Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8394961" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 34: Mar/Apr 1992part 3/5Isle of the Abbey: After all that eco-political complexity, let's get back to basics, with a self-contained dungeon crawl for starting level regular D&D characters. A small abbey on a small island that was recently beset by pirates and ruined. Should be some treasure left for intrepid adventurers to find, right? Well, you're not wrong, but there's a lot of twists along the way. First is that the clerics were Chaotic, and guarded the only dock & path to the abbey with exceedingly large numbers of undead lurking just beneath the sand. Unless you heed the environmental clues and follow a very specific winding path, you'll have to fight dozens of them for every square you advance, turning this into a meatgrinder involving a lot of retreating and healing up between expeditions. Once you do get to the abbey, it turns out there are some survivors, but not many and they're pretty low level, they've holed up and gone into full paranoia mode as a result of the recent attacks, and while the map looks fairly square and interconnected, there's actually only one safe route through it from start to end - the rest of the corridors are filled with traps. So this is essentially an old school dungeon where you should be paranoid all the time and prod everything with 10' poles, the monsters mostly stay static in their room until disturbed, and aren't high enough level to have created all the challenges the players are facing, only the writer has gone to considerable lengths to make this setup make sense in terms of backstory, and make it clear that it's a temporary situation created by recent events, not a stable system that'll remain there for centuries if you leave it. The dumb enemies are best outthought rather than outfought at the recommended character level, while many of the intelligent ones can be negotiated with if your reaction roll goes well. It's the kind of starter that's best used if you want your PC's to use their brains if they want to survive, and don't mind killing a few of them first session to make the point clear. Since I have absolutely no problem with that, I approve of this.As in Dragon & Polyhedron, trading cards are currently the cool new thing to promote, so the centre 4 pages are a cardstock set of 17 characters from their various settings to cut out. Whether you're wandering the Valley of the Mage or up in Wildspace, there's someone interesting for you to run into. Many of them have Kits, which is good to see incorporated. The artwork isn't as good as the first year's though, as it's mostly specifically commissioned for the cards rather than recycled from the past decade of book & magazine covers. That may contribute to diminishing returns in the sales long-term.</blockquote>

Verification