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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8395718" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 34: Mar/Apr 1992part 4/5The Lady Rose: Fresh from being praised multiple times in the letters pages, Steven Kurtz has a second adventure to offer us. It's another coastal one, as the PC's are asked for help by a village that has recently been raided by pirates and had a load of it's people kidnapped. The baron is a powerful enough wizard to summon a storm and damage their ship, slowing their retreat, but lacks the manpower to finish them off himself. You need to catch up with them before they can fully repair and get home, at which point fighting them would be much harder and getting all the people back near impossible, as they'll all be sold as slaves to different owners. This is effectively two different combat scenarios, depending whether you catch up with them on land or by sea. Neither of them are easy though, as they have both high level spellcasters that will use their spells to control the terrain and help the grunts, and also higher technology than the average PC, including Giff mercenaries with the stereotypical cannons & blunderbusses. This is reasonably interesting as an individual scenario, but what it really seems to be here for is as a primer to some of his own setting material, a very loosely spanish empire inspired country with a particular fetish for brainwashing and enslaving elves, so the nobles can have well-trained house slaves that stay in the family for generations. Since elves tend to be a bit delicate of constitution and don't breed well in captivity, they need to keep on going out and capturing new ones from increasingly distant places. Well, that's more than a little creepy, and would seriously piss people off if the details were changed to real world ethnicities. So this sees him using themes that he would return too repeatedly in his official books for TSR, that of depraved & decadent empires with advanced magic & technology that will eventually collapse due to their unsustainable & exploitative practices, but not without causing centuries of suffering, and leaving behind lots of ruins that are rich grounds for adventurers to explore & find treasure. He's another writer that definitely has a type, and you can get a lot of good adventures out of building on his ideas. Just remember that these countries are meant to be cautionary tales, not aspirational ones to copy in real life, and work towards transitioning to renewable resources, because dying horribly in the collapse of civilisation when we run out of fossil fuels or something is still pretty unpleasant even when you can have the pyrrhic satisfaction of saying I told you so to all the idiots in your life before you go.</blockquote>

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