few that are abnormally so due to deliberate anachronisms but they’re tiny compared to real world cities. It’s all a lot more top-down than the way the Living City was built up, partly because much of it was already fleshed out in previous editions and is being transferred with only a few timeline advances and shifts of tone. It all continues to be both interesting and usable for me, but I can see how it would annoy people looking for a more gritty realistic medieval tone to their gaming.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 04: May 2001



part 2/4



Silent Sorcery: The introduction of sorcerers in 3e raises somewhat of a quandary in already existing settings where they’re used to all spellcasters needing spellbooks & study. They could ban them entirely, but that wouldn’t be pleasing to players who expect at least everything in the corebooks to be allowed. They could do a big metaplot event to introduce them. (which Dragonlance already has a head start on) They could say they’ve always been around, but only as a rare appearance or secret society that’s only now being revealed to the wider world. Or they could retcon it, convert some of the existing spellcasters to sorcerers and act like they were always there, fully integrated. Greyhawk is going for option 3. While they might have been around before wizards in the distant past, for the last few thousand years the more reliable and replicatable method of book learning has dominated.

After that bit of general pontificating, most of this article is devoted to The Silent Ones, one of the largest and most ancient secret societies of sorcerers. Unsurprisingly, they have a prestige class that gives them access to Silent & Still spell as bonus feats in the first few levels, letting them use magic without seeming to do anything and mystify spellcasters who haven’t heard of metamagic feats yet. (or psionics) They’re also above average at messing with other people’s spells, gaining special powers that let them shut down magic items and copy a spell they’ve just seen someone else cast at higher levels. The mechanics make up a relatively small part of the article, with a good 8 pages devoted to their history, structure, relationships with other secret societies (unsurprisingly, the Scarlet Brotherhood hate them) and full stats for several of the high-up members. So this is one of the best examples so far of making prestige classes fully integrated into a setting and representing an exclusive group that you’ll need to find and get on the good side of to join, not just meeting a few prerequisite numbers on a character sheet. The ones in the DMG are pretty lacking on that front. The skill requirements will be a bit of a pain for a sorcerer to meet without at least one level of multiclass dipping, but since they gain full spellcasting progression plus a special ability every level they are definitely more powerful than just remaining a straight sorcerer, to about the same kind of degree as the Loremaster. It definitely seems worth the effort of integrating into your campaign.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 04: May 2001



part 3/4



Enchiridion of the Fiend-Sage: This continues to drop hints as to who the Fiend-Sage serves and what their long term agenda is, but mostly in the context of what cool new things they’ve discovered. An intelligent sword named Kaurok that’s forged from material from Limbo, but is Lawful itself. That could be a useful asset, but at the moment is more hazard than boon to a CE Molydeus. Perhaps letting it get into the hands of some heroes and then pointing them against your rivals by playing mysterious quest-giver. Presuming they can avoid the spying and assassination attempts from their own side long enough to actually get anything done. Still, better than letting eternity get boring. As usual, the meat of this is inspecting (and dissecting) monsters both new and old though. Time to see how challenging they are and if the ways they accomplish that is fair or unfair.

Dune Stalkers are the elemental plane of earth’s counterpart to invisible stalkers. While not quite as stealthy, they’re more dangerous in combat, with the combination of stunning shouts and a kiss of death letting them take down a target fast and get out before everyone else can react. The fiend-sage just wishes they weren’t so expensive to employ. Well, when you’re a tanar’ri people tend to want it all upfront because even things with average int can spot a pattern of not paying your bills on time.

Necrophidius get higher marks as minions because they’re not too hard to create and will obey your every command mindlessly, plus wasting the turn attempts of clerics who think they’re undead rather than constructs. Sure, you could get the feats or domains that expand what you can use that power on, but you can’t afford to take all of them before epic levels.

Nyrrian Boatcrushers are new, but are basically just elephant sized walruses, so you could make something pretty similar by taking the regular stats and adding a giant template. Since they’re fairly smart for animals you could probably train one if you got it young and are strong enough. I guess it’d be a decent alternative when you’re short of sharks for the tank to dangle captured adventurers above.

