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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8669562" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 53: May/Jun 1995part 1/580 pages. Polyhedron is making big plans, venturing off to both the victorian era and the cyberpunk future, but Dungeon is still firmly down in the … well, dungeon, fighting another load of mouldering undead. You could have just left them there and they probably wouldn't have bothered anyone, but no, gotta get those grave goods back into economic circulation and prevent deflation. Let's see where this crop of adventures falls on the greed/heroics spectrum, and if they'll attempt anything more ambitious involving any kind of continuity.Editorial: Willie Walsh celebrates his 20th adventure published in here. Despite being fairly well known and getting fanmail from people who've played his adventures and want more, he still gets more than half the adventures he submits rejected, which means there's enough other ones in his archive to make a pretty big book now. (which would probably sell quite decently if he were to update them to a more recent edition or an OSR retroclone and publish it as an OGL product) Some of them were serious, some were comedic, and many fell somewhere in the middle, but they were mostly of above average memorability. So this is a reminder that becoming the most prolific adventure writer here was not easy work, and the editors still expect him to put the effort in when coming up with new ones, not coast on his reputation. This means you're still in with a chance as a completely unknown writer, you just have to send in a good enough idea to get the editor's attention. Will anyone ever manage to catch up to him, or is his lead too great, like Ed's in their other two magazines? Let's hope it's fun finding out.Letters: First letter is one in support of Dungeon reusing adventures already published in older editions, particularly if they're updated and expanded. It can be pretty difficult to get hold of them in these pre .pdf times and many players would still appreciate them. Second wonders what happened to their collectible trading cards? They stopped doing them after 1993 because the last batch didn't sell that well, and new lines which actually have games attached to them like Magic: the Gathering and Spellfire are superseding their place in the gaming ecosystem. Third is the usual round of mistakes spotted in recent adventures and the resulting errata. Fourth wonders what to do with unbalanced parties. If you track XP strictly they'll even out pretty quickly due to the exponential level requirements. They also have a fair few solo adventures by now, so run the lower level ones through those on their own to help them catch up. Fifth wants more Forgotten Realms and Council of Wyrms material. The first, you'll get plenty more of over the years. The second, not so much.Sixth is particularly in love with Al-Qadim at the moment, and obviously wants more adventures set there. I think they might just about be able to manage that.Seventh also wants lots of setting specific material, particularly Forgotten Realms again and Planescape. Maybe they do have enough generic adventures by now and can afford to specialise a little more. Eighth has their name redacted, and is from someone who's had two adventure submissions rejected and thinks they're a bunch of unfair nepots. Just polish up your writing style, try to come up with slightly less overdone ideas and try again. As they said in the editorial, even the most frequently published regulars are still batting less than 50% acceptance rate. A thick skin is the most important thing to success in this field, far more than natural talent. Ninth praises them for putting their own twist on Shakespeare. Even if it's not original, it makes for a more memorable adventure than ones that supposedly are.Tenth is from someone excited to see his childhood friend finally get into print here. How many knockbacks did it take before he finally pulled it off?11th praises Bandits of Bunglewood for taking a gang of common monsters and making them all fleshed out individuals you can roleplay. You'll be seeing more of that in the future. 12th asks what happened to Castle Hart in the Greyhawk Wars. It sustained some damage when attacked by Iuz's troops, but still remains in heroic hands … for now. It sure could use the help of some heroes to make sure it stays that way, hint hint.13th is from David Howery, also praising them for taking inspiration from Shakespeare, and talking about other sources he's used to create adventures from. Even the best artists steal, they just hide it better. 14th wants more Dark Sun adventures, which they badly need. Probably not going to be impressed with their future output then, as they wind up with fewer than Spelljammer by the time the line ends. 15th praises them for increasing the amount of backstory in recent years. His players respond to adventures with nonexistent or inconsistent stories with great mockery. Just make sure you don't go too far in the opposite direction and start writing all the stories before play as well. 16th is notable forum founder Eric Noah, who's also pleased by their version of The Tempest, but worries about copyright issues. It's well over a century old, so no worries about that, and besides, you can't copyright ideas, only specific implementations, so you can continue to file the serial numbers off more recent source material and send it in as adventures. 17th is another person who's very grateful that the magazine is around, because they simply don't have time to write their own adventures between studying at college and a job on top of that. You might have time if you weren't also running 4 different campaigns a week. There is such a thing as quality over quantity. 18th and finally, setting a new record for number of letters in a single issue, is someone who wants to know more about L'Trel. If you're lucky, T.J.T. Zuvich will send in some more adventures set there. For now, the precise details remain unknown to all but him and his own group. Another one that would probably have more than a few sales if updated to a later edition and released under the OGL.</blockquote>

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