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<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8131898" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 8: Nov/Dec 1987part 4/5The Wounded Worm: Dragon regular Thomas M. Kane gives us another adventure that does exactly what it says on the tin. A crippled dragon is looking for a cleric powerful enough to heal it. Being an evil dragon, the concept of exchanging money for goods and services is not one that occurs to it, and so it's engaging in an elaborate pyramid scheme of capturing and mind-controlling people, then sending them out to capture more people to mindfuck, in the hope of getting hold of someone who can fix it, while it turtles at the bottom of a dungeon underneath the sea. This scheme obviously runs into the players, one way or another, and they need to foil it or become it's latest set of mind-controlled slaves. This is interesting in a number of ways, as it combines several different gimmicks in a sufficiently complex way that I doubt I'll see it precisely replicated, and once again gives you room to fail without it being the end of your character. That they've done that in two adventures this issue shows they're really thinking about how to tell more interesting stories in here, and it's just a shame that it happened in this relatively small department of TSR, rather than the 2e development team, where they could have made actual mechanical changes that make nonlethal failures easier to achieve. But no. Adventure designers who want to tell more literary stories will continue to have to fight the system for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I quite like this one. None of the individual elements are original, but there's an interesting combination of ingredients and they're put together well. That's the way to keep things interesting long term.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 8131898, member: 27780"] [b][u]Dungeon Issue 8: Nov/Dec 1987[/u][/b] part 4/5 The Wounded Worm: Dragon regular Thomas M. Kane gives us another adventure that does exactly what it says on the tin. A crippled dragon is looking for a cleric powerful enough to heal it. Being an evil dragon, the concept of exchanging money for goods and services is not one that occurs to it, and so it's engaging in an elaborate pyramid scheme of capturing and mind-controlling people, then sending them out to capture more people to mindfuck, in the hope of getting hold of someone who can fix it, while it turtles at the bottom of a dungeon underneath the sea. This scheme obviously runs into the players, one way or another, and they need to foil it or become it's latest set of mind-controlled slaves. This is interesting in a number of ways, as it combines several different gimmicks in a sufficiently complex way that I doubt I'll see it precisely replicated, and once again gives you room to fail without it being the end of your character. That they've done that in two adventures this issue shows they're really thinking about how to tell more interesting stories in here, and it's just a shame that it happened in this relatively small department of TSR, rather than the 2e development team, where they could have made actual mechanical changes that make nonlethal failures easier to achieve. But no. Adventure designers who want to tell more literary stories will continue to have to fight the system for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I quite like this one. None of the individual elements are original, but there's an interesting combination of ingredients and they're put together well. That's the way to keep things interesting long term. [/QUOTE]

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