Qullan remain just as insane and intractable as ever, making them not suitable as minions at all, although the Egg of Coot has enough of a handle on their psychology to direct them against it’s enemies. But for the Fiend-Sage, they’ll still need a lot more study from afar to figure out how to stop them from suiciding at the slightest manipulation.

 

[(un)reason]

Living Greyhawk Journal 04: May 2001



part 4/4



Dispatches: This is somewhat smaller than last time, only covering 23 countries over 4 pages. The faerie folk all joined forces to repel an invasion of humanoids in the Adri Forest. If prince Molil is responsible, he can expect some retaliatory pranks in the near future. River piracy is getting out of hand in Bissel, leading to much diplomatic scuffling about who’s job it is to actually do something about it. The Gnarley forest has become a three-way battleground between adventurers, humanoids and undead. We’re gonna need to train a lot more rangers. There are rumors that the cup and talisman of Al’Akbar have been sighted in Ekbir. This is good for the tourism industry, but dangerous for all the people travelling there, since a train of pilgrims attracts all kinds of monsters looking for easy pickings. The Celanese ambassador to Furyondy was murdered, which has obviously strained their relationship and needs an impartial group of adventurers to find the true culprit. Politics in Geoff is even more complicated, particularly since it’s recently been found the Grand Duke has been accepting aid from the fey. Just what has he been giving them (or promised to give them in the future) in return? Knowing the fey, it won’t go well if he welches on the deal. The Gran March is handing out honours to the people who acquitted themselves well in the last round of invasions. In the free city of Greyhawk, adventurers killed the wrong Xvart. Whether the law will be applied in a fair and even-handed way like it would with a human remains to be seen. The Highfolk suffered two fiendish incursions. One has been defeated but the other is still at large. Keoland’s king offers an amnesty for members of the Scarlet Brotherhood who are willing to rat out their co-conspirators. Watch out for false data from people only pretending to turn coat. Ket celebrates the 100th anniversary of their defeat of Iggwilv. Let’s hope she isn’t going to get revenge in some subtle way. Nyrond is also holding a big celebration due to founding a new village and hopes many adventurers will make their new homes there. I’ll bet something will try to sabotage it and make them needed. Onnwal manages to break through the Scarlet Brotherhood’s blockade and get some much needed supplies. The Pale is having somewhat less luck getting their caravans through the orc marauders, and on top of that they have mysterious cattle mutilations to contend with. Is it aliens? It wouldn’t be the first time. Perrenland managed to clear out their latest humanoid incursion, but someone has managed to steal the Bow of Light. Any chances a PC group will get the chance to wield it? Ratik is also dealing with attacks on it’s borderlands, but the central authority refuses to do anything about it, forcing the individual nobles to spend their own money on defending their lands. This is not good for the economy, but as long as the capital remains comfortable, out of sight, out of mind. Or maybe some kind of conspiracy. Better check for dopplegangers. Utavo the Wise undergoes an abrupt shift of personality thanks to a very sinister looking magical gauntlet he found in the mountains and engages in mass sacrifice & demon summoning to strike back against the Sea Princes. So much for there being a clear good and bad side in that conflict. Food shortages in the Shieldlands cause rampant inflation. Maybe they’ll declare a holy war to distract from that. Ulek increasingly suspects many of the people lost in recent fights against humanoids have been enslaved rather than simply killed. Rescuing them definitely seems like a good objective for adventurers. Dosselford’s mayor needs rescuing yet again. Skeptics killed in the Duchy of Urnst. This puts every priesthood under suspicion, but particularly the temple of Lydia. At least you have a little more leeway to be an atheist here than on Toril as it’s not an automatic eternity of torment. A certain Jolene is missing in Veluna. This may well result in more 4th wall breaking jokes by the players as they search for her. Finally, the Yeomanry faces an influx of refugees, some of them suspicious. Let’s hope whatever spies amongst them don’t completely destroy the compassion for the genuinely needy. Geopolitics around here continues to be complex and have multiple variants on the same problem turning up in different places around the world.



