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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8390686" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 69: March 1992part 2/5The Well of Dreams: Mmm. Time for a callback to old school ways with a magical well that has random effects on anyone who throws a coin into it, including some quite game-changing bonuses and penalties. More are good than bad, but there's enough annoying ones and distinctly mixed blessings that some of the party will regret it if they all have a go. (apart from the Wild Mage, as this is precisely the sort of item their power to control randomness will help with) Thankfully it only affects any particular individual once per year, so it won't lead to the kind of compound effects or temptation to keep drawing until you get a terrible result and die the deck of many things does. This seems like you could use it in a campaign without destroying it outright, and I would have absolutely no problem with doing so. Sea of Fire: We recently had the final Oriental Adventure in Dungeon for this edition, showing how that gameline has hit diminishing returns after a decent number of sourcebooks & adventures and gradually faded away. But Polyhedron still has one last big two-parter to offer us before it too moves onto their profusion of newer settings. It's also mongolian influenced rather than the more familiar pseudo-chinese or japanese, which makes for a nice change. An evil Wu Jen steals a river, turning hundreds of miles downstream into a rapidly drying wasteland and threatening all the nomadic tribes in the area. They converge on the one remaining lake within a few hundred miles, speeding it's disappearance even further. The PC's are obviously among the many people traveling in the area and caught up, and get volunteered to trace the river to it's source and find out what happened. The result is a surprisingly epic adventure spanning weeks of in-game time which involves a fair bit of tracking food and water, because if you run out of supplies and don't have a cleric capable of conjuring more, you'll be in trouble. While the order of the encounters is pretty linear, you at least have a reasonable amount of freedom in how you solve them without ruining the overall plot - as long as you keep heading upriver you'll get to the goal eventually. So this is above average for a Polyhedron adventure because it's neither obnoxiously jokey or so railroaded it falls apart if the DM doesn't spoonfeed the correct solutions, as well as being a decent challenge both combat and wilderness wise, with real but not world-ending stakes for failure or giving up if used in an established campaign. This is once I actually wouldn't mind using if my players were headed in the right direction at the right level range.</blockquote>

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