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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8949795" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 71: Nov/Dec 1998part 5/5Dark Magic in New Orleans: Off to another swamp, this time in Gothic Earth, to continue the general semi-aquatic feel of the issue. Marie Laveau, her similarly named daughter and Dr John had a long rivalry over who was the premiere practitioner of voodoo in New Orleans. Dr John’s latest attempt at dominance was trying to polymorph her into an alligator. She had defences up that reflected the spell, his weren’t quite so effective, turning him into a half reptile monstrosity, which means his follow-up plans are much less subtle and even more savage. (spider-man can relate) This leads to a string of weird and nasty murders, which attracts the PC's attention. Can they stop him before he gets to the end of his bucket list of people he has grudges against? Once again demonstrating that MotRD has none of the restraint the WoD has in using real world historical figures in their adventures and making them genuinely supernatural. Design-wise, this is an adventure of two halves, with a linear scene based first half where you're investigating the murders, but due to the nature of the writing there's not much room to come to the wrong conclusion and leave the railroad. Then once the culprit is obvious, you go to Dr John's old house, which is a fairly typical little dungeoncrawl with lots of undead in it and a few other bits of magical weirdness. So the D&Dish part of this is ok, but as a detective story it's pretty weak and needs a complete rewrite putting more areas, miscellaneous NPC's and red herrings in if you want your players to be challenged in any way by it. Adding the two scores up leaves it somewhat subpar but not a complete failure.Between the nostalgic callbacks, building on their ongoing adventure path and including a non-D&D adventure, this is another usually significant feeling issue in quick succession, although the average quality of the adventures isn't quite as high as the last couple. Still, as long as the degree of variety and willingness to push the envelope stays up, they'll make interesting reads even if they aren't all usable in the same campaign. I'm definitely more interested in reading next year than I was at this point in Dragon, where they were being much more conservative and formulaic. Goes to show how much difference the person in charge makes, and that Chris is much more adventurous as both a writer and creative director than Dave Gross. His run is turning out very well so far.</blockquote>

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