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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8554482" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 45: Jan/Feb 1994part 5/5Prism Keep:  Danger, Danger! The submission is coming from inside the building! The cover adventure is not from a freelancer this time, but actual employee Rich Baker III, who's already responsible for a whole load of Dark Sun stuff and several other supplements. This is his first adventure in here, but not his last by a long shot, as he'll still be working for WotC in the 4e era. As with Steve Kurtz's one, it's only slightly too small to be a standalone module, and could probably have been padded out into one if they'd really wanted. But enough preamble. The eponymous keep is a flying castle with six rainbow themed spires (blue AND indigo? What newtonian nonsense is that?) created by a powerful wizard. His apprentice was corrupted by a suspiciously sexy demon, betrayed him and took the place over without really knowing how to operate the thing. Now it's flying all over the place and obviously appears near the PC's. An obvious plot contrivance makes getting up there much easier than the previous sky island adventures we've seen in here, so you won't be spending a big chunk of the adventure looking for flying mounts or negotiating wilderness hazards. Once you do, it's all quite pleasingly old school, you have a map, lots of NPC's and monsters, plus a few prisoners and freedom to approach the place with mindless violence, clever tactics or even diplomacy and joining up. The defences use decent tactics without being so paranoid as to make day-to-day life there unlivable, there's tensions between the bad guys you can exploit and most of the characters move around and do things rather than just sitting in their room waiting for the PC's. This is both well written and flexible, making it pretty top tier as an adventure. Indeed, it looks like it was actually influential on other game designers, as Castle Shard in Monte Cook's Ptolus is an obvious rip of this mapwise, and the two could easily be connected as a literal shard from this adventure's central power crystal summoned to another world. That's a cool easter egg that you could make something more of in your own campaign. As one that's both good and mildly historically significant, this gets a solid two thumbs up from me. With all 3 large adventures being done by regular writers, this issue is actually pretty good in terms of quality, but does feel like they're becoming more closed in rather than looking at submissions by anyone fairly. It's a constant temptation not to take the easy path and get formulaic. Will they do the same next issue? Well, we'll get to that in a week or two.</blockquote>

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