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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8974190" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 73: Mar/April 1999part 1/580 pages. All that acid black dragons breathe doesn't just get squirted from the back of the throat precisely three times a day. A little drip and sizzle really adds to the intimidation factor. Turning up in a graveyard doesn't hurt either, although zombies aren't going to add much of a challenge to a group that's strong enough to take on a dragon. I suppose they're getting into customisation these days so they might be souped up as well, or maybe there's just a lot of them. Let's find out what's inside and how tactically capable you'll need to be to have a good chance of surviving it.Editorial: The editorial is quite unsurprisingly devoted to the climax of their series of adventures. They've had an overwhelmingly positive response, although there are still a few complaints that two months is too long a gap between them. Even fairly large ones like this aren't 8 weekly sessions large so it's a good thing these adventures are designed episodically so you can do other ones between them. This leaves them keen to do a follow-up, but also likely to change things around a bit next time. Maybe they'll do a full issue full of connected adventures so you get the whole series in one go. Maybe they'll do a bunch of low-level adventures revolving around the Sleeping Dragon Inn. Maybe they'll do something involving more general worldbuilding. All depends what they get the submissions to support. So they're not sure where they're going next, but at least it probably won't be boring. One of the best destinations to be heading for when you're an adventurer as who wants to keep on going over the same old already cleared areas?Letters: First letter is in favour of not just keeping up the wide variety of adventures, but using the magazine to do some proper worldbuilding as well. Settings are big business these days, why shouldn't they jump on the bandwagon?Second is in favor of both putting the cover artwork on another page unobscured and the general style of the Mere of Dead Men series. The forgotten realms can become a silly over the top place sometimes and it's nice that they've avoided that. Third wonders what's in the diary referred to in Dark Magic in New Orleans. That was meant to be cut for space reasons but obviously they didn't cut all the references. It's not as if they could have run a page less of advertising or something instead.Fourth is another person who has no problem using the adventures in Dungeon for a wide variety of systems, and would likewise have no problem with them publishing a wider variety of systems too.Fifth thinks that if they do adventures for more exotic settings, they should include a few notes on how it might be refluffed for other milieus. That'd increase the odds of them actually being useful and inspire more readers to hack adventures instead of playing them strictly by the book in general. Sixth is also in favour of fusing a wide range of influences into your own world, both in terms of settings and the people writing in them. If Dungeon became the same few writers over and over it would wing up suffering for it. Seventh talks about something completely different, the tendency for NPC's to nearly always have average or better HP. The DM can't be expected to play dozens of NPC's at once as smartly and distinctly as players do their single one, so HP inflation is a natural way to insure they don't die too quickly and make the fight an anticlimax. Most DM's will wind up fudging the rules for the sake of a better story at some point or another. Eighth is another one who has no problem changing adventures to fit their campaign, and therefore no problem with ones for specific settings and other systems. If the core story is good, you can change the mechanics at your leisure and still get something good out of it. Finally, praise for Challenge of Champions for doing something different and being very easy to use with a brand new group or one with an irregular schedule. People who want everything to be "realistic" medieval fantasy are straightjacketing everyone else's experiences. After a whole edition in which every monster had an ecology section whether it needed it or not I can quite understand why some people would be sick of that.</blockquote>

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