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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8870642" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 67: Mar/Apr 1998part 3/5Side Treks - Eye of the Storm: There's a lot of profit to be made in solving problems you've created yourself. What better time to sell lightning rods to a village than when there's a huge storm a-comin'? They'll be too busy frantically fitting them to their houses to haggle over the price or question why someone with the equipment to save the day just happened to be passing. Unless a particularly paranoid group of PC's just happened to also be passing by at the same time. So what we have here is a double layered encounter with an obvious threat and method of solving it, and a second objective that the players might not even realise exists, instead thanking their "benefactor" and going on their way once the storm is over. A fairly interesting bit of writing that uses a rare subclass, introduces a new monster, and has two very different potential action scenes packed into three pages, this definitely doesn't feel like a rehash of a previous scenario and is definitely one I'd enjoy using. Training Ground: They can't just do dungeon crawls filled with traps and puzzles anymore. They always have to come up with justifications why the place exists and why the PC's would want to go down there beyond the basic joy of killing things & taking their stuff to accumulate personal power & wealth that take up a significant percentage of the pagecount. Here's one where the tension between the 1e and 2e parts of the writing are particularly obvious. You have a tricky puzzle dungeon filled with traps, constructs and monsters that are in suspended animation until you enter their rooms so you don't have to worry about what they eat or where they go to the toilet. Then you have a secondary plot about how the Zhentarim (or other similar evil secret society in your campaign) want to get hold of all the stuff inside the dungeon. The PC's are alerted to this by a rather convoluted sequence of events in a nearby town, and hopefully engage with them enough to get involved. Of course where's there's one Zhent, there are probably more, and you'll encounter the remains of the previous party they sent in and quite possibly another one if you take too much time going through the dungeon. It's an awkward fit though. It all feels like the dungeon was created first then the plot elements were stapled on afterwards to fit the current fashions in adventure writing. The final result is an interesting read, but also rather clunky in a "how do you do, fellow kids" kinda way. There's more than enough good elements in here that I could get something out of it, but the whole package isn't one I'd just use as is.</blockquote>

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