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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8369976" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 32: Nov/Dec 1991part 4/5Pearlman's Curiosity: Oh tihs it's a nilbog get out of the van! Willie Walsh indulges in some of the worst whimsy AD&D 1e had to offer and sets a nilbog loose on a town, courtesy of an amoral wizard who's studying all the havoc it's causing (from a safe distance) as a mere scientific experiment. Everything is going haywire as people find themselves doing the opposite of what they would normally do in a situation. Can the PC's manage to double-check all their actions long enough to figure out where the effect is coming from and do something about it? Anyone who's read the rulebook will know that despite their low stats, nilbogs are near impossible to hurt at all, as what would normally harm them heals them & vice versa, and since healing spells are spontaneously reversible, it's very likely your cleric will screw up and use the wrong version even if they know the trick to killing them. It's all an almighty headache, and it's quite likely that it'll escape entirely, or they'll have to capture it and seal it away while being unable to actually kill it permanently. This seems like the marmite of adventure scenarios, they'll either love it or absolutely hate it. If I were only reviewing Dungeon I'd probably slate it, but seeing at the same time just how much worse most jokey Polyhedron adventures are, I actually don't mind this. It has good worldbuilding, like most of Mr Walsh's work, and gives you complete freedom in how you try to solve the problem (within the confines of often winding up doing the opposite of what you stated). Once the adventure's over, this is another town that you can reuse easily, as the various NPC's and buildings in the vicinity get plenty of useful details. That puts it way above adventures that expect you to go from one joke encounter to the next in order with no deviation. It's important to keep a sense of perspective about these things. Is there an Elf in the House: Murder mysteries continue to be a reasonably popular niche genre here. The PC's get hired to make a delivery to a country manor. Bad weather hits at a suspiciously convenient time, and they're trapped there for several days, when one of the serving maids gets murdered. Everyone's a suspect, including you, so all your weapons, armour, spellbooks, etc get confiscated until the culprit is figured out, giving psionic characters, monks, and other classes that don't rely on external trappings for their powers a big advantage. As is typical for these things, there's more than one secret going on at once, between the owners of the manor and the other guests, so you might solve one and think you've won while missing the others entirely, finger a guilty person for the wrong crime, get most of it but miss some of the secret rooms and bonus treasure, or of course, lose entirely and die horribly one by one over the course of several days. As usual for the genre, it requires both decent acting skills from the DM, and a decent degree of buy-in from the players (who's going to willingly give up their weapons knowing it's almost definitely going to become an issue?) or the whole thing just won't work at all. As long as those requirements are met, this looks like it could be a decent amount of fun, and the twists are indeed pretty twisty, so I'm not going to spoil them here. It's one that could probably be improved by running it in a different system, but since the readers rejected that idea, I suppose they're doing the best with the remit they have.</blockquote>

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