Living Greyhawk Contact List continues to evolve slowly. They stop bothering to list the persistently vacant positions of Naerie and the Bone March, evidently they aren’t getting enough players in Sweden or Greece to even have a hope of filling them. They have managed to successfully fill the Sea Barons slot at last, with Marco Digennaro giving us some Italian representation, while the Lordship of the Isles goes to Marco Saoner from Spain. The number of players in the latin parts of Europe must be growing then. We also see Tim Marling replace Clay Hinton as head of the Bandit Kingdoms, Bruce Paris take Perrenland from Mark Somers and Chris Jarvis take the Duchy of Urnst from Ryan Hicks. Australia isn’t having much luck with finding a stable administration but otherwise it seems to be mostly business as usual.



Another issue packed with useful crunchy stuff, flavoured with enough setting specific material to give what they’re serving us a little more depth, this is all consistently good. Only one more to go, and it’s definitely looking like it’s a shame they couldn’t make it work economically. Let’s find out if they’ll have anything particularly special as a sendoff, or it’ll just peter out abruptly without any real warning.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 86: May/Jun 2001



part 1/6



132 pages. A typically buff minotaur in a maze. Another of those cliches we’ve seen plenty of times, but it’s the first time this edition, so they have plenty of leeway to make them more interesting by adding class levels and templates. Will it be just a few more HD and feats from fighter ones, or a genuinely bizarre combination? Time to add another quartet of adventures to our capacious collection.



Editorial: For a long time, they boasted about how few of their adventures were by official members of staff. They accepted the cream of the crop from freelancers without fear or favor, apart from when they really wanted to cover a new setting and couldn’t get anything else. But the last two issues have been dominated by adventures from staff writers that were longer than any that came before and this issue continues the turnaround by making a big deal of its full three adventures by published authors. You couldn’t have spread them out a little? Nope, we’re going to put lots of blurbs on the front cover and call it a collectible. I guess that’s a pretty clear sign that the transition from TSR to WotC is well and truly over and they’ll be using the same promotional techniques they do on their CCG’s. So this is a somewhat cynical start, but they’ve managed to produce good adventures under bad conditions before. Let’s find out if they’ve pulled it off this time, or self-indulgence and railroading will make these better stories than adventures.



Letters: First letter has been captivated by the adventures in recent issues despite not converting to 3e themselves yet. The Harrowing particularly impresses them, giving plenty of ideas for a trip to the demonweb pits in his own campaign.

Second is also very keen on the Harrowing, and wishes they’d release a Return to the D series adventure to go with it & the new version of the giants series. Sorry, but they have no plans to do that. Later adventures in an extended series always sell worse than the first ones.

Third is mostly positive, but somewhat disappointed they’ve cut out all the non D&D stuff. It also looks like the suggestion of mini-dungeons is going to come to nothing, which is irritating. People just can’t keep it brief, no matter how often the editors tell them to.

Fourth wants to see them do a big book collecting every single adventure they’ve ever done. This would be a spine-breaker so that’s probably not practical, plus they’d want to convert all the adventures to the new edition, which would also take a ton of work, but a best of? That has potential.

Fifth is more general praise, but particularly for their willingness to go a bit more disturbing with the artwork. Keep it up, most people are quite capable of handling it.

Sixth is also in favor of them including plenty of full-color artwork, as it makes it easier for everyone to be on the same page than simply describing what they’re seeing.

Seventh is generally pleased with their new direction, but thinks they could improve things even more by putting a checklist of objectives at the end of an adventure so you can easily keep track of which ones the PC’s succeed, fail at, and miss entirely. I think that’s only an issue with the less linear adventures anyway. Most PC’s will be pretty eager to note down every bit of new treasure they find.

Eighth is pleased that they’re putting a lot of the maps from the adventures on their website. They aren’t there anymore, unfortunately, like pretty much everything from previous editions.

Ninth would like to see an Arthurian themed special at some point. Once again, they don’t have anything planned, but are wide open to your pitches, as knightly chivalry is a popular subgenre of fantasy.

