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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8596521" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 48: Jul/Aug 1994part 2/5To Bite The Moon: Lisa Smedman finds the time amid writing novels to submit another little adventure here as well. Some gnolls in the pricklepine mountains are suddenly proving much more effective in their raiding thanks to a little magical assistance. A dwarf who barely managed to survive hires the PC's to recover their stolen goods. Seems like a simple enough mission, right, particularly as the gnolls also stole very large quantities of alcohol so it should be an easy fight if you time it right. What you're not told is that one of the stolen items is a ring of wishes, and a casual wish by a drunken gnoll gets taken literally, turning the PC's into gnolls just as they arrive. They can still try to fight their way through the mission and then find a way to turn themselves back, but the adventure strongly pushes turning it into a comedy of errors where they pretend to actually be gnolls and bluff their way through gnollish social conventions (which are predictably abusive and counterintuitive to more civilised folks) until they get an opportunity to retrieve the items and make an exit. A moderately irritating and quite whimsical transformation adventure that's mainly tolerable because it does have some interesting setting details & characterisations, and isn't so long that the joke wears out it's welcome. It also goes heavy on reminding us just how racist the 2e physics & gods are, strictly enforcing the gnoll's class/level restrictions and not having the gods answer cleric PC's as long as they're of the wrong species, which means it wouldn't work in the same way if converted to other editions or even settings like Dragonlance where the same few gods are explicitly worshipped by all races under different names. So this is dated in a very 2e way, both rules-wise and tonally, and much less generally useful than her previous adventure in here. One I'd pass on using.The Oracle at Sumbar: Pirates dying and leaving behind buried treasure with only a cryptic map has a long literary history. But what happens if there are no convenient clues like that? Fortunately, in a fantasy campaign, there's always divination magic. Perhaps the oracle at Sumbar can help. The catch is that you need to get there, then get to the treasure, and then get back to Yhaunn within 30 days, or one of the PC's Aunt Maria is going to have everything repossessed to pay gambling debts. Can you find a suitable ship that isn't run by people who'll double-cross you, negotiate the weather and random encounters along the way, decode the oracle's riddle, get to the treasure's location and deal with that underwater dungeon, then deal with doublecrossing pirates and/or cormyran officials claiming some of the treasure belongs to them and come back with enough money to pay off the debts and still come off with a positive bank balance overall? That's a lot of different stages you could fail at, quite a few of which won't kill you, and a lot of talky bits at the beginning that the players could mess up and wind up not even getting into the adventure in the first place. A fair number of the plot beats could also be short-circuited in the other direction if you have powers the adventure doesn't expect, keep anti mind reading magic up at al times, swim, fly or teleport the journey instead of sailing, etc. It all seems a bit fragile, and definitely not of use against a group of ruthlessly optimised murderhobos who won't give a damn about helping fictional relatives in the first place.  Another very 2e feeling adventure in the bad way that means I'm very unlikely to use it.</blockquote>

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