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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8833230" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 64: Sep/Oct 1997part 3/5Bzallin's Blacksphere: Chris Perkins remains as unstoppable as ever, once again delivering the longest adventure in the issue. A solid black sphere that consumes everything it touches has appeared in the middle of the small town of Horizon and is slowly growing. If it continues at the same rate, it'll swallow the place in a week, and might eventually threaten the whole world if not stopped! It's going slow enough that no-ones in any imminent danger of dying unless they intentionally touch it, but someone needs to do something about it fast before property values in the whole region are ruined! Consulting the local high level wizard reveals two possible solutions, but both cause large explosions in the process, so they're not desirable unless the town is already completely gone. The only person who might have the knowledge to stop it noncatastrophically is his rival Bzallin, who might also be responsible for it's appearance in the first place anyway. The first place to look would be his old citadel, which was mysteriously destroyed by fiends 10 years ago. At this point, you may think the talky stuff has gone on a bit long. Apparently Chris thought so too, because it's time to go full Raymond Chandler and have a gang of yugoloths teleport in to kill the wizard, leaving no doubt that Bzallin was indeed responsible and being surprisingly loose lipped about his plans because Yugoloths hate being summoned and will undermine their binders wherever possible. If they manage to get him they'll teleport out leaving the PC's behind and highly motivated to get revenge, while if you beat them you'll have a little more assistance in subsequent parts of the adventure. Exploring the ruined citadel and beating the undead guards eventually reveals a portal to Bzallin's true lair, an extradimensional demiplane that reminds us Chris has read the Dragon articles on tesseracts and other space-twisting places. From there on in, you'll have a distinctly confusing wander through it's halls, facing various extraplanar beasties and Bzallin's apprentices until you finally reach the big bad himself. If you do beat him, you'll find out he made himself a loadbearing boss, so you'll need to escape fast before the extradimensional space implodes or die as well. But whether you got out or not, the sphere stops growing and the town is safe. This feels like Chris is doing a pastiche of Steve Kurtz's style, a long plot heavy adventure with fairly smart but overdramatic villains, a love for driving the adventure with unique macguffins and a big explosion at the end which prevents you from keeping most of the treasure. Still, it is less linear than most Steve Kurtz adventures, allowing you plenty of routes and lots of degrees of success or failure without closing off further parts of the adventure. As with his continuation of the hidden immortal adventure, he actually manages to improve on the ideas of his inspiration and make those tropes work better as a D&D adventure. Not every adventure he does is great, but he's continuing to show both flexibility and a good batting average as a writer.</blockquote>

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