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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8862495" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 66: Jan/Feb 1998part 5/5Orange and Black: A tiger? A bad guy? But they're so kyooot! Yup, it's time for another adventure in the same issue where what initially seems like just a basic challenge to kill turns out to be a lot more complex. A little kid has gone missing from a village the PC's are passing through, so they'll be asked to rescue him. If you have any skill at tracking at all, you'll soon find him in the lair of said tiger, scared but completely unharmed. Unless you really force the issue or look like you're threatening the boy, the tiger won't attack you, strongly hinting something is up. It's actually a ranger polymorphed into a tiger, losing his intelligence but retaining enough of his former personality to still be kind to kids. If you figure that out, you then need to trap him and take him to a nearby abandoned shrine to have the transformation removed, which unsurprisingly has an undead guardian to beat. So this is yet another one with an obvious evil ending, (kill the tiger) neutral ending, (rescue the boy but leave the tiger alone) and good ending (turn him back, everybody lives Rose!) for you to get depending on your player's smarts and tastes. Very 2eish, but won't fall apart if they make the wrong choices, this is yet another one in the solid but unexceptional league overall.The Statement of Ownership lurks at the back of the magazine, because unsurprisingly it's not great news. They've dropped to another 6,000 to a mere 23,000, losing a fair bit in both the newsstands and subscriptions. Like their other two magazines, it's time to put in the work of regaining trust by showing they can deliver regularly again and maybe finding ways to promote to potential buyers that TSR couldn't or didn't want to reach. A lot of short and competently written but dull encounters here, there's nothing here that really offends me taking the adventures in isolation, but put together it's a pretty weak and repetitive collection. We're now hitting the point where 2e had ran out of new ideas and they were still figuring out what to do differently with the next edition. Dragon really upped the number of short crunchy filler articles in this period and it looks like Dungeon will be following suit. You can still get plenty of useful stuff for your game from them but you have to filter more carefully than earlier years. This is one I'm quite comfortable closing the final page on and maybe never opening again.</blockquote>

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