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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8643902" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 51: Jan/Feb 1995part 5/5The Last Oasis: After an issue full of adventures that offer a decent amount of freedom in how you wander and react to the things you encounter, they can't resist putting one irritating railroad in where the PC's actions to a lot of the events are presumed rather than giving you a proper choice, and others will have basically the same thing happen next regardless of their choices so they feel kinda pointless. The PC's are hired as guards for a desert caravan in Al-Qadim or any similar area, as they've been having a lot of bandit trouble lately. A sandstorm sweeps up, and the PC's are buried in it regardless of what they do. Instead of just dying, their spirits leave their bodies and they get to explore the borderlands between life and death. (which is basically just another desert, only spookier) They have to realise what's going on, and then get back to their bodies before their shadows disappear completely, indicating that they've died for good. Some of the dead denizens will be helpful, others try to trick you or have you for dinner, and figuring out which can be trusted will make subsequent encounters easier or harder, but not affect their overall order, which eschews any mapping for purely narrative logic. The kind of adventure that feels like it's based on a specific story, and is going to push you into playing something like that story even if it has to completely disregard the established AD&D cosmology as well as player agency to do so. As usual when Dungeon tries this kind of adventure, the writing is still of higher average quality than Polyhedron's railroads, but that still doesn't leave me with any actual desire to run this. It just doesn't feel like it was meant to be a D&D adventure in the first place, and is being shoehorned into the system awkwardly. No thanks.A mixed bag of relatively short experiments that mostly manage to be interesting whether I'd want to use them or not. They still have far more good submissions than they need, which means that there's room for a new editorial direction in a few months while not hurting overall quality. Let's see if the new management will have the courage to try stepping away from the purely episodic, or it'll continue being business as usual for a while longer.</blockquote>

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