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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8287017" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 26: Nov/Dec 1990part 4/5Deadfalls on Nightwood Trail: As they said in the editorial, here's a two page encounter that you can easily put in nearly any campaign to spice up their journeys between more significant locations. A Spriggan and an Ettercap have joined forces to create more elaborate traps and string them up along a forest path where prey might well wander. If the PC's aren't in complete paranoia mode or powerful enough to have magical detection on as default, it's pretty likely they'll stumble into them, leaving some of the PC's strung up or netted and the others struggling to free them while the monsters attack and do their best to have everyone for dinner. A reasonably interesting demonstration of how different creatures working together intelligently can be more dangerous than the sum of their parts. It'd fit pretty seamlessly into the previous adventure too. Now, can they come up with a good name for these kind of little roadside encounters and get enough good submissions to keep them as a regular thing? There's definitely no shortage of demand for them, as long as PC's have to travel to get from one place to the next, a few filler encounters will always be handy to earn a few more XP and make the world feel like it doesn't revolve around one thing. The Curse and the Quest: For a third adventure in a row, we have an adventure which comes to the PC's, so they don't really have an informed choice in whether they participate or not. There was a letter complaining about their players turning down too many missions a few months ago, so I guess this is the editors overcompensating in response. The PC's come across a dead body by the side of the road with a book. If anyone touches the book, they get cursed to be attacked by an exponentially increasing number of incorporeal horrors every day until it's too much for even the highest level party. Fortunately, one of the previous victims figured out and wrote down what it takes to destroy the book and free yourselves of the curse, if you can only get to the right place at the right phase of the moon and perform the right ritual. Double fortunately, the full moon is just a few days away. Better get cracking then. So you have to negotiate both the challenges of the wilderness, and the humans who own the land you're passing over, who will not be particularly sympathetic to the plight of some rando adventurers trespassing, and then figure out how to use the book to venture into the weird extradimensional place where it can be unmade & the curse lifted. While not as linear and restrictive as some of the worst Polyhedron adventures, this is still far more railroady than any adventure we've seen in Dungeon apart from Irongard, and while this offers more freedom of movement than that in terms of map routes, it has several horrible pixelbitch puzzles near the end that have very specific solutions, and if you mess up, you'll either die by running out of time and being swarmed or be trapped forever. In fact, you can destroy the book, and still be trapped forever to die of starvation all too easily if you don't think ahead or talk to the right NPC's. It's all a little irritating and worrying, and I hope it doesn't herald adventures like this becoming a regular thing. Not my idea of a good time.</blockquote>

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