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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8338768" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 30: Jul/Aug 1991part 5/5Thiondar's Legacy: The final adventure is more than twice the size of any of the others in the issue, a 29 pager that could easily have been a standalone module in the old days. Steve Kurtz, another freelancer who will go on to produce quite a few full books for TSR, sends the PC's to a mysterious tropical valley in the middle of arctic wasteland. What magic sustains it's unnatural presence, and what treasures from ancient civilisations might be found there? Get ready for the kind of expedition that could easily take months of in-game time, and only mildly less in reality if you're only doing weekly sessions. The whole thing is heavily inspired by pulp tales of derring-do and lost continents, with several places that you could stop play on a cliffhanger, and a suitably maniacally insane villain at the end. Deal with some decidedly suspicious stone giants and their similarly oversized sheep. Offer tribute to the mushroom king or face his wrath. Team up with or wind up fighting a rival adventuring party after the same prizes, some of which have wound up in rather dire straits after being split from the others. There's definitely plenty here for you to get stuck into covering the exploration, roleplaying and combat pillars, with quite a few memorable setpieces along the way. However, this does come at a price, as there's far fewer forking paths in the map than usual for this magazine, and many of the encounters assume a default solution rather than just letting the PC's do whatever they please, so wrong choices may screw the story up further along the line. The final dungeon in particular is very linear indeed, with a default plot where the final boss is too powerful to beat in a straight fight, so you win by destroying the artifact empowering him, which is also responsible for the climate change, thus setting off a load-bearing boss situation where you'll likely have to escape without most of the treasure, and be responsible for mass genocide as the whole valley rapidly cools to normal temperatures for that latitude. But I guess that's also in-genre. No-one cared what happened to the Ewoks when the Death Star exploded, they just cut to the celebrations. So this makes pretty decent reading, but I have a suspicion it'd be one of the more annoying ones for me to actually play through, as it's a very 2e one where the author is telling his specific story rather than giving you a sandbox where you tell your own. Still, it's less annoying than Ed's attempt this issue, and more flexible than most of the polyhedron ones where they're forced into ultra-linearity by the strict 4 hour time limit. It could well work with a party who likes that more scripted approach to their campaigns.An oddly lopsided issue, as the sheer size of the final adventure meant all the others were smaller than average. Still, all the adventures were interesting reads, even if they definitely weren't all ones that I'd actually like to use. Their choices are still more good than bad overall, and the gradual upgrade in production values is definitely appreciated. Let's see if they can last another full 5 years without going wrong, or things'll go downhill sooner when TSR starts to run into trouble in general.</blockquote>

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