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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8790482" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 60: Jul/Aug 1996part 2/5Shards of the Day: It's entirely recurring writers this issue, reminding us that it has been 10 years and they've built up a whole bunch of habits, for better or worse. First up is Randy Maxwell with his 16th successful submission, a trip down to the underdark that's easily incorporated into their recent Night Below mega adventure. The PC's are hired to get hold of the themed set of magical swords known as the shards of the day, each having powers based upon a different time, plus synergistic ones when used together. Anything else they find down there in the process they can keep themselves. This turns out to be a pretty good deal, as there's a lot to explore in the abandoned dwarven city of Dylvwyllynn. Like Waen Fawr from issue 46, rather than doing it as one big map, they give you a bunch of cutout tiles for city districts, some of which uniquely represent one area, while others appear multiple times in different orientations to show your basic housing and commercial districts, giving you tons to explore as players, and lots of spare room as a DM to put further encounters of your own design in. The current inhabitants are similarly varied, with a good mix of underdark races of different alignments and degrees of hostility, a bunch of specific encounters in certain places and then lots of less defined rooms where you'll be rolling on the random encounter table a lot if you hang around. So this is an old school dungeon crawling sandbox in the style of I1 that's much too large for a group of PC's to kill everyone and take everything in one delve, forcing them to map things out, choose their fights carefully and sometimes talk to the natives, think regularly about whether to press on or head back to heal and resupply. (although a little knowledge of fungi will go a long way in solving any food supply issues) It doesn't unseat Tortles of the Purple Sage as the largest sandbox they've ever done in here, but it's still comfortably somewhere in the top ten of adventures that are likely to last the most sessions in actual play, particularly if you put the effort in to add a few more details and connect it to other underdark adventures as they suggest. Not groundbreaking, but a pleasingly ambitious and page count efficient example of a type of adventure they've done very few of in recent years.</blockquote>

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