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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8673171" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 53: May/Jun 1995part 5/5Steelheart: Paul Culotta is another regular writer who's really racking up the number of adventures accepted. This is our highly setting specific adventure for the issue, a Forgotten Realms one revolving around steel dragons (hence the title) and the Cult of the Dragon in general. A young steel dragon lost her parents to the cult, and wants them rescued, or failing that, revenge. Like many steel dragons, she's more comfortable in human form than dragon one anyway, so she pretends to be a little girl and asks adventurers for help. She'll then accompany them while trying to keep her & her parent's true nature a secret, but not doing a great job of it, so it's very unlikely that you won't find out at some point. This'll take you on a tricky journey through Vassa's frigid swamps until you eventually find the Cult's lair, where you'll find out that they're trying to negotiate an alliance with the Zhentarim. These two villainous organisations pooling their forces would be bad for pretty much everyone else in the moonsea region, so you'd better do something about it. Fortunately, they're as backstabby and paranoid as ever, so it won't take much to trick them into thinking the other one is welching on the deal and devolve the meeting into a general scrum, then mop up the survivors. The kind of scene based adventure that's pretty linear in the order of what you encounter, but does at least offer you a decent amount of freedom in how you react to them. (although some options are obviously more favoured than others) It also has the ambition to go big with it's premise, giving you not just one, but a whole bunch of dragon encounters of various toughness and the possibility of your actions making a long-term difference to the political balance of the area. Since the dragon part of D&D is underused in general that makes this a particularly refreshing one for a high level party used to seeing dragons as a singular big bad or not at all in adventures. Solidly above average for a plot-driven adventure.An issue in which I found myself preferring the longer adventures over the shorter ones, as they had more room to develop distinct identities and not be repetitions of things I've seen already. It once again leaves me hoping that the editors will feel the same way and try their luck with a few more multi-parters, and the repeated change in editors won't result in more things that are repetitions of ideas already done in issues getting through. In the meantime, let's see how another summer full of conventions is progressing on the Polyhedron side.</blockquote>

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