Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8394088" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 34: Mar/Apr 1992part 2/5Euphoria Horrors: Well, that's an interesting title. What's going on here then? :reads, sighs heavily: Well, I guess it had to happen sometime. Dungeon decides to do a Very Special Episode, where they show us in a fairly heavyhanded fashion that doing drugs is bad, mmkay, and will ruin your life, so don't do drugs. The PC's get approached by a distraught little boy crying that his friend has disappeared. Further questioning will at least reveal that his friend is not human and looks a bit like a big butterfly, but not precisely what his friend is, as the kid lacks the vocabulary to be more precise. When his parents see him talking to adventurers, they'll get aggressively protective (don't talk to strangers, kids!)  and drive them away, leaving you with a quest and insufficient information to complete it easily. Fortunately, a bit of sniffing around will reveal suspicious tracks that will lead you to the culprits. Turns out the "friend" is a faerie dragon which has been trapped and caged by Tasloi, who have become addicted to his euphoria breath weapon and now force him to breathe on them, so they spend most of their time off their heads apart from brief, increasingly sloppy forays for more food. So this is a pretty short and easy adventure that's made even easier by the fact that most of the monsters are either high or jonesing most of the time, and so are acting in silly ways and suffering mechanical penalties to their actions. It has the combination of linearity, whimsy, and overt moralising that's more commonly found in Polyhedron adventures than Dungeon ones, which is decidedly unwelcome to see. I'm not completely averse to aesops & allegory in my adventures, but they'd need to be a bit more subtle and sophisticated than this after school special crap for me to consider using them.Side Treks - Rogue: The short scenario this time is an entirely mundane adventure idea that has happened in reality. An elephant was attacked by hunters, injured but survived, and now he has a quite understandable grudge against the whole of humanity. So he's attacking any humans he finds in the jungle with increasing aggression and has already killed several low level parties. This is obviously a problem for both natives and traders, so a hefty reward is posted. (plus what you'll get from selling his ivory on top.) One of those reminders that in a world where there are plenty of bigger, smarter monsters out there, and humanity is stuck at medievalish population densities & tech levels due to their depredations, no-one has the safety or perspective to develop anything resembling modern standards of conservation except maybe the druids. So while it is theoretically possible to talk the elephant down and resolve this peacefully if you have the right spells, that won't stop the locals from wanting vengeance for all the previous deaths, and you'll have to take him with you if you want him to survive long term. The way it's presented, the vast majority of parties will just kill him and take his stuff. Putting the real world politics aside, this is a pretty decent encounter, using the environment and the mobility of the elephant's trample attacks to keep the players on their toes. It shows you don't need spell-like powers to keep a fight from degenerating into a static slugfest until one side runs out of HP. It also reuses background setting details from issue 15's Elephant's Graveyard, making it easy to use in the same campaign. David Howery is definitely proving to be a writer who has topics in his works most of the other authors here don't and returns to them repeatedly.</blockquote>

Verification