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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8642893" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 51: Jan/Feb 1995part 4/5Side Treks - The Witch of Windcrag: Our second side-trek this issue is somewhat less expandable. Your basic Basic D&D mini dungeon crawl where you hear any one of a tableful of rumours and go investigate. From the name, you're probably expecting some kind of cackling crone, maybe with a penchant for eating children? Surprise! It's just a single harpy. Double Surprise! She has some wizard class levels, adding spellcasting on top of her natural charming and flight powers! If she rolls well on casting a sleep spell she could take out a whole low level party, reminding us why you bring hirelings along at this level to act as meat shields. So this isn't an impossible challenge at the expected level, but does look very swingy, with success or failure largely dependent on who gets the drop on who and how well they roll in the first round. The kind of thing they'd actively work to eliminate from the rules in later editions. Whether this will work for you or not depends on if that kind of old-school unfairness is a feature or a bug in your campaign. Nothing exceptional, but a good palate-cleanser after the last three adventures being very 2e feeling and heavy on encouraging noncombat approaches.The Bandits of Bunglewood: Another alliterative title in quick succession, and another set of monsters who are enjoying the increasing permissiveness of the rules when it comes to gaining class levels. Chris Perkins takes us back to Tucker's Kobolds territory, a place that should be familiar to long-term readers, but never fails to annoy no matter how high level you are, because they use tricks that bypass your AC & HP to be effective at any level unless you have specific countermeasures prepared. Say hello to The Seven Jekks. Urto, Irki, Blepp, Snog, Zark, Neglu & Liklik. They may seem like your typical puny comedic annoyances, but each is fully statted up like a PC with various class levels, nonweapon proficiencies and preferred tricks. They've strewn various tricks & traps throughout the bunglewood, so anyone just blundering through it will have a very bad time. If you can stand up to them regardless, they'll retreat to their lair, which is cramped enough that full-sized PC's suffer penalties the whole way through on top of the various defences. So this is one of the most formulaic scenarios ever, repeated in various iterations so many times over the years, mainly notable because it treats every monster with the same complexity as a PC rather than being interchangable mooks. It feels like a precursor to the design philosophy of 3e, where they actively embrace stacking class levels and templates on everything so you can never take a monster's capabilities for granted, no matter how many of them you encounter. I guess he's one of the people you can thank (or blame) for that, since he'll be sticking around throughout the whole process. Not terrible, but more interesting as a part of overall trends to analyse than as it's own thing.</blockquote>

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