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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8823884" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 63: (Not!) Jan/Feb 1997part 5/5Beauty Corrupt: Consistency? In our hags? I think not. Issue 29 featured hags for whom being made beautiful was the worst curse they could conceive of. This trio is doing the exact opposite, trying to make themselves permanently beautiful, which apparently is a lot harder when you're doing it consensually to yourself because consistency? In our magic system? So they've spent years painstakingly gathering ingredients, culminating recently in stealing the voice of a sirine so they can be as pleasant on the ears as the eyes. This may prove to be their downfall, as it sets off a comedy of errors in the neighbouring village that will attract adventurers. Before having her voice stolen, the sirine was involved in a tentative friendship with the chief negotiator of the city. Unfortunately, said negotiating skills did not extend to being able to understand her attempts to mime what had happened to her (genius level intelligence and she never learned how to write or use sign language?) and in her frustration she used her int draining touch on him, turning him into a blithering idiot with a weird obsession with always having a shoe on his head. Unfortunately, this came just as his skills are critically needed to keep the town from being taken over by a nearby larger city via complicated legal technicalities. Now you have to deal with the slapstick scenario of trying to stall the negotiators and keep his condition strictly secret while also finding out what caused it and getting hold of a cure. This may or may not involve splitting the party, but either way, does look like it involves lots of cringy comedic misunderstandings. Basically, it's an episode of Frasier with supernatural elements added. Not what I was expecting and not really a playstyle I have any interest in, as it's hard enough to just watch let alone participate in. The fact that it's structured in acts & scenes further reinforces the TV comedy feel of the whole thing. I can see how someone might like this, but it just doesn't work for me at all. Too much whimsy, too many implausible contrivances in service of the plot. The Statement of Ownership shows a 14% decline in readership to 29,000 copies, most of it in the last few months before the hiatus. As usual, this slightly improves their ratio compared to Dragon, which went down 17% over the same time period, but it's hardly good news by any stretch of the imagination. Goes to show that TSR were losing a fair chunk of their customers before they crashed for various reasons. Now they've lost even more as the subscriptions expire and have an uphill battle to win them back, but we won't see the effects of that until next filing. Despite saying Jan/Feb on the cover, this issue feels more like they decided to keep all the april adventures in, with lots of roleplaying heavy adventures of various degrees of whimsy. Once again we're very firmly in 2e territory for better or worse and it remains to see how long it'll be before the WotC policy of back to the dungeon kicks in in earnest. Time to head on through this interregnum period and see how the the new boss is and isn't the same as the old boss.</blockquote>

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