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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8658106" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Magazine Issue 52: Mar/Apr 1995part 5/5Laughing Man: The final short adventure sounds like it might be a comedy one as well, but turns out to be deadly serious for the players. A man was shot in the back of the head while laughing, and became a unique ghost who's laughter also has a banshee-like save or die effect. He's spent the past few years tormenting the man who killed him, who has also become a unique ghost unable to pass on until someone else takes ownership of the Fang of the Nosferatu, a deeply annoying magic item that should be familiar to Ravenloft players. Now the two are locked in a cycle of one trying to give the dagger away, and the other ruining it by ghostly mischief, or if that fails, just manifesting, laughing and making everyone save or die, which tends to sabotage the deal even if some of the potential customers survive. There's plenty of potential for interesting roleplaying in this encounter, but sooner or later, you're going to have to fight one of the two, and many of the group may die or wind up ageing several decades. Then if you win, you have the question of what to do with the dagger, because taking it is a bad idea, and just leaving it lying on the ground where anyone could pick it up even worse. Maybe you could build a dungeon full of traps and ominous warnings in every known language around it,  defer the problem for a few generations. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Or go on an epic quest to find out how to destroy it permanently. It's all pretty brutal, so don't use it unless you've got players which are emotionally prepared to deal with an encounter that doesn't pull it's punches and may leave them permanently weakened even if they survive, then screw with them further if they aren't careful when they win. Don't want them ragequitting because being several decades older or a slave to vampiric hungers messes up their character concept or something. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Some of these adventures are jokey and some aren't, but they're all quite plot-heavy and 2e feeling, with the plots more important than the mechanics and some very unbalanced stuff being allowed through as a result. People who take the ideas and use them in entirely different systems will probably get something out of this, but for ones that prefer the 1e or 3e ways of writing adventures, this'll be pretty unsatisfying. I guess D&D is a wide church. Let's move on and see which section of the choir the next issue is preaching too, and if the gods involved deserve to have been forgotten.</blockquote>

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