10th is pleased by them reprinting the cover picture inside without all the promotional crap. Sometime you want to cut that kind of thing out and put it on the wall or customise your GM screen and that makes it a lot easier.

11th is from someone who was introduced to D&D through Baldur’s Gate and is a little confused by all the tabletop lore, but eager to learn. That’s a looooong story, but these days you can learn a lot of it on the internet.

12th is another newbie quite pleased by the quality of their adventures, particularly the new scaling guidelines. That change in particular seems to have a universally positive reception.

13th is by Roger Moore, reminiscing on the very silliest adventure ideas they ever came up with. Maybe some day they will turn them into complete adventures, but it will not be this edition.

14th wants them to bring back the adventures covering other real world cultures, particularly the works of David Howery. If there’s continuing demand they will try to convert a bunch of old ones to 3e and put them on the website.

15th quibbles how the multiclass armor and weapon restrictions work. You don’t forget how to use them, but spell failure chances are still a risk so you have extra incentive to invest in Still Spell.

16th complements them on the monster tokens last issue. Great, another thing missed out when they scanned the issue that I only find out about after the fact. I hate it when that happens.

17th is another person who thinks a competition building adventures around maps of mystery would be a good idea. The editors agree, so they’re going to make it so. Now all they need is some actual entrants.

18th is also very pleased by the monster tokens and wants more! Good thing they were already planning to do that anyway.

19th is in favour of most of their format improvements, but still misses the shakespeare adaptions and linked adventures from previous years. Don’t you worry, they’ll do much longer adventure series before they’re through.

20th is from future game developer Will Hindmarch, praising the art of Stephen Danielle and Craig Zipse. They’re really putting a lot of regular work into making the magazine look as good as it is.

21st and finally, setting a new record, we have someone wondering if they do joke adventures for April like Dragon. It has been known to happen, but not every year. They do still have a few of them in store waiting for the right moment. After all, timing is the key to good comedy.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 86: May/Jun 2001



part 2/6



Anvil of Time: Oh no. Our first adventure is not only a Dragonlance one, but a Dragonlance time travel adventure by the king of cheese himself, Tracy Hickman. Just as in the original Ravenloft module, you’re teleported straight into the adventure from anywhere in the multiverse with no chance to resist and no way to escape without going through the challenges. (Well, you could leave the dungeon itself, but until you also find the proper code, you’ll be stuck on Krynn, probably in another time period to the one you came from. Depending where and when you started, this might be an improvement) You have to explore the eponymous Anvil of Time, a dungeon/time machine that exists in multiple ages simultaneously, and figure out how it works. In the process you’ll wind up in the 4th, 3rd and 2nd ages of Krynn at just the right times to interact with important historical figures when they were also visiting the place. Meet Fistandantilus using the Anvil to steal lore from across time and space, Lord Soth when he was still a living paladin, get dragonhunting advice from Huma himself in the 2nd age and maybe even get to wield a dragonlance yourself against a young red dragon. (not enough room for a larger one to fit through the doors in here) No 5th age variant though (although if you’re playing it in an ongoing campaign where the PC’s are natives it’s likely they’ll be from then, since that’s when the most recently released stuff is set) and he doesn’t even mention that period, reminding us that he wasn’t involved with big chunks of the game side of things and fell out with TSR/WotC at multiple points over the life of the setting.

