TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 146: March 2001



part 3/6



The magic of Raven's Bluff (concluded):

Bowls of Monster Summoning extend and enlarge the effects of any Monster Summoning spell cast by the owner, with a few minor provisos. Since becoming a specialist wizard is somewhat easier this edition, you can really do some minion spamming with the aid of this.

Candles of Exploding only have a one round delay on them, (and rounds are much shorter now) so exercise great caution and possibly the help of a 10’ pole when lighting them.

Cloaks of Starlight have completely different effects depending on if it’s daytime, nighttime aboveground, or underground. All are interesting, but none overly powerful.

Cones of Communication are your basic paired magical walkie talkies. If you are going to split the party, they’ll mitigate the worst parts of that by letting you co-ordinate your actions from a distance anyway.

Dirty Turtles are a particularly malodorous type of magical stink bomb. If you have 500gp to blow on a single prank, you’re probably not operating on the street gang level this is supposed to be aimed at, unless inflation has gone crazy recently.

Earrings of Dark Fire let you appear to be an ominous evil fiend hurling flames that consume instead of emitting light. This may or may not increase your life expectancy, depending how easily intimidated the marks are.

Eldath’s Origami Peace Cranes make everyone simmer down, as you’d expect, Just maybe you can get through an adventure without combat for a change.

Flagons of Flowing Ale generate a good gallon a day, enough to quench the thirst of all but the hardiest dwarf. Careful using it in the pub, as you don’t want to be chucked out for being a freeloader.

Gauntlets of Heat are another pretty obvious thematic one, letting you do damage or smithing easily without looking so evil in the process.

Gloves of Entropy give you a level draining touch, but slowly drain your own XP and wisdom as well, plus you can’t hold anything corporeal while wearing them, making them very much a double-edged weapon. Once again, a vast amount of expense to mimic a fraction of what many undead can do effortlessly.

Graz’zt’s Six-Fingered Pendant let’s you summon a vrock once a week. If your intentions aren’t suitably diabolical, controlling it is another matter altogether.

Firey Red Rhomboid Ioun Stones give you fire resistance, as you’d expect. Surprised something that basic isn’t already in the corebooks.

Keys of Translation are one of those basic effects you take for granted if you have them, and really miss if you don’t. Best to pack something like that to avoid misunderstandings.

Lathander’s Deathspeak Stone is a one-shot speak with dead, for if the party is too low level to have a cleric with the appropriate spell, but you want to move the plot along that way anyway.

The Mask of Bhaal makes you look terrifying, but doesn’t grant any other powers, making it another one that’ll get you killed quickly if you face courageous adventurers and don’t have the skills to back it up. Non-evil characters need not apply.

Necklaces of Beady Eyes are a handy but imperfect substitute if you can’t find an oasis.

Obsidian War Eagle Pendants counter origami peace cranes, and also make you even better at using weapons you’ve already specialised in. Only really useful to fighters who are determined to make fighting their first solution to any problem.

Powder of Stone to Flesh is found suspiciously commonly in adventures that also feature medusas or gorgons.

Shifter Manacles keep their captive from teleporting away, as also seen commonly in Sigil due to the frequency of fiendish encounters.

Skull Masks make your head appear to be a skull, and give you limited resistances to things that undead are completely immune too. As usual, what is balanced for PC’s and monsters uses quite different math.

Thieves Picks of Stealth are a familiar one, improving your skill and melding into your body when not needed so you can easily smuggle them anywhere just as they did in the old edition.

Waukeen’s Curing Clasps let her priests do at least a little healing when they were without their powers a few years ago. Even now, with the added convenience of spontaneous conversion a few extra HP rarely goes amiss for a busy adventuring party.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 146: March 2001



