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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8683369" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Magazine Issue 54: Jul/Aug 1995part 2/5Unhallowed Ground: We start things off with a murder mystery set in a monastery. One monk accidentally killed another, then panicked and covered it up as a suicide, burying him outside the walls with the help of his two hapless underlings. This then goes poorly for him when his victim returns as a revenant and systematically kills everyone involved while the players are caught in the middle, and quite possibly become suspects at first. You're staying there overnight while travelling elsewhere. As usual, you're expected to remove your armor & weapons even though it's a bad idea every time an adventure explicitly asks you to do so. Sit through their religious ceremonies, have the stuff you were forced to leave in your room poked through, watch a mentally handicapped monk get abused by another one, then find him dead in the morning. You're then strictly forbidden to use any kind of magic to investigate this. (and of course none of the monks will do so either despite their clerical abilities) Maybe you'll look in the right place to find some clues, maybe not. Not that it matters, as the revenant will manage to find and kill the second accomplice when you're not there as well. The only real active chance to make a difference you get is when it attacks the main murderer in the church, wanting to get a public confession for it's murder rather than just killing mysteriously and clear it's name. The kind of adventure which you don't get to have much influence on the story, as it'll happen pretty much the same way no matter what you do, and the main thing your actions change is how much you know about what's going on. A generally tedious adventure to read that's pushed from mediocre to bad by the combination of ableist abuse & fridging, and the way it just doesn't work with the D&D cleric system with objective morality and people losing their spells for breaking it. Might as well have just written it as a story instead of trying to shoehorn it into the D&D system where it's a poor fit.Side Treks - Fetch: Trying to make Fetch happen nearly a decade before Mean Girls? You go, Matt Maaske. <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" /> The adventure itself turns out to be your typical "What's that Lassie, is little Timmy stuck down the well again?" scenario. A careless druid gets caught in a trap set by a bugbear. He carves a request for help on a stick and sends his dog to get help. Hopefully the PC's will spot the message when playing fetch with the dog and let themselves become the ones being fetched. Once found, it's not too hard to free him, but he's in no shape to help you catch the culprits, so you'll have to do that on your own. If you're careless, you'll soon run across another trap and have to fight the bugbear and his pack of trained hellhounds from a disadvantageous position. A little more care and the element of surprise will be on the other foot, making the fight easier. Another perfectly serviceable but unexceptional short encounter that's mainly notable for the amusing double meaning in the title. The new editor still appreciates a bit of snappy wordplay, so incorporating that is a good way to make your submissions stand out from the pile at first glance.</blockquote>

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