So this is basically a Dragonlance version of Castles Forlorn, giving you a greatest hits tour of multiple important moments in Krynns’s history and forcing you to engage with them to solve the puzzle of how to get back home. It has a mix of fair encounters and ones with important historical figures that are overleveled which you’re really not supposed to fight, because if you killed them it would screw up the timestream and who knows how the present might be different when you get back. After the forced beginning it’s not actually that railroady, which means it does offer a lot of opportunities for you to make significant changes to the setting that go outside the bounds of what’s written here, forcing the DM to make up a whole ton of stuff in response to keep the game going. It falls into the category of adventures that are interesting, but also potentially problematic to the functioning of your campaign in a way that they’d never let a normal freelancer write. The conversion to the 3e rules is also a lot rougher than the official books a few years later, with the correspondences between the core and dragonlance gods sometimes rather baffling. Definitely one you should think very carefully about using before you do, particularly in an ongoing campaign rather than a one-shot where you can just ignore any particularly messy consequences. Overall, easily the most annoying 3e adventure in here so far, but still miles better than Bill Slavisek’s Council of Wyrms & Dark Sun railroads, which still hold the bottom slots for all-round awfully designed adventures that would never have been published if not for the name attached to them.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 86: May/Jun 2001



part 3/6



Rana Mor: Now here’s one I can go into with somewhat less trepidation, as while Richard Baker isn’t quite as successful as a novelist as Tracy, the game writing I’ve already seen from him is much more to my tastes, including the rather cool Prism Keep from issue 45. We’re off to somewhere vaguely india-like to find a legendary emerald known as the Rain Tiger. This will involve a lengthy trip into thick jungle that has plenty of both rain and tigers to impede your progress. Fortunately there’s a massive river leading into the jungle that’ll take you most of the way there, although that’s still not without it’s hazards, but at least you don’t have to worry about getting lost apart from the bit where it turns into a swamp for a stretch. This does admittedly mean the first half of the adventure is a linear sequence of half a dozen encounters, but at least there’s a decent amount of variety in them. The temple of Rana Mor itself is a more interesting tactical challenge, as it’s surrounded by multiple rings of canals/moats that’ll make it much harder to get in stealthily if you’re weighed down by gear that can’t survive a soak. This becomes particularly significant when you do venture underground, as he remembers that the water table exists and all it takes is one carelessly triggered trap to open up the plugholes and flood the lower level, forcing you to make a hasty exit without all the treasure. In between, you have a decent mix of Huecava, living priests of Nerull and various jungle animals to fight, plus traps both intentional and caused by bits simply being in poor repair. So this turns out to be a fairly typical pulp adventure in the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom mould. Go to exotic places, find out the people there are already dead so you don’t have to feel guilty about killing them again and taking their stuff, probably having to make a hasty exit at the end. (but not being inevitably railroaded into it like a worse written adventure would do) Mildly problematic on a cultural sensitivity level, but much easier to use in any campaign than the previous adventure and less likely to cause massive long-term headaches to the DM if the players take an unexpected direction, this is definitely one I can work with.



Nodwick has Steve Irwin join the party. He’s probably safer here than he was dealing with wild animals in real life.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 86: May/Jun 2001



part 4/6



Stormdancers: Last time we had to deal with an eternal storm, it was a shakespearean epic of an adventure that put you through a whole string of challenges before you could resolve the main one. This is a much smaller and lower level affair that looks like it could probably be done in a single session. A pseudodragon was exploring a dead wizard’s lair and came across a magical horn. Like any curious creature it did the obvious thing and blew it. This summoned an air elemental, which became uncontrolled when the pseudodragon flew away and is now distinctly displeased about being trapped on the prime material plane. It’s own attempts at blowing the horn merely summoned more air elementals and now they’re making an almighty mess of the surrounding forest. You’ll be asked for help by a Treant just before you reach the worst of it. (and even if you say no, you’ll have to trek through the storm anyway or take another route if you have a specific destination. ) Climb the mountain, realise there’s too many air elementals of various sizes to kill them all, explore the wizard’s tower, blow the horn and hold the portal open long enough for all the elementals to go home, then find out it’s magically bound to the place and you don’t get to keep it to use in future adventures. All very 2eish, emphasising puzzle solving and talking to things over combat. Not terrible, but rather underwhelming since we got the long, high level melodramatic version of the same basic concept first not that long ago. There is such a thing as pacing and diminishing returns and this falls foul of that. If only you’d put them the other way around.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 86: May/Jun 2001