part 4/6



Taverns - Gateways to Adventure: Dungeon has worked very hard over the years at making sure you don’t get the majority of your missions from mysterious strangers in taverns. Polyhedron has never had the number of submissions to be so selective and many Living City players have become thoroughly fed up of this. What if my character is teetotal, how do I break into adventuring social circles then? (Not that it was easy to go completely dry in a gritty medieval setting, even the monks became experts at winemaking because it was less dangerous than drinking the untreated water) This article, rather than apologising for the trope, sets out to justify why it became a thing in the first place. It goes all the way back to the fall of the Roman Empire, which removed the bathhouses and feasthalls as social venues, letting privately owned taverns become dominant. When trade picked up again, they were the main place anyone travelling stayed, which meant anyone seeking novelty also gravitated there despite the exhortations of the church against frequenting dens of iniquity. This combination of profitability and lots of foreigners meant big taverns frequently became laws unto themselves, with what happens inside staying inside policed only by the staff. Now there’s something you can’t say about the modern day, with the pub industry being decimated by the pandemic and licensing regulations in general becoming increasingly onerous. This article winds up doing pretty much the opposite of what it intends for me, instead of making me want to go back to the tavern, it illustrates how the way history and fashion went in Europe was not inevitable and there are plenty of other ways our social gatherings could have shaken out if you fiddle with the inputs a little. Adding magic, particularly polytheistic clerics who can reliably conjure their own food & drink definitely counts, so D&D worlds shouldn’t look just like earthly middle ages. Don’t fall into the trap of calling things that are actually very specific to your country generic because that’s all you’ve ever personally known.



H. H. Holmes - America's First Serial Killer: Some people accomplish so much in their lives that if you did it in a story they’d say it was unrealistic. Herman Mudgett, aka Henry Howard Holmes, was only 34 when he was caught in 1894, but had managed to go through multiple wives and mistresses, several successful businesses and (probably) murder hundreds of people, although they could only pin 27 of them on him solidly enough to convict. (which was still more than enough to earn the death penalty, so it’s not as if they could punish him any more harshly even if they did find more bodies. ) With his slick wheeling and dealing he first ran a very successful drug store, then used the money to build a spectacularly confusing bit of real estate filled with methods of spying on the tenants and killing without any risk to him (other than the long term danger of all the asbestos) such as filling the rooms with gas or trapdoors with greased chutes leading down to his secret basement lair, filled with torture equipment and various ways of disposing of the bodies. All in all, an excellent example of how psychopathic charm and ruthlessness really helps you get ahead in life, up to the point where it doesn’t because the number of people you screwed over along the way catches up with you. While they do give him and his minions stats, they have the good taste to not make him supernatural in any way, which is very unusual for a Masque of the Red Death article. Sometimes a person is just that nasty without any outside influences and there’s not a lot you can do about it apart from stopping them and making sure they can’t hurt anyone else. An interesting reminder that there have been real world deathtrap dungeons created without any magic and real world villains are rarely cacklingly villainous all the time, with the successful ones very good at putting on a show, being charming and deflecting suspicion. You can definitely use the lessons here for the villains in your own game to make them more realistic, even if it might not seem like it to your players.



Teamwork - How to get it and use it: What’s that Lassie? Is Timmy stuck down the well again? No, it’s something that happens even more frequently, a basic bit of advice about how you should build a party that works together. Build your party as a group, making sure they have a decent mix of classes and personality types, but leaving out the Starscreams, brooding loners and the thieves who view their own party as valid targets. Give them a good reason to form a group and work together in the first place. Make sure you build the adventures so all the characters can make a valid contribution. If they still won’t work together properly, don’t let it fester, do something about it IC or kick the worst offender out of the group. Same as it ever was. The rules of the game may change, and the emphasis on co-operation or PvP may change with the setting, but human nature will not without serious genetic engineering, and your odds of getting people to go through with that willingly as a society and also not screwing up the practical side are very slim indeed going by the novels on the subject.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 146: March 2001



part 5/6



Elminster's Everwinking Eye: Another very literally named location this time, as Ed takes us to Owlhold, which does indeed have a lot of owls in its wild winding woodlands. Not a huge number of people though, with those there widely spread out in individual homesteads rather than clustering into villages. This means they’re all very self-reliant and many of them are high level, so thinking you can rob a house is a big gamble even if it seems to be deserted. They can melt into the woods and pepper you with arrows from a distance while you blunder around and get thoroughly lost trying to find your way out, and any widespread fires or logging will soon get everyone to gang up on you to protect their lifestyle. The most powerful duo are an archlich and a watchghost who both have very impressive collections of magical items, and can sometimes be convinced to lend a few out to adventurers if asked nicely and it’s for a good cause. There’s a decent amount of other stuff to explore, as this was once the site of a technologically advanced gnome kingdom, until it was swept over by a horde of orcs and abandoned by the few survivors. It may be rusted and overgrown by the trees, but if you look in the right cave or basement who knows what nice little fixer-upper you could find. Seems like a good place for adventurers to settle down and make a home as long as you obey the unwritten social rules and don’t set up too near to any of your neighbours, with plenty of low level challenges just around the corner to ease your kids into gaining their first few levels. Another good example of how no-one writes places that simultaneously seem nice to live but also fun to adventure in like him.



