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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8234821" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 20: Nov/Dec 1989part 5/5Ancient Blood: After a relatively short solo trip to icy terrain, here's the main course, a very large (although with fewer rooms than usual for it's size) keep haunted by undead frost giants. They're actually less scary in combat than living ones, but there's a good reason for this, so they can keep the intended character level low enough that the characters can't just bypass all the mundane dangers of arctic travel with magic. This gives them room to play up the atmosphere of the forbidding wilderness, enormous ice wall and vast icy halls, and create an adventure where there's more tension between the combats than during them. Yup, horror season is spilling over from last issue and they're going full gothic with the writing style. Starting off with flavour encounters with superstitious natives and a relatively simple seeming assignment, they then get roped into trying to deal with an ancient ghost that will apparently devastate the town in a month's time if not laid to rest. To do do so, you have to deal with the mundane challenges of arctic travel as well as the supernatural ones. So running this one well is all about pacing and building up the drama. It's not as deadly as the last couple, but still has plenty of good qualities to it, as it does gothic without overdoing the spooky to the point where it becomes mundane or being a railroad like far too many Ravenloft modules. We're definitely accumulating enough decent far-north adventures to justify an extended stay up there. With 3 out of 4 adventures involving far north or icy terrains, this issue manages to be reasonably seasonal even without any formal mentions of christmas or it's otherworldly equivalents, and also manages a decent variety of tones within the same terrain. A good example of the kind of thing we don't get when they're trying to sell us individual modules. Let's find out if next issue is similarly wintery, or they'll already be looking forward to the whimsy of spring.</blockquote>

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