Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8538328" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 44: Nov/Dec 1993part 3/5The Hand of Al-Djamal: An Al-Qadim adventure? That would be nice. Nope, it's a Mystara one, because they have an arabian themed area as well, among many other things. Glantrian wizards excavated a Ylaruam tomb and brought a bunch of artifacts &amp; mummies back to put them in a museum. Now a couple of security guards have turned up strangled overnight, and they strongly suspect the mummies are not quite as dead as they seem, despite not pinging their magic detectors. Better hire some heavily armed adventurers to stake the place out and see what happens next night. Turns out it's not just mummies, the titular Hand of Al-Djamal is actually a Druj, one of the scariest and most magically adept undead in the Companion set. Like the similarly scary Odic encounter in issue 21, it'll use it's nasty selection of spell-like powers intelligently to reanimate and support it's minions rather than just attacking mindlessly. You can't just create horror with atmosphere in D&amp;D, particularly once they have levels in the double digits, you need to be able to back the theatrics up with aging, disease, energy drain, or something else more significant than just lots of hit points and damage once you get into combat. While not as large as it could be, this strikes a nice balance between the scares &amp; misdirection and the very real threat behind it. It also takes the latest metaplot developments into account, which is quite nice to see, making Glantri somewhat less hostile to clerics and magic resistant demihumans, and talks about some interesting edge cases of ways to use certain spells. All in all, a quite pleasing package I'd have no problem using.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 8538328, member: 27780"] [b][u]Dungeon Issue 44: Nov/Dec 1993[/u][/b] part 3/5 The Hand of Al-Djamal: An Al-Qadim adventure? That would be nice. Nope, it's a Mystara one, because they have an arabian themed area as well, among many other things. Glantrian wizards excavated a Ylaruam tomb and brought a bunch of artifacts & mummies back to put them in a museum. Now a couple of security guards have turned up strangled overnight, and they strongly suspect the mummies are not quite as dead as they seem, despite not pinging their magic detectors. Better hire some heavily armed adventurers to stake the place out and see what happens next night. Turns out it's not just mummies, the titular Hand of Al-Djamal is actually a Druj, one of the scariest and most magically adept undead in the Companion set. Like the similarly scary Odic encounter in issue 21, it'll use it's nasty selection of spell-like powers intelligently to reanimate and support it's minions rather than just attacking mindlessly. You can't just create horror with atmosphere in D&D, particularly once they have levels in the double digits, you need to be able to back the theatrics up with aging, disease, energy drain, or something else more significant than just lots of hit points and damage once you get into combat. While not as large as it could be, this strikes a nice balance between the scares & misdirection and the very real threat behind it. It also takes the latest metaplot developments into account, which is quite nice to see, making Glantri somewhat less hostile to clerics and magic resistant demihumans, and talks about some interesting edge cases of ways to use certain spells. All in all, a quite pleasing package I'd have no problem using. [/QUOTE]

Verification