Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8720754" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 56: Nov/Dec 1995part 4/5Grave Circumstance: From one adventure full of trolling to a literal troll, as we reach our cover story. Bill Slavicsek takes us off to Athas, to explore the new lands opened up by recent metaplot developments. Well, I say explore, but it turns out there's an obvious trade route to follow that's common knowledge to people outside the familiar 7 city-states, which makes it strange that none of the previous books never mentioned it. So you head through a sequence of encounters that while longer than the average tournament adventure, with 14 wilderness challenges to get through plus a few social ones to break things up, are just as linear as the worst Polyhedron railroads. A bunch of B'rohgs looting another caravan. A gag of Muls attacking some still alive lizard men. A hungry undead beastie that will deplete your resources considerably or feed on you if you refuse it's demands. When you get to the next village, one way or another you'll come to the attention of the Ravagers, who'll order you to go and deal with a problematic defiler and won't take no for an answer. This'll send you through the big sandstorm of the barrier wastes, to hit the enormous cliff leading down to lands wetter than any of the PC's have ever seen before. Fortunately, the defiler is no more experienced at trekking through jungle than you are, so you don't even have to roll to follow the trail of broken plantlife. This leads you to an ancient Green Age building that contains the power to turn a user into a 30th level dragon just like that, (draining the life force of the entire swamp in the process) skipping all the painstaking XP accumulation and complicated rituals required in the previous books. Surprise surprise, the defiler has already realised that and will use it if not stopped. You have to beat him, plus The Last Troll on Athas™ which lurks around the area and save the day. You get 50gp as a reward for basically saving the world, which is a piddling amount even with Athas's exchange rate and feels like a cruel joke after slogging through everything here. I hate every moment of this. This is bad in the same way as his Council of Wyrms adventure, determined to tell a particular story regardless of the rules of the game or how people realistically interact with one-another, and putting in ridiculously unbalanced things without any thought for the ways they could break a campaign if ever used in anything but the highly specific ways the plot demands. Like Ed's adventures in here, its horrible in a way that they would never let a freelancer's submission be, and all the more grating to read because of that obnoxious privilege. It's becoming increasingly obvious that he was behind some of TSR's worst railroading adventures of the 90's. Complete and utter rubbish.</blockquote>

Verification