(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon Issue 58: Mar/Apr 1996
part 3/5
A Bad Batch of Brownies: We eventually got solo adventures for each of the core classes. Now we have one for a druid, courtesy of Lisa Smedman. As you'd expect from the title, it's whimsical one where you have to deal with trickster fae, and find out that a big part of being a druid is not summoning the raw power of nature to destroy despoilers, but talking to people with differences, some of which are unable to communicate with each other at all without your help and coming to an equitable solution. The little folk are taking way more food than normal from the Paradiso family inn, and you get asked for help. If you stay up late you'll spot them easily. (catching them is another matter) Turns out they have a "visitor" in the woods that they're trying to keep comfortable. You may go in expecting it to be some evil monster threatening them. The reality is far worse. It's a biker who wandered through a portal from earth and is now getting all the local fae into tattooing skulls & lightning bolts, switchblade fightin' and hog-riding with his tales of burnin' rubber on the open road. It would be a very good idea for you to restore the integrity of the 4th wall and find a way to send him back home. This will require collecting ingredients for oil of etherealness, which involves solving several other minor problems around the forest, most of which are also best resolved by talking. A distinctly silly adventure, but one which does actually have a genuine moral message and real challenges underneath that and doesn't railroad you from one scene to the next with no freedom of choice. Probably not one I'm going to use personally, but not completely groan inducing and infuriating as a read at least.
Challenge of Champions: Ah, here's an interesting turnup for the books that I'd heard about before going into this. Not content with turning the Ecology articles into a series with several recurring protagonists to make things more dramatic and memorable. Johnathan M Richards also gave us this one in Dungeon, a series of puzzle based adventures designed to be solvable challenges for characters of any level, primarily testing the brains of the players rather than the stats of your characters. (You do still need at least one of each core class though, as some of the magic items you're given need the right one to activate them) There are 10 challenges and you're given 15 minutes of real time each to solve them, so you can easily do everything in here in a single session even accounting for snack breaks and OOC digressions. Once you've completed them, you get scored for how well you did on each trial, allowing you to compare your result with not only the NPC's on the leaderboard but also other real groups around the world like the old school competitive tournament adventures. Since this is one where the dice rolls aren't important and knowing the details beforehand would remove all the challenge I'm not going to give more specific spoilers, but it is indeed a pretty cool departure from the usual adventure format in here and I can see why they'd be happy to accept sequels to it, particularly if it gets specific praise in the letters section in the next few issues.
part 3/5
A Bad Batch of Brownies: We eventually got solo adventures for each of the core classes. Now we have one for a druid, courtesy of Lisa Smedman. As you'd expect from the title, it's whimsical one where you have to deal with trickster fae, and find out that a big part of being a druid is not summoning the raw power of nature to destroy despoilers, but talking to people with differences, some of which are unable to communicate with each other at all without your help and coming to an equitable solution. The little folk are taking way more food than normal from the Paradiso family inn, and you get asked for help. If you stay up late you'll spot them easily. (catching them is another matter) Turns out they have a "visitor" in the woods that they're trying to keep comfortable. You may go in expecting it to be some evil monster threatening them. The reality is far worse. It's a biker who wandered through a portal from earth and is now getting all the local fae into tattooing skulls & lightning bolts, switchblade fightin' and hog-riding with his tales of burnin' rubber on the open road. It would be a very good idea for you to restore the integrity of the 4th wall and find a way to send him back home. This will require collecting ingredients for oil of etherealness, which involves solving several other minor problems around the forest, most of which are also best resolved by talking. A distinctly silly adventure, but one which does actually have a genuine moral message and real challenges underneath that and doesn't railroad you from one scene to the next with no freedom of choice. Probably not one I'm going to use personally, but not completely groan inducing and infuriating as a read at least.
Challenge of Champions: Ah, here's an interesting turnup for the books that I'd heard about before going into this. Not content with turning the Ecology articles into a series with several recurring protagonists to make things more dramatic and memorable. Johnathan M Richards also gave us this one in Dungeon, a series of puzzle based adventures designed to be solvable challenges for characters of any level, primarily testing the brains of the players rather than the stats of your characters. (You do still need at least one of each core class though, as some of the magic items you're given need the right one to activate them) There are 10 challenges and you're given 15 minutes of real time each to solve them, so you can easily do everything in here in a single session even accounting for snack breaks and OOC digressions. Once you've completed them, you get scored for how well you did on each trial, allowing you to compare your result with not only the NPC's on the leaderboard but also other real groups around the world like the old school competitive tournament adventures. Since this is one where the dice rolls aren't important and knowing the details beforehand would remove all the challenge I'm not going to give more specific spoilers, but it is indeed a pretty cool departure from the usual adventure format in here and I can see why they'd be happy to accept sequels to it, particularly if it gets specific praise in the letters section in the next few issues.