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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8882120" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 68: May/Jun 1998part 2/5The Artist's Loving Touch: In a fantasy world, one thing to be suspicious of is when a sculpture or painting is a little too perfect. How many times has it turned out that they were actually people directly trapped in the form of artwork by magic instead of the product of a keen eye and much painstaking work with your hands? Romero Selejian is the latest ageing sculptor to stumble across a shortcut and decide continuing to make a living was more important than the lives of others. So he's employed a trio of wererats and their jermalaine minions as kidnappers to find suitably interesting subjects for petrification. The rise in mysterious disappearances will soon attract adventurers one way or another. Whether you investigate the auction house, ask round the streets & taverns for rumors, or just go straight for poking around any abandoned buildings in town, there's plenty of ways into this little mystery story, making it nicely open-ended and suitable for a decent variety of groups. Hopefully they'll be able to figure it out, track him down, kill him or turn him over to the legitimate authorities and realise that the magical gloves he used for petrifying people are also reversible, so you can free everyone rather than having to settle for the Vampire Princess Miyu style bittersweet ending. (although the people who bought the "sculptures" will still be annoyed at their artworks being recalled, which could have consequences in the future.) Both a good idea and decent implementation, but it all feels too short, leaving me wanting more. This could definitely be improved upon by adding a little more detail of your own to make it more than a single session adventure, and if I were to use it I'd do so.Maps of Mystery: Last issue they started doing comics. This time they bring in a proper regular column. (the boundary between a side trek and a short regular adventure has always been pretty nebulous, so the branding doesn't mean much) The idea of just doing a prefab map without all the creatures within detailed has come up a few times in the letters page. (and done in Polyhedron as well as Uninhabited) It provides a middle ground between full adventures that take up a significant pagecount to detail and single line plot seeds where the DM still has to do all the construction work themselves and is particularly useful if you know how to write adventures, but your cartography skills aren't the strongest. It expands the ways they're useful and increases the average efficiency of the magazine, so I'm very interested in seeing if this'll catch on and how frequently it'll appear. First one is a simple two-level fort built into a hillside. There's an obvious throne room at the back, with a pit trap conveniently placed to drop people into the dungeon if supplicants displease the ruler. The rooms aren't just all uniform squares, the routes between them are non-linear and you can infer their purposes by looking at their relation to one-another, making it look like a place that's lived in, not just a series of obstacles to kill invading PC's. A pretty strong starter. Another way in which Chris is really putting in the effort to shake things up around here after a full decade of the formula staying exactly the same.</blockquote>

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