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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8242536" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 21: Jan/Feb 1990part 5/5The Chest of the Aloeids: Oh no. It's a time travel adventure. Those rarely turn out well, as they're either predestination railroads or the number of options for ways to change history rapidly outpaces the writer's ability to catalogue them. Eris has decided to mess with the timestream in an attempt to prevent Hermes from ever becoming a full god and joining the Greek pantheon. Athena picks up on the problem, but wanting to be subtle, sends the PC's back in time to stop this rather than acting directly. This turns into a romp through various classical references, with all the predictable monsters like centaurs, minotaurs and harpies making appearances, plus some previously unstatted ones like the Stymphalian birds and the titular Aloeid giants. Get distracted by the satyrs of Silenius, answer the riddle of the Sphinx (easy in hindsight), learn how to properly harvest Moly to make a potion that'll cure magical transformations. It does make this adventure feel much more significant than the majority of ones in here, and there's some definite opportunities for interesting roleplaying with such big, well-known NPC's. Of course, the greek gods are also well known for their pettiness and vindictiveness, and making the wrong choices will result in you getting arbitrarily squashed, cursed, or otherwise screwed over without a saving throw or chance to resist. So this is more irritating, obviously derivative and linear than most of the adventures in here, but not as bad as the two multi-part Polyhedron adventures that also involved godly meddling and prophecy/time travel, as it gives you all the information in one go, and at least offers multiple overland routes and interaction options. It's my least favourite of the ones in this issue, but still just about in the salvageable range rather than ones that make me want to throw the magazine at the wall in annoyance. With adventures that take you up into space, back in time, and aimed at rather higher average levels than usual, this issue does push at their limits in an interesting way. Not all of them are successful, especially with the knowledge in hindsight that they'll never publish another adventure even this high a level for the rest of the edition, but at least they're trying to involve the PC's in bigger events that could make real changes to the campaign long-term instead of expecting them to wander aimlessly from one dungeon crawl to the next. Let's see if next issue continues that trend, or it'll be right back to the basics again to make sure they don't scare off the newbies.</blockquote>

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