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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8393359" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 34: Mar/Apr 1992part 1/580 pages. A cover where all the participants are looking away from the camera? You don't see that very often, even when it would make sense narratively. They'll more often go to great lengths to have both sides showing both face and ass, particularly when the participants are female. So this little bit of drama comes as welcome, even if it might not end well for the person about to be backstabbed long-term. Let's see if the adventures inside have anything similarly unexpected to offer. Editorial: There is no truely generic fantasy, merely unexamined conventions that are taken as default. The more Barbara asks people what they want from the magazine, the more obvious it becomes that different people have very different preferences, so you need to publish a wide variety of things if you want to keep them interested. Popular settings, not so popular settings, dungeons that can easily be placed anywhere, and solo missions all have their part to play, so send them all in. Just don't forget your SASE! This all seems pretty much business as usual. Getting all your readers to agree is both a futile task and would be boring if they did. Just keep on publishing the most interesting adventures you get, especially if they don't fit the mould of the average one and you've got a good chance of going on for many years more.Letters: The debate on the proportion of generic to setting specific adventures also dominates the letters page. First letter is by frequent contributor Randy Maxwell, answering why he designs adventures the way he does, and some other frequent complaints in here. Most of it's all very logical, or at least following the path or least resistance, even if the steps they took to get there might not make sense in hindsight. Second wants one adventure per issue to be for a specific setting, one for one of their three vanilla settings, and the rest completely generic. Barbara agrees with the general figures, but of course individual issues may still vary, as sizes of adventure also do, and sometimes they'll vary the number to put something particularly epic in.Future Al Qadim writer Steve Kurtz is unsurprisingly another one in favour of lots of diversity. You never know what you'll need for a campaign, so it's helpful to have a wide toolkit to choose from. 4th things generic sounds boring and pejorative. Call them versatile adventures instead. Urgh. Can we not do the euphemism treadmill thing here. It wastes time and helps no-one.5th is another one in favor of more specific setting material. Ah, but which one? That's the real tricky decision.6th prefers adventures entirely created by their writers to ones set in TSR worlds, but accepts that both kinds are useful to figure out how best to create your own. 7th also thinks the mix of generic and specific adventures is about right. As long as they're packed with interesting details to make them feel solid, precisely what those details are can be varied quite a lot and the adventures will remain usable. 8th takes a break from the debate to thank Steve Kurtz for his recent adventure. It's twists and turns were suitably challenging for his PC's when he ran it. 9th also lists the adventures from the magazine that have seen actual play in their campaign. Some of them took a bit of geographical adaption, but plenty of fun was had. May they produce plenty more, particularly a few more high level ones to choose from.10th is also a particular fan of Steve Kurtz. His future hiring comes as no surprise if his first submission got that many good responses.11th has been enjoying both the modules from Dungeon, and the ones published in Dragon before it started, and would like to see a best of. Hindsight says that's not happening, but it's good to have a dream.12th also wants lots of adventures for specific settings. TSR has been publishing so many of them recently, and if they don't have decent rosters of adventures for each of them they'll go to waste. This is why you don't want to have too many active at once. You can't give proper attention to all of them, and their fanbases will suffer accordingly. 13th wants more Ravenloft and Forgotten Realms adventures in particular. Both have tons of cool places only hinted about in the corebooks to expand upon. 14th is particularly interested in Spelljammer and Ravenloft, as they depart more from regular adventures than the Realms or Greyhawk, where you can use generic adventures and ones for them pretty interchangeably. Since spelljammer in particular only has two intro adventures so far, it could really do with the expansion.15th and final also finds FR & GH adventures no harder to use than completely generic ones. Don't be put off by branding, look at each one regardless of setting and see if you can make it work for your campaign.</blockquote>

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