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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8816927" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 62: Nov/Dec 1996part 2/5Dragon's Delve: Chris Perkins continues to appear more issues than not with our cover story. A young crystal dragon has been captured by the things lurking within an abandoned dwarven fortress. The parents are too big to go in all guns blazing, so they ask the neighbouring dwarves for help, who pass the buck to you because they don't want to risk a frontal assault either. Can you get in and out, rescue the dragon and any enslaved dwarves without it turning into an all-out bloodbath? Will you realise in time that most of the "monsters" inside are also mind-controlled & polymorphed dwarves and adjust your tactics accordingly, or treat this like a traditional dungeoncrawl where you kill everyone and take everything your encumbrance limit will allow? So there's both a dungeon & a dragon (not actually that common these days, last issue didn't have any of either!) in this adventure, but the way you're expected to deal with them is unusual in a very 2eish style, emphasising roleplaying, sneakiness and subduing enemies over killing. The big bad on the other end is similarly sneaky, making extensive use of it's own illusion & mind-affecting powers to appear more dangerous and further muddy the waters. A pretty interesting adventure in it's own right, but it does highlight how so many writers almost seem to be ashamed of playing Dungeons & Dragons, trying to push things as far away from that as the ruleset will permit. It can't be good for a product when the people behind it don't play it, don't really want to be working on it, and only continue to do so to support their more experimental ideas that don't sell. That's one benefit of having second-generation ascended fans working on things, they're more likely to love it unironically and try to make the thing more like it's platonic self, rather than just the amalgamation of it's influences.Side Treks - Blood on the Plow: It can be a hard life running a small family farm. One accident at the wrong time of year and you don't have enough hands to get the harvest in, risking losing tons of money or even not having enough food to get through the next winter. Two is really stretching it, particularly if you don't have any kids to take up the slack. Three or more and you might start to get suspicious that you're cursed or someone has a vendetta against you. While passing over some farmland in late summer, the PC's do indeed get asked for help by a family who've been laid up, and urgently need the wheat brought in before it spoils. After several days of backbreaking labor when you're probably fatigued and away from your armor & weapons, you find out the cause was an evil scarecrow, as it gets fed up of the subtle troublemaking and just attacks. The kind of scenario that's built on screwing over the players and saying if they don't specifically say they have their equipment ready and rememorise their spells every day, they haven't done it. I hate that kind of nitpicky crap. As a horror one it's not particularly great either, with much less spooky buildup than it could have fit in the wordcount. Irritating and distinctly subpar, this is one I'm left with no desire to use, which is particularly unusual for a side trek.</blockquote>

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