Bare Bones: Having done birth last time, this column goes for another big life event. Weddings! We’ve had adventures involving those from several perspectives - making sure they go ahead safely, stopping them, going on a quest to come up with a really good present and even the ultra-cheesy one where one of the PC’s gets to marry the princess at the end. He does manage to come up with some new spins on the idea though. What if the wedding celebrations are actually some kind of occult ritual. The details of the music, the guest placement, the wedding speech, all may seem innocuous on their own, but if not disrupted something eldritch may be summoned and most of the guests might find themselves on the menu. What if the wedding dress is cursed, the wedding is on an inauspicious day or the groom accidentally sees the bride before the wedding? What if the wedding is a sham done for financial or political reasons, and one or both of the people involved rebels against their parents? What if one of them plans to kill the other after the deed is done? I think that’s a decent number of ideas for a compact little column like this to contain, not all of which have been done to death already. You can definitely get some useful inspiration out of this one.



Can Ogres Fly?: Ian Richards continues to bring that general gaming magazine feel from across the pond with a preview of the computer game Arcanum. Part of the growing steampunk trend, it sends us to a fantasy world in the middle of an industrial revolution, mixing magic & elves with tesla coils & zeppelins. Like many an RPG, it offers a lengthy selection of benefits & flaws that you can use to make your character unique that give plenty of opportunity for experimentation and figuring out the optimised builds. The plot seemed pretty interesting too from what he saw in the demo, with plenty of people to talk too and hints as to the story. Unfortunately, the version he got was also still pretty buggy, so between the crashes and the time limit he didn’t get much chance to engage with the combat system. So plenty of promise, but wait and see if it delivers in the end. Since it did mildly underperform saleswise, with strong initial ones tailing off fast as people discovered the problems with the interface, I’m guessing the developers didn’t do as much refinement as needed in response to this initial feedback. Oh well. It’s always hard to know when a game is ready, and any more would be just gilding the lily, with both rushing and getting bogged down in development hell both real risks.

 

[(un)reason]

Polyhedron Issue 146: March 2001



part 6/6



The Polyhedron Review: Thieves in the Forest is a short 1st level adventure from Atlas Games, at a mere 24 pages smaller than most actual old school modules. The rules editing has improved since their last offering, but the story is nothing to write home about. Wander about the forest a bit and kill some thieves. That’s about it. Nothing you haven’t seen multiple times before, better written if you have a subscription to Dungeon.

The Hills Rise Wild is a comedic skirmish game of lovecraftian horror, with the players taking the role of multiple families of feuding hillbillies delving into forbidden lore and inflicting it on their rivals. This frequently backfires, making for a frantic and unpredictable experience where luck is as important as skill in winning. You can’t take going insane and dying horribly too seriously, otherwise you’d really go mad in real life.

The Last Days of Constantinople is another early d20 boom adventure that really screws up the rules. Skills that are listed like 2e proficiencies, challenge ratings all over the shop, absurdly charismatic NPC’s. The premise is interesting and it covers a historical period TSR never got around too, but it’s a little too puerile, and revelling in it’s freedom to include whores and gruesomely described deaths to really satisfy Erik. Just because there’s no morality clause in the OGL doesn’t mean you have to go full X rated straight away.

The Spear of the Loghin annoys our reviewers less, but it’s all a bit scooby-doo and the maps just look cheap and bad. It does have some good ideas like multiple scaled difficulty encounters and the general organisation is decent, but they can still spot lots of little errors in the implementation of the d20 rules. Probably not worth it in hindsight.



Web Wanderings: This column lacks a theme this time, and goes back to some very basic suggestions indeed. You probably have an email address by now, but given that they’re free and easy to make, have you considered making ones for your characters as well? Well, it definitely makes things easier if you’re running multiple characters in a PbM game. The recommended ones are somewhat dated, but still around, although you have to intentionally create a hotmail account rather than an outlook one and most of the good ones are already taken. The next suggestion is also still alive and very usable. www.earthcam.com lets you check in on any of thousands of webcams live around the world or link your own one up to the site, which has multitudes of information gathering possibilities, even if separating signal from noise may be a challenge with so much to choose from. The final two are less consequential and not around any more. An alignment test quiz? The link may be dead, but there’s plenty more of these to be found with a casual search. Similarly, there’s plenty more zener card psychic tests to be found even if the linked one has been replaced by a food shop, of all things. Some are even apps rather than websites. Nothing hugely consequential or mind-blowing then, but more little data points of what has and hasn’t changed in the intervening decades.



