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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8520090" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 43: Sep/Oct 1993part 2/5Jacob's Well: Another adventure that very clearly spells out it's primary influence in the preface. It's Alien in a fantasy campaign. The PC's are trapped in a remote trading post by bad weather, with a newly-born Slaad. Over the next few days, it'll go from relatively weak but sneaky tadpole thing to full-grown frog thing able to infect people and subject them to chestburster situations in turn. Can you catch it before it does, or will you lose large quantities of the various NPC's trapped in here with you to it's depredations without ever seeing what's responsible? This gives you a fairly open-ended scenario with plenty of potential for roleplaying and ratcheting up the paranoia between actual attacks, trying to keep the NPC's from doing stupid counterproductive things, because of course they've never watched horror movies and don't know the tropes of these situations. It's not particularly consistent with slaad lore from other sources, (red slaad infections produce blue slaad and vice versa) so it's another case where they're prioritising what's cool for the current story over rigorous application of mechanics, but it's a pretty entertaining read taken on it's own merits, reminding us how to make familiar monsters feel weird and scary. Still seems very usable in a good variety of campaigns.Moving Day: We've had several road trip adventures where you guard a caravan through various dangers, and some sea ones too, but I don't recall them doing it with a river journey before. So this is a variant on a familiar theme, but one that manages to stay interesting by mixing up the specifics. Most pertinent is that among the cargo is some cockatrices, which you REALLY don't want getting loose, plus an evil wizard wants to steal them to use in making magic items. You get a nice scenic river ride, with various increasingly blatant heist attempts to foil and a few unrelated challenges along the way. There's plenty of opportunities to fail at your mission without dying, and enough flavour encounters to serve as red herrings that being surly and responding to every threat with maximum force would be a bad idea. It's mostly linear, but in a naturalistic way rather than feeling like a railroad, gives you freedom in how you react to each encounter and won't fall apart if you make a single unexpected decision like many of the Polyhedron ones. It's just a relief to see that at least someone can do these kinds of adventures with style and without shoehorning in bad jokes every other encounter.</blockquote>

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