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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8492255" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 41: May/Jun 1993part 2/5Pleasing all of the People, Some of the Time: The complete results of the survey are pretty similar to the early results, just in greater detail. Some D&D worlds are more popular than others, but nearly all of them are more popular than the idea of adventures featuring other real world cultures. There's a lot of quiet racists who play D&D, and the surveys don't get censored like any obviously vitriolic letters. Another potential conflict is that their younger readers are much more favourable to the idea of trading cards than older ones, which will only be exacerbated in a few years time when trading card games become big business and start to cut into the RPG section of game shops. Curiously enough, younger players are more likely to find their attempts at comedy more cringe than funny. Completely unsurprisingly, humans are the most popular race by a modest margin, but there's no strong class preference apart from the people who think psionics doesn't fit their idea of fantasy. Like any survey involving lots of people, the answers average out fairly conservative, and so they're not planning on making any big changes as a result. They'd need to expand their international readerbase if they wanted more people voting for multicultural representation.Deadly Treasure: As they said in the letters page, the first adventure is a good old trap-based dungeon-crawl where you try to deal with the sadistic imagination of the wizard who created it and get out wealthier than you came in. (although the backstory is still considerably lengthier than Acererak's in the original ToH.) Upon feeling death approaching, Zathis the Insightful spent all his accumulated wealth & magical items setting up an adventure that would challenge the hardiest of souls. Said treasure isn't simply waiting at the end of the dungeon, but actively incorporated into the traps, their powers set to be triggered by the PC's actions. This means getting the maximum profit out of this adventure involves not merely brute-forcing or bypassing the puzzles, but deconstructing them so you can take the valuable magical items home. (while avoiding the cursed ones, as of course there's a few of those thrown in as well) If the players don't realise that, they'll only get a fraction of the possible reward even if they get through it alive. While sadistic, this adventure plays fair in that all the items stick by their regular rules, and there's no effects that the PC's couldn't replicate if they had access to the same spells & items. This makes it a good example of a rules as physics based challenge, that rewards players who have lots of supplements and a mind that can recall obscure details from them to figure out what they're up against and how to deal with it. If you're designing your own deathtrap dungeon on a budget, this is much better inspiration than the arbitrariness of the truly old school, even if it is pretty linear in layout. Given the limit on word count and detail they go into for each room, I can forgive them not making it larger and more mazy.</blockquote>

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