part 5/6



Mysterious Ways: Our final adventure is another long and highly setting specific one, as Thomas Harlan takes us off to crusades era earth for a tie in with his series of short stories in Dragon of the same theme. Like the Robin Hood adventure a few issues ago (which is obviously set in the same era, so using them in the same campaign seems quite doable if your PC’s are the globe-trotting types) magic is considerably rarer than the average D&D setting and mostly viewed through a christian framework. But there is still some very powerful magic out there, including the True Cross, which makes it harder to contact the lower planes just by existing. There’s always someone who thinks maybe more demons and magic in the world would actually be a good thing, for them at least, so an evil sorcerer steals the True Cross in a vulnerable moment when it was being moved from one place to another. Guess who has to get it back and preserve the status quo for the world without anyone ever knowing. Follow the trail from Bethlehem to the dead sea, where they have to get to the top of the Masada plateau. There they’ll need to stop them from summoning the demon that’ll carry the True Cross away. Fortunately, failing at this doesn’t end the story there. You’ll still get a chance to chase it to the city of Petra where the true mastermind of this scheme lurks, to stop him before he finally figures out how to destroy the cross and open a permanent gate to the abyss. If you succeeded in retrieving the cross, you’ll still get info revealing that this is where you should be headed next to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again, but you won’t have to rush there to stop the ritual and can come in better prepared. Either way, you’ll wind up fighting much the same set of encounters in the same order, but at least it’s not the bad kind of railroad that makes no allowances for anything but one outcome and falls apart if the players or dice do anything unexpected. Decent for a tournament style adventure, with some nicely written setpieces, but mostly linear and quite specific in setting, so it wouldn’t work in a lot of ongoing campaigns. Still better than the average Polyhedron one, but probably not one I’m ever going to use.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 86: May/Jun 2001



part 6/6



Adventure Design Tips: They’re obviously still struggling to get submissions that stick to the much stricter 3e rules and formatting, as this shows up again just 6 months after the last time. It’s not just a straight copy-paste though, skipping the general stuff we’ve seen plenty of times before for a very specific 7 page list of what you should include, in what order, regardless of the type of adventure you’re writing. Some of the elements are optional, but if you do include them, this is the way you should be doing it. Yet another thing that reinforces that 3e operates on very different design principles to previous editions and you have to step up your game if you want to create things that fit within it and work as intended with all the subtle interlocking rules. If you don’t, they have to work twice as hard to make what you send in ready for publishing, and that’s if they still like the basic idea enough to not immediately throw it on the scrap pile. You can see how this environment would lead them to stick with already established writers more.



Monster Tokens - Set #2: Well, at least this second set get scanned properly. It sticks to the monsters that actually appear in the adventures this issue, which leads to a motley collection of public domain creatures and D&D specific ones. Regular 5x5 ones are Chuul, digester, mummy, skeleton, bronze statue, ghost, huecvava, shadow, grimlock, ice mephit, magmin, ghoul, baaz draconian, assassin vine, minotaur, tiefling, vrock and gargoyle. Long 10x5 monsters you really have to worry about facing for are a young red dragon, tiger, yrthak, and destrachan. 10x10 large creatures are retriever, tendriculos, phase spider and giant constrictor snake. Since there’s more than one of many of these monsters in the adventures, you are not only permitted but encouraged to photocopy these. That provides you with a good carrot to get people playing using the grid system rather than old school theatre of the mind.



Map of Mystery is a fairly large Egyptian themed temple complex this time, with both a square and a circular pool in different rooms, plus multiple stairs leading down to a lower level. There could be quite the megadungeon beneath the shifting sands if you’re willing to fill it in. (and come up with an excuse why said sand hasn’t already filled in the underground levels forcing you to excavate the place before it can be properly explored)



An issue filled with adventures that are interesting reads, but easily the hardest to use in your average campaign without reworking so far this edition. As such it feels like a bit of a throwback to mid 2e when they were putting more obscure setting material in to keep from repeating themselves at the expense of accessibility to the casual reader. It’s still probably worthwhile overall, but not the kind of thing they should be doing every issue. If next issue is going to do anything experimental, it should be a very different set of experiments to please a different subset of their audience.