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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8880229" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 68: May/Jun 1998part 1/584 pages. Like the last couple of Polyhedrons, the cover decides to go a little higher tech than usual. While we've seen goggles & gears like this before in mechanus, the guns make it look more likely we're finally off to see what adventures the Alternity system has to offer us. Let's see if they can deliver content that's both fresh and good without the grognards complaining about even the slightest presence of non D&D material sullying the purity of their magazine. OwO what's this? Mere of Dead Men series coming soon? They're finally getting serious about providing adventures with a bit more connection between them and promoting it properly beforehand as well? About time! Another big sign of how the WotC years are going to be different from the TSR ones. Letters: First letter praises them for continuing to produce varied adventures despite the complaints. No two campaigns are the same, so not all adventures should run on the same basic assumptions. Second praises them for their general standard of quality control. Pretty much every issue has something usable, and if it's not, it's easily modified to make it so. Third is the typical contrary opinion, complaining how even when dual-statted, a Dragonlance SAGA adventure bogged down the magazine and wasted space. Even a few pages of non D&D material is too much! Fourth also has a problem with the SAGA adventure - the annoying deus ex machina bits. Yeah, that's a staple of the genre, and a good example of how even if you convert an adventure to another system, it'll still retain the basic assumptions of the original, which in this case skew more towards romantic fantasy than gritty dungeoncrawling. Fifth goes back to being pleased with their diversity, with particular praise for The Unkindness of Ravens. They also want to know if they've ever done an amnesia adventure. Just the one, in issue 22. They're not easy to fit into an ongoing campaign, so they're more likely to appear as a tournament adventure or other one-shot. Sixth is general praise, preferring the issues with lots of short and medium length adventures to ones dominated by a big one. You're definitely going to like this one then. Finally, one complaining that monster HP do not appear to be rolled randomly as they should in the magazine. They've crunched the math and pretty much every adventure has them at average or better. What kind of example is that setting players?! It's just your basic survivorship bias. The ones that were wimpy probably died before they could meet the adventurers. <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" /> How many 1hp wizards did you lose when you were just starting out before you made it to 2nd level? Editorial: Chris's editorial confirms that the issue does indeed contain an Alternity adventure, and tries to thread the needle between selling the game and reassuring all the AD&D fans that it'll still be getting the lion's share of the magazine. There's a whole load of things you can do with the new system that wouldn't work so well in the old one and it would be stupid to ignore them. Which is actually the case for a lot of games systems, as AD&D is looking pretty clunky by now and there's plenty of ways more recent ones have improved on it, but inertia and network externalities are powerful forces and it's hard to get people to switch. Bringing out a new edition and letting the old stuff go out of print will get many to convert, but even that isn't foolproof, and will become less so as the internet makes copying and redistributing digital versions of old books ever easier. There might be parallel universes where Alternity became more popular than D&D and came to dominate WotC's output, with dozens of different fully developed settings, but it's not this one, and I'd wager they're a very tiny proportion of the multitudinous branching potential timelines. In this one Alternity does get more adventures than 5th Age or Top Secret managed, but it's still a small proportion, and they'll be back to all D&D all the time in a few years. Enjoy the variety while it lasts.</blockquote>

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