Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8672366" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 53: May/Jun 1995part 4/5Elxea's Endeavour: Willie Walsh may be their most prolific writer overall, but Chris Perkins is nipping hard at his heels, and I think he's catching up. But not without a little help from his friends, as he freely admits, taking a map designed by someone else and then writing the adventure around it. Said castle was attacked and taken over by evil adventurers, who then erected a magical barrier around it. The niece of it's legitimate owner realises the only thing that can stop a bad adventuring party is a good adventuring party and asks you for help rescuing her uncle and liberating the place. Unlike usual in these scenarios, she'll then stick around and help you in the adventure, being neither so weak as to be a liability or so strong that she didn't need to ask for help in the first place, which is nice to see. You then have plenty of freedom in how you handle this. You can try to get past the magical barrier on your own by flying over or digging underneath it. You can go on a side-quest to find a spellcaster capable of dispelling it or teleporting you past it. Or you could simply lay siege to the place and wait for them to run out of food, which kinda works, but more enemies arrive after a week so you'll have to fight them as well. As with his adventures in the last two issues, he goes for quality rather than quantity with the antagonists, making most of them fully customised NPC's with class levels and roleplaying notes. The non PC style monsters are an unusual selection as well, mostly basic D&D ones from supplements that don't have AD&D counterparts, showing that he's really been delving deep into the sourcebooks and wants to give obscure creatures some more spotlight time. This mixes old school open-endedness and new school focus on character development in a very pleasing way, making an adventure that can hold up to all sorts of approaches and be an interesting challenge whichever way your PC's choose. This is pretty top tier overall, and precisely the kind of adventure I like to play in and encourage. Designing the adventure the "wrong" way around has paid dividends this time.</blockquote>

Verification