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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8448614" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 38: Nov/Dec 1992part 1/566 pages. The cover once again spoils the big twist of at least one of the adventures inside. Pod people! How very 50's of them. Better watch out, or part of the party'll be replaced and then paranoia will really set in. Just how easy to spot and powerful will the replacements be, and how elaborate are their plans? Let's crank up the tremolo and blast some surf licks and see if it helps me get through this one any quicker. Editorial: Polyhedron regularly spends 6+ months between talking about a competition and publishing the results, and more than a few have simply died a quiet death due to lack of submissions. By contrast, Dungeon gave us a survey last issue, and already has enough results in to be confident in the overall opinions of their readership. Unfortunately, it turns out the average reader is more conservative than the TSR writers, and a surprisingly large proportion want nothing to do with terrains where they might encounter darker-skinned humans. Adventures involving real world diversity will continue to be thin on the ground for the foreseeable future. Psionics will also continue to be a niche topic for the rest of the edition. The average age also skews somewhat higher than Dragon, with a mean in the 20's rather than the teens. A somewhat dispiriting start that reminds us that the TSR staff tried a lot of things their audience responded too with a resounding meh, forcing them to go back to the generic D&D well over and over when they'd rather be working in different settings and under different systems. Making a living out of creativity when most of the audience only wants to hear the greatest hits over and over never stops being a struggle.Letters: First letter reinforces the cynicism from the editorial, saying they only publish adventures that tie-in to new products as a means of making more money through cross-promotion. Hardly. If it were purely about money, they'd all move to the mainstream book or computer game industry, where they could earn several times as much with their skillsets. They do actually want you to like the things they come up with and expand on them with more adventures, not just publish one or two bits of in-house support and then have them fall by the wayside. Second thanks them for offering constructive criticism even when they reject submissions. It means people are much more likely to try again. They don't want the magazine to devolve into a nepotistic circle of the same few people getting published over and over. (although things will naturally trend that way long-term even if you actively fight it.) That would not be good for their output on a creative level.Finally, feedback from a group that played through Asflag's Unintentional Emporium and suffered a TPK. Despite technically failing, it was still great fun to play. It's not really about the winning or losing, it's the journey that really counts. Don't feel you have to make adventures too nice, just make sure the challenges are interesting, not just waves of undead or deathtraps with no clues on how to avoid them.</blockquote>

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