Clubline: I’ve been quite cynical over the years about how tiny the turnouts of the decathlons are, but at least they are going in the right direction, with last year’s the biggest yet. This column is basically just 4 pages listing all the events over the year and who got those big scoring 1st & 2nd places in them, so it’s all transparent and fair. The overall winners were the Naughty Weasels, coming in and pushing last year’s winners the PM Players down to 2nd place. Will things be even more fiercely fought next year? I guess I’ll probably hear about it whether I want to or not, going by previous years.



On the Trail: There’s not many conventions this time of year, so they can devote all their attention to the RPGA’s spiritual home, Winter Fantasy. Unsurprisingly, the Living games took up the majority of the time, between the swarms of people trying to get 3e certificates for their Living City characters, the epic introduction of the Living Force and the second wave of Living Greyhawk adventures, but there were a decent number of Classic tournaments for all sorts of systems as well. While Jack Ravenwild had the honor of sealing Myrkyssa Jelan away in the official novels, your party got to play out her defeat in Amber’s Story, another multi-round adventure all the long term players who went through the war can really get emotionally invested in. Finally, we have another reminder how often future writers came up through the RPGA, with Jason Buhlman (sic, obviously they don’t know him that well yet) being singled out as easily their best overall scorer over many tournaments. Let’s hope they get that h in the right place next time, as I know we’ll be seeing him again along the course of this journey. A decent number of significant historical footnotes here then, putting this entry at above average interest for this column.



The signs that we’re reaching the last days of the magazine continue to grow, but the density of useful content per issue has also rarely been higher, even if some of it is a bit basic and repetitive as usual. So it’s looking like their demise might not have been directly their own fault after all, but the consequences of larger forces of history acting upon them. At least if they go out on a high they’re more likely to be positively remembered. Let’s see if there’s any odd deviations in the final arc of their trajectory.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 85: Mar/Apr 2001



part 1/6



82 (100) pages. A cold-blooded metabolism may allow you to survive on a small fraction of the food a warm-blooded one requires, but you do still need to eat, which our cover star evidently hasn’t been doing nearly enough of. Let’s find out how likely the PC’s will wind up on the menu and if they’ll have the opportunity to save anyone else along the way.



Editorial: Editing two magazines at once is not a good idea, as Roger Moore can attest, even if one or both of them is only bimonthly. You risk not only burnout, but getting mixed up and putting things in the wrong one. But there’s always the pressure to do a little more, particularly if it also means getting paid a little more and Chris has become the next contender for this multitasking challenge, adding Star Wars Gamer to his plate. Unsurprisingly, a licensed game is a whole load more hassle than one owned entirely by your own company and has become the main part of his day, leaving him to catch up on his dungeon-delving responsibilities in what used to be his free time in the evening. So if Dungeon starts to go downhill you know exactly what to blame. Since it doesn’t spin off of or merge with any of the magazines I’m already covering and I was never the greatest fan of Star Wars in the first place I think I’ll skip adding this one to my plate as well, even though it only lasted 10 issues. If anyone else wants to do a Let’s Read of it, Undefeated, Amazing Stories or any of their other offerings you are more than welcome, but I’ll keep on aiming to complete this journey, not extend it indefinitely at any opportunity.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 85: Mar/Apr 2001



part 2/6



Letters: First letter praises them for making their contact info easier to spot. It’s the little things like that which really affect the number of submissions they get.

Second is a much longer one with a whole load of comments about recent issues. They’re pleased with the magazine going full-color, the new advice on scaling adventures is awesome and the maps continue to be good, but the format choices are sometimes too busy and hard to read and the cover of issue 83 was disturbing. Well, what do you expect from a magazine that regularly has horror adventures? They also wonder if they’ll ever follow in Dragon’s footsteps and release a digital compilation of issues. Now there’s a big can of worms that they don’t have the energy for at the moment.

Third notes that the goblins in Depths of Rage really ought to have a few ranks in Balance, given all the chasms they routinely cross. Now the rules are stricter, it’s much easier to create plot holes like that if you’re not careful.

