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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8916106" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 69: Jul/Aug 1998part 2/5Slave Vats of the Yuan-Ti: So far, Dungeon has been almost entirely episodic. One two-parter, a couple of sequels to popular adventures, plenty of adventures set in the same world that are stand-alone but have minor connections a DM could choose to put together, but nothing forcing a lengthy commitment purchasing every issue that has a part of the larger adventure for it all to make sense. And actually, it looks like while the Mere of Dead Men series may have more connection between it's various parts, as well as a canonical place in the Forgotten Realms, they're still making sure that the individual parts can also be used standalone. After all, dismal swamps infested with monsters can be found on many worlds, as are stalwart heroes. You could remove the framing device and put each of these adventures in different swamps around your own campaign world. But anyway, the swamps north of Waterdeep have been unusually troublesome of late. You've been hired by Sir Justin Melenikus, a Paladin of Helm, along with several other adventuring parties. (which neatly explains why he isn't out there doing it himself despite being higher level than you, the problems are too many for one party so it needs a more co-ordinated approach) Your first assignment is to investigate the abandoned manor or Wolfhill House, which they believe is being used as a hideout by smugglers. They're not wrong, but things are a lot more complex than that. The leader of the smugglers is actually a Yuan-ti pureblood, using the mundane criminality to gain resources to create brainwashed clones to increase their influence over the world in general. Having the typically high intelligence of his race, he's prepared a contingency plan for if adventurers come blundering in, involving sacrificing a clone of himself and using illusions to hide the important parts on the manor so they can lay low and go back to plotting world domination once the adventurers have gone, thinking they've cleared out everything. So this is designed so the players can have two outcomes and still get to the next adventure. They could defeat the obvious monsters but miss the more subtle ones, go back to Sir Justin and claim their reward and be assigned their next mission next session. Or they could realise something fishy is going on, get to the secret areas and face tougher challenges, but also gain more treasure and clues that there's a bigger conspiracy at work, which will hopefully lead them to investigate things more proactively. It does a careful balancing act of catering for both dumb dungeoncrawlers and people who want to know the history of a place, how and why the monsters got there and what they actually get up to day-to-day when adventurers aren't around. It is corralling their choices behind the scenes so they'll get to the next part of the plot either way but at least it's letting them deal with the individual scenario the way they choose and the worldbuilding parts of the adventure are well above average, as is the use of nonstandard monsters with templates and class levels to keep the challenges interesting. Even though Chris is only editing rather than writing it still shows his hallmarks in monster design, much of which will become common practice next edition. So this is a step forward rather than a bold leap, as they're still trying to juggle doing something new with pleasing their more conservative readers who just want more standalone adventures to use as they please in their own campaign, but it is a well done one. Looks like this experiment is indeed going to be a success. (after all, they wouldn't have produced more and longer adventure paths if the readers had panned this one)</blockquote>

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