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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8320178" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 29: May/June 1991part 5/5Mightier than the Sword: With the cover story moved to the middle, we finish off with a typically playful medium sized adventure from Willie Walsh instead. What happens if someone invents a better pen and spreads literacy amongst the common people? A whole load of economic disruption from people who's living depends on the old supply chain, or having a captive audience for their services. They'll make attempts to prevent the new technology from gaining widespread use, sabotage the equipment or even resort to violence against it's manufacturers. So here we have a murder mystery involving fantasy luddites. Was it the goose-breeders, (for the quills) the guild of scribes, a druid wanting to protect the forest from increased logging for paper, or even just a co-incidence? Most of the town council have connections to one or another of the industries involved, so they don't trust each other to do an impartial investigation. They hire the PC's to function as neutral parties and get to the bottom of this before it tears the town apart. (preferably bringing the killer in alive for proper trial, and generally avoiding hack and slash behaviour, as this is a civilised place) It may be humorously presented, but this is also surprisingly educational, inspired by logistic & economic issues and historical conflicts that have happened repeatedly in the real world. The details of the advancement will need tweaking if you run it in a high magic world where mundane technological concerns like this have long since ceased to be an issue, but the set of interesting NPC's with plenty of quirks to ham up in roleplaying should remain valid regardless of genre, and this is another town you can put on your map and reuse when the PC's pass by again. I look forward to seeing what inspirations he draws upon next time. Yet another issue that maintains reasonably high standards for writing, while really pushing at the production values. At least that's one area that generally only moves upward, at least until the readership drops and their budget gets cut accordingly, and even then it's often made up for by technological improvements. Now it's time to enter the era where we'll be seeing two Polyhedrons for every Dungeon, which will hopefully keep the whole idea of a magazine doing nothing but adventures from hitting diminishing returns for a little longer. Let's hope both sides of this journey still have plenty to offer us.</blockquote>

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