Fourth is very pleased to see them complete the old map from the DMG and would like to see something similar done for many of the Maps of Mystery they’ve done over the years. Maybe they could make it a competition or something.

Finally, another long one that looks at issue 84 in detail, and delivers a mostly positive verdict. They’ve calmed down a bit on the dungeonpunk and the adventures offer plenty of opportunities for both fighting and roleplaying. Keep it up.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 85: Mar/Apr 2001



part 3/6



Ever-Changing Fortunes: One fairly significant change 3e has made is not just listing the alignment of creatures, but which ones are pretty much always that alignment and which it’s merely a suggestion for. This is particularly the case for many of the humanoids that were previously just savages to kill, which gradually had nuance added to them last edition with the 2e Complete Book of Humanoids and BECMI PC1-4 books, but now they can truly compete on a level playing field. Anyway, the PC’s are encouraged to question their prejudices when a kobold asks them for help. It turns out he was raised by dwarves, but now the mine has been taken over by a group of troglodytes led by drow, which means both the dwarves and kobolds are slaves working under far worse conditions. If you don’t speak dwarven or draconic, this will not be explained very well, as his common is pretty halting. If you choose to take the mission, he’ll accompany you, and while not very useful in combat he does have plenty to contribute to the roleplaying encounters in various parts of the mines, making him not just another irritating cowardly comic relief sidekick. So this uses some fairly familiar elements, but delights in subverting your expectations in the way it uses them, with things like a male drow priest, (who’s actually extra good at his job due to all the extra assassination attempts he attracts from rivals) kobolds you can make peace with and troglodytes that actually use technology & decent tactics. It feels like it was written after 3e was released and is keen to encourage you to break those old habits and expectations that might not be the best idea under the new rules. We’re still a long way from completely solving fantasy racism (which would also need the invention of some kind of powerful magical deodorant before you could fully integrate the trogs into a mixed society) but any step in the right direction is a positive one in my book.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 85: Mar/Apr 2001



part 4/6



Lord of the Scarlet Tide: They’ve clearly relaxed their word count limits since the edition change, as James Jacobs gives us a 36 page mammoth that’s not quite as massive as Monte’s last issue, but still comfortably larger than any single-parter for previous editions. It’s time for a world-threatening adventure of the sort they’d never let a freelancer do as an eldritch fungus spreads across the land taking over people’s brains and turning them into the slaves of an ancient imprisoned lovecraftian monstrosity. Can it use them to break free, or will the PC’s manage to foil it? Fortunately, like many a real world fungus, it doesn’t do well exposed to direct sunlight and fresh air so it’s not a completely unstoppable plague. The PC’s arrive in Narwell shortly after the first wave and are attacked by a gang of scarlet children who haven’t learnt subtlety yet. If they survive that first challenge they’ll rapidly be inducted into the resistance and given a good infodump. Do they dare venture down into the wells that the fungus came up through and attack it at the source? Like Kingdom of the Ghouls, you’d better pack as many anti-disease effects as you can get hold of and pay extra attention to protecting your cleric if you want to get through this one, because nearly every encounter (or just drinking the water without boiling it first) has decent odds of you winding up infected and joining the other side if not treated within a few hours. A good reminder that James is very pointedly not one of the people who worked on nerfing energy drain, poison, disease, etc in the new edition and many of his monsters feature inventive new variants on long-term status effects that can really make your players sweat even after the battle is over.

From this rather linear start, you then have a fairly large, twisty underground area to wander with lots of different monsters only bound together by the fungal template forced upon them, plus a few uninfected holdouts doing the best they can. It’s all realistically dark and damp so that’s another drain on your resources to deal with, albeit a relatively minor one at the expected character level. If you’re quick you can rescue the remnants of a previous adventuring party sent down and add them to your ranks. You might be able to ally with some of the uninfected monsters but this is a much more dicey prospect for various interesting reasons. Eventually, you’ll find your way to a whole city full of infected kuo-toa, where you can finally find out what’s behind it and reseal it if you’re sneaky. Or if they’re much higher level, they could release the eldritch abomination and kill it for good, as James is kind enough to give it full stats even though it’s way out of the standard challenge range. Either way, it’s a loadbearing boss situation and the fungus loses all its potency without the connection to its master. So I can draw a clear parallel between this and his earlier work in Dungeon (powerful monster mostly trapped but managing to influence the world regardless) and see how he’s refined his implementation over time. Since he’ll use a pretty similar idea again but even larger scale in the Savage Tide adventure path (they both even have tide in the name) I guess those are pretty common in his own campaigns. Not hugely original then, but challenging, has plenty of distinctive flavour and could last quite a while, particularly if the players dawdle or go off on a tangent, giving the fungus time to spread and the DM room to come up with the details of how it affects the rest of the campaign world. It’s nice to have another adventure that’s more about the big concept that could make up a whole campaign than the specific set of rooms and monsters.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 85: Mar/Apr 2001



