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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8224880" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 19: Sept/Oct 1989part 2/5By the Wayside: Since they've been having multiple complaints about the lack of Greyhawk material, here's one straight away to calm them down. Let's head to the hive of (pond)scum and villainy that is the Hool Marshes. Slavers, demon cultists, weak & corrupt government, oh my, and that's before you even get to the nonhuman dangers. Straight away, it's obvious we're in grim and gritty fantasy naughty word vietnam Greyhawk, not bad puns and liberal crossovers with completely different worlds & genres Greyhawk. Although they have made concessions to 2e watering down by turning what was obviously an Assassin in the original submission into a regular thief who just happens to engage in assassination as his primary source of income. This is one of those adventures that's as much a sourcebook as it is a plot, devoting nearly half the pagecount to fleshing out the village, which is hardly a safe haven in itself, before you face the real threat, an unusual pairing of intelligent monsters that use their unique abilities synergistically to make them more sneaky and dangerous than the sum of their parts. They'll lure travellers through the swamp off the safe paths and have them for dinner. If you spend too long in the village they'll come to you and engage in increasingly reckless schemes to separate the PC's and kill them one by one. So this is basically a slasher movie turned into a D&D module, combining a generally untrustworthy landscape and population that the PC's are quite right to be suspicious of, with an enemy who is actively out to get you that uses the other two factors to their advantage in hit and run attacks, and if you only kill one of them and think you're safe now you'll get a nasty jump scare a little bit later. As usual for horror, it'll take a bit of work by the DM to generate the atmosphere to actually make the players afraid, and you'll need to be willing to actually kill characters rather than pulling your punches, but this is easier here than some others I've seen, and not a railroad like far too many of the Ravenloft modules. I think we're off to a pretty decent start.</blockquote>

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