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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8275067" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 25: Sep/Oct 1990part 2/5The Standing Stones of Sundown: So what was the point of those rings of standing circles many cultures made? In a D&D universe with plentiful magic, the question of how they were created without modern technology is less of an issue, but why becomes an even bigger one when there's all sorts of esoteric things they could be doing beyond tracking the cycle of the seasons. Of course, it wouldn't be a D&D adventure if it didn't involve something to fight, so they decide to go with this particular one being a result of a magical ritual to trap an ancient de*censored*, oh, I'm sorry, Tanar'ri that was too powerful for them to kill at the time. A modern day wizard messes with the stones, winds up releasing the fiend, and now it's terrorising the nearby village, partly to find a magical item that'll let it go back to the Abyss without being stuck for yet another 100 tedious years (as will happen if you kill it), and partly just for the fun of being free and getting to torment and kill again. The result is a scenario that has strong slasher movie influence, as you're dealing with a monster that can appear and disappear at will, and will gradually work it's way through the cast of PC's and NPC's if not stopped, so you need to figure out what it is, it's goals and weaknesses, and how to lure it out, which will take exploring the area, talking to the NPC's and generally doing a fair bit of Buffy style research. There's a few darkly comedic moments to break the tension, it expects you to actually be smart and use divination magic rather than being ruined by those kind of tactics, and it has a short-term win condition (giving it the means to go home) that's actually a long term loss which will lead to the bad guy coming back to terrorise you again with friends later. It makes for a pretty cool read. It does make some assumptions about the nature of the cosmology that means it won't fit into every campaign though; that technology has actually changed meaningfully not just on this world but every world connected to the same set of planes over the past few thousand years, so a recently released demon would be genuinely surprised and sometimes blindsided by medieval technology. It definitely doesn't fit with the tone of most Planescape books, where low and high tech mix inconsistently, there's plenty of fallen empires where things were actually more advanced than now and experienced planar travellers are pretty jaded to whatever mix of science and magic they experience. But I guess you can't expect to make every adventure fit together into one massive campaign. At some point, you're just going to have to choose between mutually exclusive axioms and stick to one. It's not as if there aren't more than enough adventures to take you into the mid-teens just from this magazine by now.</blockquote>

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