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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8846893" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 65: Nov/Dec 1997part 3/5The Ice Tyrant: Before Chris became editor, he was fast becoming the go-to guy to write adventures for new settings when no-one else would. This is one of his last and hardest assignments, as he had to get to grips with not only a different setting but also an all-new system as well. It's time to draw those cards and see what can be done with Dragonlance Fifth Age that you couldn't in D&D. (And also if they get any complaining letters as a result, as they did back in 1990 when they tried putting a Marvel Superheroic & Top Secret adventure in.) So, a lot of things have happened to Krynn recently, many of them pretty devastating. Ergoth has been taken over by the white dragon overlord and turned into a land of ice. Your PC's are heading there, whether to help with the resistance or simply to find out what's happened in the first place. They encounter a rag-tag band of silvanesti freedom fighters, who are typically dickish despite the hard situation they're in. Presuming you can put up with their elvish insufferablility without coming to blows, you'll get a chance to join in with their macguffin hunt, heading to Anghanor to capture or destroy whatever valuable thing the overlord is keeping there. Time to go through a mostly linear series of encounters, here divided into acts & scenes because the system tries to be more dramatic and narratively focussed. Get ambushed by some ice trolls. Deal with a banshee haunting the old elven lodge. Make your way through an icy mountain pass guarded by ogres. Get the choice of whether to follow the deus ex machina of the White Stag for an easy route, or go it alone for a harder one. Face the Thanoi minions of the overlord, then (hopefully) sneak past the dragon guarding Anghanor and find out that what they're guarding inside is a large clutch of white dragon eggs, ready to be raised as mounts for the evil army. The adventure then expects you to smash them (none of that moral debate about nature vs nurture and the ethics of baby killing this time around) and figure out how to make an escape before reinforcements arrive. As usual for Chris, I get the impression that he's done the reading and is working hard to make what he writes fit the themes of the setting. Unfortunately, when said setting is Dragonlance, there's only so much you can do, so this is pretty cheesy and linear, falling firmly into the epic fantasy railroad where there's not much room for deviation without leaving the bounds of the adventure entirely. On the plus side, using the SAGA system means he can give more equal weight to combat and social solutions, as they now both use the same methods of resolution and take about the same amount of time, and he takes pains to point out that each encounter has multiple solutions. It'd actually be a better fit for many of the adventures they're publishing in here at the moment, since they're trying so hard to encourage ones that are heavier on roleplaying and lighter on killing. This really serves to demonstrate why they made the SAGA system in the first place, and how far the TSR writers were from their audience in the type of games they wanted to play in the mid 90's. If it had been a greater success they could have split the playstyles off and written more social adventures in a system better suited to them. Lots to think about here, and as usual even a linear adventure in Dungeon is of higher writing quality than the ones in Polyhedron, but I can't really call it an unqualified success. Not one I have any real desire to use under either system.</blockquote>

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