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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8552591" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 45: Jan/Feb 1994part 3/5Side Treks - All Things Nice: In a world with no magic marts, the opportunity to get hold of magic items without killing their owners (who hopefully know how to use said equipment, making the fight trickier) can be pretty rare. So when you do get the opportunity to just buy things, some people will be less cautious than they should. Which is where this quartet of grifters come in. They'll sell you shiny-looking but shoddily made weapons & armor with Nystul's Magic Aura cast on them and hopefully be long gone by the time you realise your mistake. If you have suitable nonweapon proficiencies or local knowledge of the areas they come from (which are all quite specific forgotten realms places, making this one work particularly well there) your odds of spotting something that arouses your suspicions before buying go up quite a lot. So this is a fairly roleplaying heavy short encounter that could go very differently depending on how your characters are built and how well they roll, then if they fall for the scam, tracking them down to get revenge could be extended out to a much longer adventure. It goes into enough detail on the characters that you should have no problem playing out their distinct personalities, while not overstaying it's welcome. Decent, but nothing worldshaking. If they have more money than sense it's a good one to throw at them to keep them on their toes. Rudwilla's Stew: The second full-length adventure here is another from regular freelancer and future staff member Chris Perkins. A lighthearted low level one where many of the encounters don't need to be resolved by combat, the PC's are sent to gather ingredients for a special stew that'll placate the local Bugbear tribe - if they don't do it by the chief's birthday it's war! Unsurprisingly, their taste buds do not work quite like humans, and some of the things you're sent to gather are gross and found in dangerous places. So you have three short challenges you can do in any order to gather them, and then a 4th when you take the stew to the bugbears, dealing with the logistics of encumbrance and a bugbear who'll try to poison the stew if it's left unwatched and pin the blame on the PC's, because he'd prefer to go back to the old ways of looting & pillaging the humans. It's highly modular and could easily be expanded or shrunk down. (and they note in the intro it's already been pruned a fair bit in editing. ) It's not quite as interesting a read as Steve's work, but one I'm more likely to actually use, particularly if I found myself DMing for younger players. Seems a good one if you want to start them off in a non hack and slashy way, as while the monsters are often quirky and obnoxious, few are just mindlessly irredeemably bad. Also, while it's lighthearted, it doesn't have any obvious 4th wall breaking jokes to ruin the immersion, unlike too many Polyhedron ones. That makes it much more tolerable as a whole.</blockquote>

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