Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8718160" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 56: Nov/Dec 1995part 2/5Briocht: Willie Walsh once again plays up his irish heritage with a very celtic adventure indeed. A pair of tribes are engaging in extremely competitive potlaching for status, which has reached the point where one commissioned a wizard to create a helm of invulnerability as a gift. This has not arrived on time and the chief is getting worried, so it's time to send some passing adventurers to find out the cause of his tardiness. He did manage to complete it, but it turns out a dragon killed him and took his stuff, deciding to stay in his house as it's bigger on the inside than out and has all sorts of magical amenities, much more comfortable than some old cave. If you just knock openly on the door he'll be in human form, pretend to be the wizard and bluff his way through the conversation. (while not surrendering the helm under any circumstances even if that means resorting to combat because dragons gonna be greedy) If you sneak in, you could encounter him at multiple points throughout the place, plus plenty of other magical defences and he'll be even less friendly. While this could devolve into a hack & slash dungeoncrawl, it's written in a way that encourages lots of roleplaying along the way, with plenty of detail given to your employers, the dragon, and various other celtic flavoured encounters along the way. (which does include trickster faeries, predictably) As usual for him, it's mildly whimsical, but not in a way that breaks immersion and works best if you engage your brain to solve the puzzles rather than brute-forcing your way through. Despite the number of adventures he's had published by now, he's not letting the quality control slip, which is pleasing to see. I could still stand to see more from him. Janx's Jinx: A little more mild continuity here, as we head back to Dovedale for some more low-key problem solving. The local wolves have an infestation of foaming mouth fever, (ie, not particularly scientifically accurate rabies) which means they're very aggressive, but will mostly die off soon. In the meantime, you need to protect the village, and particularly the cattle, because if they lose too many that would cause problems. So you have fairly free reign to either set up defences or explore the village & surrounding area and take the fight to them, with short but decent enough descriptions of various locations of interest. Things get weirder when a weird teleporting wolf appears, attacks and then disappears in the night as soon as you hit it once. Turns out it's actually an elf's pet blink dog that was infected with the fever. He'd very much like you to save it. Of course, catching something with at-will teleportation is easier said than done, requiring either magic or use of the grapple rules and lots of determination. If you're using this at the expected level, you also don't have Cure Disease yet either, so you'll need to find the macguffin to fix that. (which if you explored the area properly earlier on you'll already have stumbled upon, but one of the villagers will give you a pretty obvious clue if you didn't.) Cosy stuff that's fairly low in real danger but can still be played to tug on the heartstrings, this is a solid but unexceptional campaign-starter that becomes better if you're a long-term reader, as it references several other adventures it's easy to incorporate into the area, while still functioning just fine standalone. As long as you're ok with using basic and advanced D&D material interchangeably this selection should get you out of the fragile levels with minimal DM prepwork.</blockquote>

Verification