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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8139999" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 9: Jan/Feb 1988part 4/5The Golden Bowl of Ashu: The Oriental Adventure this issue once again sees the forces of heaven treating earth like straw dogs. Someone or something pisses off the spirits, and they punish the entire region with months-long drought. Obviously, it falls to the PC's to figure out what it'll take to make reparations before everyone starves to death. The result is a fairly linear trek through a series of mythologically inspired setpiece encounters that are definitely a rather too high CR for the intended player level they give. So this is one where you're not supposed to fight some of the encounters, but are supposed to fight others, it's often intentionally unclear which tactic you should take due to the creatures being tricksters, and if you chose wrongly, you'll fail the adventure. Somewhat irritating really. If you are going to use it, wait until the PC's are at least 5th level, and have both the strength, and the improved information-gathering toolset 3rd level spells offer so they have better odds of not screwing themselves over through making a wrong choice they could never have had the information to solve without guessing luckily anyway. Not very keen on this one at all.  The Ghostship Gambit: Ruh-Roh Raggy. A g-g-g-ghost?! Jinkies, we'd better investigate this. Yes, this adventure is straight out of a Scooby-doo cartoon, as it doesn't actually involve undead at all, merely people pretending to be undead with the help of various magic spells & items and highly water-resistant makeup for profit. Fortunately, it's flexible enough to set anywhere, so I'm not spoiling anything, as there are plenty of real ghost ship adventures out there and your players won't know it's this one unless they can see your notes. All the spells and items are preexisting ones, and this serves as a rules exercise as much as it is an adventure, showing you how one thing can pretend to be another in a entirely rules-legal way under the D&D system, and the limits to the accuracy they can achieve. So if you're into that kind of system wonk rules exploit stuff, this is a very entertaining read as an article as well as an interesting adventure. Like the non-Euclidean dungeon, you can apply the principles in here to create other adventures that do interesting and unusual things with highly specific combinations of creatures and spells. It's good that they're trying to teach you how to be a better DM in here, not just become reliant on the prefab adventures they're providing.</blockquote>

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