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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8671474" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 53: May/Jun 1995part 3/5Clarshh's Sepulchre: Willie Walsh may have been doing this a long time now, but he's still not averse to going back to basics, with an adventure designed to introduce new players to a microcosm of the D&D experience. Get hired by dubious employer, wilderness adventure section, dungeon adventure section, beat monsters, get treasure, voila! The only twist here is that said employer is of blue-skinned hive-mind spelljammer favourites the Arcane, which also explains why he won't be joining you for the dungeon part, as human scale structures are pretty inaccessible when you're 12' tall, and gives you an easy starting point for future more ambitious adventures if this one is a success and they don't betray him to keep all the loot at the end. Other than that there's no real surprises, the dangers are mostly mundane animals in the wilderness bit and mostly undead in the dungeon, no particularly diabolical or unfair tricks. It's all solidly designed, but also pretty basic, not doing anything they haven't done before in many other adventures, and also holds the hand of the players quite a bit. Not bad, but also a bit boring when you've seen as many other adventures like it as I have. I'd only break it out when playing with newbies and want to play the low-level D&D experience completely straight, save the weird and sadistic stuff for later.A Serenade Before Supper: As usual when they mention food in the title, there's a good chance that the PC's will be the ones being served up. A group of Jackalweres killed the staff of a remote roadside inn in the middle of a forest, decided it's a more comfortable place to stay than sleeping out in the cold and damp, and now pretend to be the staff to lure people into a false sense of security before attacking. Any adventuring party that isn't obviously too high level to fight will be lured into taking their protections off and then devoured at leisure. If you decide to skip the inn due to suspicion or miserliness, they'll use ominous howling in the distance to persuade you to reconsider, then attack during the night supplemented by a pack of real jackals & wolves if that fails, making for a tougher but more obvious fight. The kind of thing paranoid players won't fall for for an instant, particularly when the attempted seduction starts, and if they weren't paranoid before, they will be next time. The kind of encounter you use to fill up travel time between larger missions, as it's very unlikely to last you a full session, this has a decent amount of worldbuilding & atmosphere and doesn't railroad you in how you approach it, so I have no objection to it. As ever, just be careful you don't overuse scenarios like this, for they hit diminishing returns fast when used repeatedly without at least a few honest NPC's in between.</blockquote>

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