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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8599199" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 48: Jul/Aug 1994part 4/5Sleeping Dragon: In an issue full of lots of little adventures, even the cover story is only 15 pages long. Bill Slavicsek gives us a mid-level adventure for Council of Wyrms, in the unlikely event you ever manage to get that far with the wonky XP system making it near impossible to get over the 1st level hump playing by the RAW. (although they do include pregens if you want to do this as a one-shot) As is often the case when they do a tie-in with an all new setting, this also serves as an introductory promotional piece for people who haven't bought the boxed set yet, spending several pages explaining the basic details & history of the setting before getting to the stuff that won't be repeated in the actual books. But enough context, and onto the actual adventure. An ancient red dragon who once tried to take over the entire Blood Isles has returned centuries later as a Dracolich. Key to his plans is recovering a macguffin that would let him summon the Tarrasque to wreak havoc on the Council of Wyrms.(notwithstanding that mechanically, even a single ancient dragon matches it in damage output & HP in 2e, they can easily evade it by flying and have all manner of other tricks to beat it in a fight, even if none of them have access to a Wish to finish it off, so playing by RAW all that would happen is the site itself getting trashed and a few demihuman casualties in the evacuation. ) So straight away, it's obvious that we have a very 2e style adventure where an official writer wants to tell a Big Story, and doesn't care that the physics of the game do not support the events they want to happen. The rest of the adventure is similarly linear and cheesy, with the PC getting dragged into the plot by dream visions (which most of the elder dragons don't believe of course, because that stupid trope apparently applies even when everyone knows the supernatural exists and has a ton of magical powers of their own) multiple bits of overwrought boxed text, destroying the artifact by throwing it into lava a la LotR and the main villain being killed by deus ex machina rather than your own efforts. Basically, this sucks on toast in both writing style and mechanics, treating you like an idiot and leading you by the claw from one cliched setpiece to the next. The kind of bad adventure only an official member of staff could get away with in here because they aren't being held to the same standards as freelancers. No wonder the setting never worked out in actual play despite being an awesome idea, given how shoddy the mechanical foundation was, and how the writers seemed determined to hem you in and make PC dragons less powerful than NPC ones in all sorts of niggling little ways. One of TSR's experimental ideas I'm particularly annoyed they botched the implementation of. This is D&D, so you ought to put extra effort into getting anything involving the dragons right. Index to Issues 37-48: The index follows exactly the same formula as last time, sorted by alphabetical order of adventure title, just over a page of writing padded out to two with artwork, with the only change looking at them side by side that the font has increased in size slightly at some point in the last 2 years, as have the margins. If anything, that's a mild step downwards, and a reminder that upper management will impose some more petty cost cutting measures that don't work (surely decreasing font size and page count with the same amount of content would be more effective than the few cents you save by mildly reducing writer's word counts) before TSR collapses. So much for linear concepts of progress.</blockquote>

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