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<blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8834074" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 64: Sep/Oct 1997part 4/5Last Dance: Our cover story turns out to be just as creepy inside as out. The PC's are hired by a wealthy eccentric lady to deal with a monster in the basement of her mansion. Turns out she's not just eccentric, but completely insane and has been poisoning people to death, then turning their corpses into marionettes to dance eternally for her entertainment. You need to survive the deathtrap set for you, then figure out how to escape and either get away from the place entirely, or fight your way through the rest of the mansion's weirdness, find the control room and get revenge. A distinctly creepy scenario that's actually made moreso because it's all accomplished by mundane means rather than magic. Of course, since this is D&amp;D, not scooby-doo, that doesn't last. If you kill her instead of taking her alive, she becomes a ghost straight away, able to control all the inanimate objects in the mansion, so her puppets no longer need any strings to hold them up and each room has a new set of more dangerous encounters added. So this does for gothic mystery what Grotto of the Queen does for dungeoncrawling, work hard at making the location reactive to the players and scalable to suit the needs of different groups. The difference is that this mansion is actually a decent size as well, giving you plenty to explore, much of which is optional rather than sending you through a linear gauntlet of challenges. That makes it more satisfying overall as both a read and an adventure. This is definitely well into the range of ones I'd use in quality and sufficiently different from the previous evil puppet adventure in issue 14 that it doesn't feel like diminishing returns to have both.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="(un)reason, post: 8834074, member: 27780"] [b][u]Dungeon Issue 64: Sep/Oct 1997[/u][/b] part 4/5 Last Dance: Our cover story turns out to be just as creepy inside as out. The PC's are hired by a wealthy eccentric lady to deal with a monster in the basement of her mansion. Turns out she's not just eccentric, but completely insane and has been poisoning people to death, then turning their corpses into marionettes to dance eternally for her entertainment. You need to survive the deathtrap set for you, then figure out how to escape and either get away from the place entirely, or fight your way through the rest of the mansion's weirdness, find the control room and get revenge. A distinctly creepy scenario that's actually made moreso because it's all accomplished by mundane means rather than magic. Of course, since this is D&D, not scooby-doo, that doesn't last. If you kill her instead of taking her alive, she becomes a ghost straight away, able to control all the inanimate objects in the mansion, so her puppets no longer need any strings to hold them up and each room has a new set of more dangerous encounters added. So this does for gothic mystery what Grotto of the Queen does for dungeoncrawling, work hard at making the location reactive to the players and scalable to suit the needs of different groups. The difference is that this mansion is actually a decent size as well, giving you plenty to explore, much of which is optional rather than sending you through a linear gauntlet of challenges. That makes it more satisfying overall as both a read and an adventure. This is definitely well into the range of ones I'd use in quality and sufficiently different from the previous evil puppet adventure in issue 14 that it doesn't feel like diminishing returns to have both. [/QUOTE]

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