(un)reason
Legend
Dungeon Issue 69: Jul/Aug 1998
part 3/5
Challenge of Champions II: This probably wasn't intended to be a series when they did the first one, but it stood out from the crowd quite handily and got several letters praising it, so when current ecologist-in-chief Johnathan M Richards created another one, it seems a no-brainer to accept it. The basic formula is the same as the first one, a D&D world in which adventurers are common and aware of the basic class divisions, so there's an actual adventurer's guild regulating them and running competitions for whatever rewards you see fit. You have 10 challenges, each of which has a time limit of 15 minutes to solve or fail at, which means you can easily fit the whole thing into a single session. You could run the challenges in a vacuum, but there's also a betting pool and a bunch of other parties going through the same challenge, one of which will try to cheat, so watch out for trickery. It turns dungeon-crawling into a sport, rewarding people who like to engage with the rules as physics. Of course, it wouldn't be a sequel without trying to be bigger and better than the first one, so this is 18 pages long where the first was only 14, most of which goes into giving bigger and better illustrations than before, with only two on a page so you have fewer worries about having to either cut up the magazine to turn them into handouts or give hints as to later challenges. So this doesn't have the surprise factor of the first one, but it does have a decent amount of incremental refinements and there's still no-one else doing anything like it around here. I think this is pretty secure in it's place and has room for further sequels in the future.
Nodwick's party scores nul points on the Challenge of Champions due to their over-reliance on sacrificing the henchman over any other strategy, which does technically work but isn't what the judges want here.
part 3/5
Challenge of Champions II: This probably wasn't intended to be a series when they did the first one, but it stood out from the crowd quite handily and got several letters praising it, so when current ecologist-in-chief Johnathan M Richards created another one, it seems a no-brainer to accept it. The basic formula is the same as the first one, a D&D world in which adventurers are common and aware of the basic class divisions, so there's an actual adventurer's guild regulating them and running competitions for whatever rewards you see fit. You have 10 challenges, each of which has a time limit of 15 minutes to solve or fail at, which means you can easily fit the whole thing into a single session. You could run the challenges in a vacuum, but there's also a betting pool and a bunch of other parties going through the same challenge, one of which will try to cheat, so watch out for trickery. It turns dungeon-crawling into a sport, rewarding people who like to engage with the rules as physics. Of course, it wouldn't be a sequel without trying to be bigger and better than the first one, so this is 18 pages long where the first was only 14, most of which goes into giving bigger and better illustrations than before, with only two on a page so you have fewer worries about having to either cut up the magazine to turn them into handouts or give hints as to later challenges. So this doesn't have the surprise factor of the first one, but it does have a decent amount of incremental refinements and there's still no-one else doing anything like it around here. I think this is pretty secure in it's place and has room for further sequels in the future.
Nodwick's party scores nul points on the Challenge of Champions due to their over-reliance on sacrificing the henchman over any other strategy, which does technically work but isn't what the judges want here.