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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8383632" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 33: Jan/Feb 1992part 4/5Dark Days in Welldale: Willie Walsh has been doing this long and successfully enough that apparently he now has imitators, as we once again head off to a whimsical halfling village beset by small-scale but still dangerous foes. The well of Welldale used to grant wishes, but it dried up recently, one of their number disappeared mysteriously, and now they think they've been cursed for being too greedy with their wishes. They've actually got completely the wrong end of the stick, but the danger they're in is very real, as instead of a trickster leprechaun, they've got an infestation of meenlocks settling in and expanding their tunnel network underneath the village. You'll need to put up with all the comic relief NPC's with very silly alliterative names long enough to either trap them when they emerge, or figure out how to shrink yourselves down to hunt them in their lair. You might or might not be aided in this by the original "wish-granter", a particularly powerful variant faerie dragon which was granting the halfling's requests for his own amusement, but wandered off when he got bored. Whether he even shows up is heavily based on random roll, so the difficulty of this adventure can vary widely from one group to another by luck and if they're the kind of over-serious adventurers he'd rather prank than help. This all seems somewhat irritating, as it overplays the comedy and hinges on the people you're helping being ignorant, superstitious and lacking in common sense. If you help them once you'll wind up having to help them again, because apparently they're just too dumb to survive on their own. To be honest, I'd really rather not. I can see what they're trying to do here, trying to make a small-scale adventure that's also a re-usable setting like several others we've seen before, but it takes a much better hand than this to thread the needle between humour and playability successfully, plus definite diminishing returns due to the derivative elements. I'm going to pass this time.Alicorn: The short adventure to make up page count this issue is still a 4 pager, which means it doesn't get the side treks header. A goblin chief delved the wrong dungeon and picked up some cursed treasure that infected him with a wasting disease. His second in command actually shows some loyalty and initiative, (unusual for goblins, admittedly) and decided to hunt for a unicorn horn to cure him. They shot it with an arrow of wounding, but it got away. Now you need to find it before they do and save it. Since it's losing HP by the hour, this is one where you can't afford to pull 15 minute workdays if you want to win. It also means you can lose the adventure but still survive in several different ways, by being too slow, going in completely the wrong direction, or by killing all the goblins without bothering to listen to them, thus missing the initial exposition and not finding out about the unicorn part of the adventure in the first place. Seems like a decent little low level adventure for if you want to keep your players from getting too cocky, but don't want to TPK them straight away if they mess up, forcing you to roll up a whole new set of characters. It probably won't last you a full session, so best to use it when travelling between larger missions, and have something to do next already prepared in your head if you want the campaign as a whole to keep running smoothly.</blockquote>

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