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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8860311" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 66: Jan/Feb 1998part 3/5The Sunken Shadow: Turns out the cover story is pretty accurately represented by the cover, as it's aimed at starting level characters, so you will indeed be low on magic aside from some potions of water breathing provided by your employer. That means you'll have to use your brains to figure out and deal with the other supernatural elements. The PC's are hired by a Paladin to retrieve the treasure from a shipwreck, with a particular emphasis on a gold armband that looks like an eel. Since paladins aren't supposed to care about material gain, this should immediately be cause for suspicion that this won't be just a simple retrieval mission. Any suspicions will be further compounded by the ship losing a crewman each night of the journey to a massive eel-like creature. Unsurprisingly, the armband is cursed, and the paladin it's latest victim, turning him into a ravenous were-eel each night unable to resist his hungers and trying to make up for it in the day. To get the good ending you'll need to realise that and destroy the armband rather than giving it to him or falling prey to it's supernatural beauty and trying to keep it yourselves. Another very 2eish feeling one where you're strongly encouraged to take the heroic path and not take every mission purely on your own potential material gain. If you do nothing but those you'll stay poor forever and never get the chance to move to domain management even if you hit high enough level. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> It's no wonder that playstyle has been eroded from all sides over the years. So this is another adventure that isn't bad on it's own merits, but there's a lot of diminishing returns seeing the same idea several times in quick succession.Side Treks - Swing Shot!: After several fairly familiar ideas, here we have one they've only done once before in Dragon, and not at all in here. A bridge over a chasm in the underdark, as seen previously in issue 131's underdark special, which means there's no way around unless you can fly and monsters can easily use it as a choke point for ambushes. Only instead of Gargoyles and Ogres, this time you're facing orcs and a giant snapping turtle in the water at the bottom if you get knocked off during the fight. They do have a shaman that'll use their spells intelligently to make the encounter more dangerous, but despite saying they're aimed at similar level parties, this one is much smaller and easier than it's precursor from a decade ago, reminding us that adventures have become much more forgiving in general over the years. Underdark exploring is common enough that both are entirely valid and could be used in the same campaign at different points, but this is definitely the weaker of the two in terms of both challenge and inventiveness. We could stand to see more iterations on the same idea, but they'd have to really put the work in to come up with different layouts and combinations of creatures to prevent diminishing returns.</blockquote>

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