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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8777483" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 59: May/Jun 1996part 5/5Voyage of the Crimpshrine: Gnomes. Why'd it have to be gnomes? Even in the settings where they aren't available as PC's (at least, until Mystara was moved from basic D&D to AD&D) they wind up with the tech guy stereotype. This time their mad inventiveness involves using a juggernaut as a perpetual motion machine and creating a faster, larger, more advanced paddleboat to negotiate the known world riverways with. Not that impressive compared to the Princess Ark, but still anachronistically advanced for the average Karimeikan. Maybe you'd like to take a ride on it? Unfortunately, they didn't reinforce the hull enough, it hits a log, springs a leak and sinks. Typical gnomish craftsmanship. Well, at least you get two different adventure scenarios out of it, either of which could be used separately as well. First, there's surviving the ship sinking and trying to rescue as many other people as possible, then getting them to safety through miles of wilderness with whatever limited equipment you managed to grab. Then there's going back with some water-breathing equipment on a salvage mission for the treasure left behind and finding out some merrow have moved in during the intervening time. Each will probably take a session or less so it's not any kind of epic quest, but it's all quite usefully modular and easily transplanted to other settings. This is aided by them including full descriptions for every area both before and after it sinks, in case you want to use it for multiple successful voyages before everything goes wrong and have the players get more attached to the place. We have enough village adventures that also work as toolkits now and more things like this instead would be a good way to expand our options without being so directly repetitive.With two setting specific adventures, but also saying they won't be doing that again in the foreseeable future, combined with making submissions less accessible to new writers, this is another issue that's mainly good due to the sheer number of freelance submissions they get, rather than competent management by the editors. Dungeon might have been affected less than the other two magazines so far, but no-one's making good decisions in TSR upper management at the moment. Time to see what trials the next couple of months bring us.</blockquote>

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