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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8384634" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 33: Jan/Feb 1992part 5/5Mad Gyoji: When this magazine started, you got an OA adventure nearly every issue, but the quantity rapidly dropped off once we hit the 90's and this is the first we've had in a full year, and the final one until the 3e era revival. How quickly fashions change. Unfortunately one unwelcome way they're changing in which the OA modules were ahead of their time is the average degree of of linearity. This is not an exception, as while it's not a complete railroad like most current Polyhedron ones, it definitely feels like it was written as a story first, and an adventure second, with a plot heavily based on asian folklore that you'll only find out all the backstory too if you do things in the specific way the author intended. The eponymous Mad Gyoji is a Wu Jen who's cursed a village elder with a wasting disease. He has perfectly good reasons for this in his own mind, but is not inclined to explain them to anyone, so the PC's are asked for help in curing it and hopefully finding out why this whole mess started in the first place. This does indeed involve taking the rather rickety bridge on the cover, as trying to take the water route will conveniently seriously piss off the local nature spirits and get you in a fight above your ECL, making it much more likely you'll do the encounters on the island in the right order. If you pay attention to the little details that you're supposed too, the backstory is actually pretty interesting and tragic, reminding us of the complicated problems fantastical racism can result in, with some neat looking setpieces and a dramatic redemption arc if you do all the right things in response. The problem is that all of this lining up properly seems …… not great with the average group of murderhobos without a lot of DM prompting. So this is pretty good as a story to read, but only mediocre as an actual adventure, due to having a lot of baked in assumptions of what the players should be doing without spelling it out to them. If they don't think like the writer, it'll be a bit of a damp squib for all involved.Bud's Holiday Scrapbook: Unusually, we finish off with a bunch of photos from their christmas party, giving us a rare glimpse at the Dragon & Dungeon (but not Polyhedron, which seems to be a slightly more distant department) staff at repose. They're not getting up to any particularly wild hijinks, but when your day job is gaming, what exactly is cutting loose anyway? Work, play, it's all sitting at the computer typing either way. The hairstyles are already noticeably less dated than the 80's ones, but still distinguishable from the modern day. Slightly surprised it went in here rather than Dragon, but I guess they needed to make the page counts line up or something. This time, it seems like the contrast is between adventures that work best if you look past the obvious route and do your own thing, and ones that fall apart if you don't follow the paths. Using both types interchangeably with the same group seems likely to confuse and irritate, so it's a reminder that you need to curate the adventures you choose to fit your playstyle. On I press again, to see if the next one will have anything worth adding to my repertoire.</blockquote>

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