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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8932306" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 70: Sep/Oct 1998part 4/5Kingdom of the Ghouls: Another particularly significant adventure in quick succession, as Wolfgang Baur releases his magnum opus, backed up by a tie-in ecology in Dragon and which he’ll return to again in 5e. It’s time to go full Lovecraft/Clark Ashton Smith, where ghouls aren't just feral scavengers only concerned with their next meal, but an ancient and complex underground society that inducts living people into their immortal ranks selectively. (still got to have plenty of corpses to eat, after all) Unfortunately, this isn't the World of Darkness, so they aren't maintaining an equilibrium on their overall numbers and staying a secret with the help of still-mortal puppets who control the media, but an aggressively expanding underdark empire that's spreading across the oerth destroying the settlements of other underdark races along the way. The PC's find out about this via a passing through a village full of refugee deep gnomes who fled to the surface, which will hopefully motivate them to head down there and do something heroic. If they do, they'd better pay close attention to logistics and look after their healers, because it's a long mazy journey to reach the capital city of the ghouls, teleportation is blocked by the magical radiation of the underdark and you're facing a lot of enemies with paralyzation & disease effects. If things go badly you could well face a lengthy difficult retreat to the surface with a crippled party or be captured by the ghouls & stripped of your gear to be a future meal. So this is a long brutal trek designed to take months to play through both IC and OOC, as the characters delve increasingly deeply into the underdark, fight the ghouls and hopefully save & make alliances with other underdark denizens against them. If they play their cards right, they could find themselves at the head of an army when they arrive at the capital, which lets you resolve this in an epic mass combat scene of a kind we've seen maybe 2 or 3 times in the history of the magazine. If not, they'll have to find a sneakier way to explore the place, take out the leaders and destroy or steal their powerful macguffins, because there's no way you'll be able to fight through literally thousands of extra-powerful ghouls on your own. After reading, this is indeed one of the most ambitious adventures they've ever done in here. It doesn't displace Tortles of the Purple Sage from the very top spot in either size or nonlinearity of the different ways you could explore it, but it's still a densely written sandbox covering a vast area, not just a single dungeon or city, which gives you plenty of freedom in how you approach it and room to add on further areas as a DM. It might be slightly smaller in page count than Umbra, but it'll last much longer in actual play. It's not the very biggest or best thing they've ever done in here, but it's comfortably in the top 5 by several different metrics, which I think is more than good enough to deserve it's classic reputation. It is nice to see them be more ambitious and produce adventures that could make up a whole campaign in themselves rather than just little standalone stories designed to fill a few sessions.</blockquote>

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