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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8871392" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 67: Mar/Apr 1998part 4/5Side Treks - The Little People: Leprechauns. Whether they're on your side or not, there's a creature guaranteed to add a little irritation to an adventure. Thankfully this is one where the pointy boot is on the other foot, and they're the ones in trouble. One of them wandered into a dead magic zone, which abruptly switched off his invisibility and made him easy prey for the group of highwaymen currently camping there. Now they want three wishes from him, which obviously he can't grant under the circumstances. His friend ran away and asks the next group of adventurers to come by for help. (but he won't mention the dead magic zone as he doesn't know exactly what happened either) This means you'll probably get a nasty surprise when you try to fight them, or have a baffling time trying to scry or use other magic like a Sleep spell to shortcut the encounter and free the leprechaun nonviolently. They're still low level enough that you can probably beat them in a straight on fight, but it'll be an annoying gotcha encounter, particularly for the players of spellcasters. Probably not one that would appear in future editions more concerned with game balance and making sure every character can contribute to every encounter, this is not as irritating as it could have been, but could still prove pretty problematic if used with the wrong group. This one's probably winding up on my discard pile.Falls Run: James Wyatt provided the majority of Masque of the Red Death articles in Dragon, doing a lot of work to keep the setting alive and expanding. No surprise that he'd also contribute a MotRD adventure in here during the same time period. We're off to a tiny appalachian village to find what darkness lurks within. There's a cabal of evil adepts that worship a wolfwere. A journalist dug too deeply into their affairs and became their next victim. Now his ghost appears on the anniversary of his death and haunts the train passing through the village. The PC's will be on that train for whatever reason. (using public transport in the USA? There's a lot of character concepts that plot won't fit <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" /> ) They'll be way underleveled to fight a D&D ghost head-on, so they have to survive the chaos the ghost causes, then investigate what his backstory is and figure out how to lay him to rest. Actually, they won't get much choice in the matter, because the weather will be conveniently awful, trapping them in town until they solve the mystery and the timeline throws events at them hard and fast, pretty much ensuring it'll be over one way or another within a couple of days. This feels very much like a tournament adventure, with a fairly linear sequence of events designed so something happens every time the PC's hesitate, keeping them moving so you can wrap it all up in as single session. Pretty decent for a linear story based adventure, with the writing and editing as usual well above Polyhedron standards, but not really my cup of tea. It's also very much not for a group that picks combat as their first solution to problems, as the adversaries are both much more powerful than your recommended level, and both the ghost and wolfwere only hurt by magic weapons you probably don't have. If you don't think to go to the legitimate authorities trusting that they haven't been corrupted by the cult you don't have good odds in a fight against them. So this is dated in not only the 1890's way, but also the 1990's way. Even though the code of conduct is technically gone by now, most of the writers haven't caught up, and the police are still presented as unambiguous good guys. How many groups are going to believe that and do what the adventure expects if you ran it now?</blockquote>

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