part 5/6



Side Treks - Flesh to Stone: It is the april issue, and thankfully they have managed to find one whimsical but still usable submission which has the kind of tone they used to back in the late 80’s. A family of Stone Giants has managed to capture and safely contain some cockatrices with the aid of some rings of petrification resistance and are now selling their byproducts. Unfortunately they keep escaping and have petrified a bunch of nearby miners. The PC’s will come across the statues, then the cockatrices, then the stone giants seeking their escaped poultry in quick succession. If they attack the cockatrices, the giants will assume you’re poachers and be distinctly displeased. It’ll take some fast talking to convince them otherwise and even more to get them to believe the statues weren’t looking for trouble and turn them back, particularly the ones the wife has taken a liking to and is using as garden gnomes. The kind of thing where you could miss the joke and just slaughter your way through the whole thing, but it’ll be a tough encounter at the expected level range and you’ll get more out of it by engaging in the spirit it’s intended. It’s all pretty entertaining reading, and short enough that the silliness doesn’t wear out it’s welcome. Given the way Dragon’s april fools content went over the next decade, I have a suspicion that this may be the last of it’s kind. Perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I guess it depends who’s in the editor’s chair.



Nodwick gets petrified by the cockatrices. Since that raises his encumbrance limit, his employers seem in no hurry to turn him back.

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 85: Mar/Apr 2001



part 6/6



Natural Selection: Usually druids and rangers get along quite well despite their alignment differences. (which are both much looser now anyway after the edition change. ) But you can still run into differences of opinion over where exactly the balance between nature and civilisation lies, particularly when some are born and raised in the wild and others only learn how to survive in it later, plus like any animal there’s old-fashioned territoriality if you have too many in one place. This time it’s the rangers of Urnst and the druids of the Celadon forest that have fallen out due to complicated political reasons and the PC’s are going to have to settle things. They’re hired by the Lord Chamberlain to find out what’s happened at Dedermont’s Keep and rescue any surviving Pathwardens. Turns out it’s all the people at the top’s fault. The Rangers themselves didn’t want to do this, and were actually making an effort to humanely relocate the monsters they were supposed to kill using stasis beads. But no good deed goes unpunished, the druids set the monsters free inside the keep, captured the head ranger inside one of his own beads and are going to sacrifice him on the night of the new moon. It’s not all bad though, the kobolds now living in the keep hate being under the thumb of the trolls and will betray them at the drop of a hat if they think you’re not going to just kill them as well. Another one where who the good and bad guys are is intentionally blurred and it’s a lot easier if you’re willing to talk to people and settle your differences rather than just trying to kill everything, with the XP rewards the same whether you solve encounters by beating them or making friends. It also makes a big deal about many of the druids being humanoids, which always made a lot of sense as a skillset for them, yet was one of the most racially exclusive classes in previous editions, creating a setup where it was all humans (and the odd half-elf) unilaterally deciding for the rest of the world what the proper balance of nature should be. It definitely feels like it was written to exploit the worldbuilding possibilities the new system offers and would work quite differently if you tried to backconvert it. That’s the kind of thing I like to see so I strongly approve of this adventure.



Dungeon adventures index Issues 73-84: Another 12 issues, another 62 adventures, which means it’s time to do a bit of statistics. This time, the trend is definitely towards fewer but longer adventures per issue, since the average page count is also up by a substantial margin. It’s good to see things go back the other way after the long slow downward drift of the 90’s.



An excellent issue overall, with most of the adventures purposefully doing things that would have been impossible or much harder in the old edition and even the one that doesn’t being pretty entertaining. It looks like Dungeon is following a similar pattern to Dragon, with the first few issues of the new edition being fresh and exciting above and beyond the call of duty after years of things gradually becoming increasingly repetitive. Let’s see if they keep it up for the same duration. (which will seem all the shorter with the schedule still bimonthly.)