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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8407021" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon issue 35: May/Jun 1992part 4/5Side Treks - The Whale: Like last issue, the short adventure is something that could be run completely without any supernatural elements, involving an animal you could actually hunt in reality, but would get serious complaints for doing so, due to the whole endangered species thing. While traveling along the coast of anywhere vaguely nordic, they come across a beached whale, and two tribes of vikings fighting over it. You could edge around them and avoid the fight altogether, you could side with one or the other, you could watch from hiding and see who wins, then kill them while they're weakened and take everyone's stuff, or even be good guys and try to save the whale's life by negotiation. The only limitation is your own conscience, and maybe level relative to the enemies you're fighting, although taking the everybody lives option seems a little easier here than the last one. Whatever choice you make will likely have consequences further down the line, with the family of the party you decide against seeking revenge unless you kill them all and move on before anyone can find out you were involved. This seems like it could occupy time at the table nicely in excess of it's page count. If you're playing on the grittier end of the gaming spectrum it seems pretty easy to use. It also gains extra points by having the option of using the viking runes from the appropriate sourcebook rather than regular spellcasters. What real world endangered animal or plant will they use next time? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Green Lady's Sorrow: Sometimes the PC's are hired by someone who might be shady and attempt to betray them at some point, but they aren't certain and go along with it anyway because they agree with the cause or need the money. This is not one of those occasions. A green dragon was nesting in a dormant volcano that suddenly proved to be not so dead. A fissure opened up right below the nest and dropped her eggs into the chasm. Dragon eggs are pretty tough so they survived the fall, and are obviously being kept warm by the volcanism, but she's too big to go down and get them. So she approaches the first group of adventurers she finds and offers surprisingly generous terms if they can go down and get them for her. If they refuse, she won't take no for an answer, and the terms will be somewhat less congenial. You probably aren't high enough level to take her in a straight fight out in the open and skip the rest of the adventure, so best to go along with it for now. The rescue isn't just a simple rappel and climb back though, as there are magmen living in the lava tubes, and the eggs are their favourite new toys. This leads you on a merry game of hide and seek amid lava flows, geysers, and various other fire based monsters, with the possibility that some of the eggs will get broken or hard-boiled in the process, or hatch just as the PC's arrive, leading to a whole other set of problems in wrangling the baby dragons to the surface alive and unharmed. Hope you have a decent selection of fire resistance powers available. Whether you do rescue them all or not, she plans to welch on the deal, so smart PC's will use the babies as hostages, find the alternate exit to sneak out of the caverns and escape entirely, or come up with some other contingency plan to make sure they get out alive and with a positive bank balance. This all feels very old school, both in it's playfulness, and in expecting adventurers to be sneaky sorts who have to use their brains to stay alive against all sorts of monsters and environmental hazards, many of which you don't need to fight to complete the mission. It pretty much demands you not follow the obvious path blindly if you want to win, which is the kind of dungeon-crawling I prefer. This kind of lightheartedness is much better for actually gaming in than Polyhedron's attempts at humour, as it arises naturally from the situation rather than 4th wall breaking references and puns, and I'd have no problem with using it.</blockquote>

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