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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8466355" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 39: Jan/Feb 1993part 4/5The Fire Giant's Daughter: Despite being a full-time editor now, Wolfgang Baur still finds time to write another adventure for the magazine as well. A teenage fire giant chafes against the rules of her strict father, who uses a geas to prevent her from straying far from home. Naturally, she pushes at the limits of that, and would like to find someone who can free her from it entirely. The PC's come across her going for a stroll in their planet's local equivalent of iceland and she leads them on a merry chase back to Jotunheim to meet her family. Hopefully the PC's won't attack on sight, despite fire giants having definite LE tendencies & pet hellhounds for guards and listen to her story. If they talk to her father, he's initially dismissive of them, and will only let her go if they win a series of contests. So this is basically intended to be the norse story where Thor & Loki meet Utgard-Loki, only hopefully it'll be your PC's using wits and magic to triumph in the various contests against much more physically powerful opponents. Alternately, it could turn into a heist story where the PC's sneak around their home, try to find the geas-rune binding her and destroy it, before all making a hasty escape, or devolve into a straightforward hack and slash dungeoncrawl where you kill everything and completely miss the plot xp rewards. These various options mean it's a fairly flexible scenario with plenty of opportunities for roleplaying, while still holding up if your players are bloodthirsty dumbasses. (although it definitely won't be an easy fight at the intended level) Plus it gains a few extra marks for good use of the rune magic system in the vikings sourcebook. I like this one.The Ulrich Monastery: Oooh, we haven't had a solo adventure in a few years, and we haven't had one aimed at a cleric before at all. This is a welcome addition to our arsenal. For some reason, quite possibly a minor transgression that requires atonement, your PC is sent to a monastery in the mountains without the rest of the party. When you get there, you find everyone's dead, and it's getting dark & snowy so leaving straight away would be a very bad idea. Can you figure out the clues to what's responsible, search the place for helpful equipment and figure out appropriate countermeasures before it comes back? So what we have here is basically a murder mystery, with a single tough fight at the end. It could be over very quickly if you rush through or ignore the detective part, so you need a GM that can do the descriptions the right way and slowly build up the tension before the action finally arrives. It strongly rewards having some divination spells in your repertoire and knowing when to use them. It does demonstrate why you need a GM with a spellcaster, while fighty classes can be handled in the CYOA style, as it is quite open-ended in how you approach things. (and precisely what spheres you have access too if you're a specialty priest can make a big difference as well.) Not something for every group then, but a fairly interesting read that does something they haven't tried before. If the rest of the group flakes out, it's a handy one to have in the back of your pocket.</blockquote>

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