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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8139140" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 9: Jan/Feb 1988part 3/5The Crypt of Istaris: Another Finnish-influenced tournament adventure where the PC's are on the clock to finish the mission or face dire consequences? How very odd. It's not an obvious combination of elements at all. One of the joys of the arctic circle in real life is the several months a year when day or night becomes constant, and you don't have to keep your body clock bound to the insistent 24 hour rhythm the rest of the world imposes on you. But anyway, you have 4 in-game (and real world) hours to find and destroy two macguffins before the planets align, and untold destruction is delivered on the land. Are your characters up to the job?! Fortunately, it's only a single-round adventure, so the actual dungeon itself isn't a railroad pushing you from one encounter to the next with no room to deviate from the story like the Maiden of Pain series. There are multiple objectives, and you could succeed or fail in each of them independently of the others. Like many tournament adventures, it has a scoring system so you can directly compare how you did overall to all the other groups that have been through it. Overall, I think it falls somewhere in the middle of the pack quality-wise, neither particularly good or bad, which is still an improvement from the last time they went here. I can live with that.The Djinni's Ring: Ooh. Another interesting experiment here, as they try out a solo chose your own path adventure like the Fighting Fantasy series. That's a good way to keep up variety, and particularly good for people who haven't got a group, and would otherwise just be collecting the magazine to read. They take pains to make sure everything in here works even if you haven't read the full rules, simplifying the stats somewhat. Of course, since it's only 11 pages, not a full book like those, it won't occupy you more than an hour or two even if you roll through all the encounters legitimately, explore every branching pathway and go all the way back to the start each time you make the wrong choice and die horribly. (of which there are a fair few, as is the nature of Fighting Fantasy books) Take the role of an elf trying to free a genie in an ancient abandoned palace. While you can try to leave, you'll die of dehydration before you can get back to civilisation. Other than that, you do actually have plenty of meaningful choices, tracking your equipment really matters, and you'll both expend resources and gain new ones that could be crucial later on. It's a pretty decent dungeon crawl, and I just wish it was longer. Hopefully there'll be some more of these over the course of the magazine to come.</blockquote>

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