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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8422844" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 36: Jul/Aug 1992part 5/5The Sea of Sorrow: Steve Kurtz once again submits the cover adventure, a chunky 30-pager that could easily have been turned into a standalone module. It's not another introductory one too, although it does play heavily into D&D cliches in other ways. A Radiant Dragon is attacking an important shipping lane … IIIIIINNNN SPAAAACEEEEE!!!!! This is not good for business, so the Arcane are willing to pay quite considerable sums to the group that can kill it & take it's stuff, including a decent advance to upgrade your ship, as anyone who knows anything about radiant dragons knows they are not an easy target. Off you head through the phlogiston and arrive in the dark and mostly deserted crystal sphere you'll be spending most of the adventure in. Turns out the dragon has been corrupted by an evil artifact, which explains it's unusual degree of violence and weird colour scheme. Like his other big adventure, this climaxes with a load-bearing boss situation where either you or the dragon will probably wind up destroying it in the final battle, forcing you to flee as the place goes boom or die horribly in the implosion. Guess he really likes that cliche, which is a real pain when used in D&D as it prevents you from collecting a lot of the potential treasure. Once again, this is easily the most linear adventure in here, with a lot of bits where if you try to do something unintended, you'll be forcibly pushed back on the path. (which is still better than the polyhedron adventures that don't even seem to consider what happens if you don't follow the intended path, or have exactly the same things happen in the same order no matter what route you try to take, admittedly) There is still some room for exploration and getting variable amounts of treasure, but this is primarily story-driven even when it has to push at the limits of the rules to achieve it, like trying to have multiple encounters with the dragon where neither side dies before the final confrontation. So this is one of those cases where the 2e writers' desire to tell interesting stories conflicts with a system designed for small scale battles & dungeon-crawling, mostly unchanged since 1974. I can't help feeling his writing would be better served by another system which does narrative-heavy stories more easily. But then of course we wouldn't be seeing it in this magazine. What an irritating circle to have to try and square.Index to Issues 25-36: Another two years has passed, but instead of extending the index to three pages, they decide to do another small one only covering the recent issues, once again primarily sorted by alphabetical order rather than level or setting. This once again means it's mainly useful for people who already own and have read the issues, and simply need to jog their memory rather than someone coming in cold and trying to put a campaign arc together. This still needs work. But then again, until back issues are freely available online, they don't have much incentive to improve their indexing methods anyway.A pretty good issue, although once again there's signs of creeping 2e linearity. But that's still only a minority here, and considerably less than in Polyhedron, which has long since embraced it as standard. It's becoming very obvious that the push to linear storytelling adventures full of metaplot came from inside the house without any research as to whether that's what the public really wanted or not. Still, that means as long as Dungeon is primarily supported by freelance submissions, there should still be plenty of adventures that give the players free reign to explore them in the way they choose. Time to go back to the chore of doing two of that, then another one of this.</blockquote>

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