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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8983088" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 74: May/June 1999part 1/584 pages. I want no greens at all! Red, yellow, purple, black, all fine. Even a hint of green, you're fired! Well, it definitely gets this cover to stand out, making things look bleak but not too dark to make out what's going on. Let's hope the adventures inside strike a similar balance of distinctive but not overwhelming types of peril. Time to see what new challenges remain now we've reached a third of the way through the magazine's run. Editorial: Like Polyhedron, they want to take playtesting their adventures more seriously these days. So the editorial is encouraging you to sign up to do some of it and going over their process. Send in the SASE with an idea of what kind of adventure you want, (just knowing what kinds of adventures are popular is also a factor in what ones they accept) play the adventure within a month or two of getting it and send the questionnaire back with as many useful notes as you can think of. Do the difficulties of encounters and amount of treasure feel right, did any obvious plot holes come up or the players pick an unwritten path? It may add months onto development time but you'll be thankful you did, and it's not as if some adventures didn't spend over a year in the buffer waiting for the right combination of other adventures to make a good issue even in the TSR era. They don't mention it, but obviously it'll be even more important once they announce the next edition while all the rules for that are still undergoing revisions. It'll be interesting to see how they handle that and what the proportions of adventures written by the staff natively to the new system vs ones obviously converted from old 2e submissions are.Letters: First letter praises Kingdom of the Ghouls and wants more big nonlinear adventures like that where the players have lots of freedom in where they go and what they do. That's where the fun in RPG's over other types of game lies, the freedom to make choices not strictly covered by the rules and have it still work thanks to the intelligent responses of the GM.Second is a lengthy one on the filtering process in a magazine that gets an even more lengthy response, reminding us just how many submissions they get for each one that's accepted. Even the people who do get published regularly have more than half of their submissions knocked back, they just don't get discouraged. Don't think it's some kind of nepotistic conspiracy, grow a thicker skin and send in some more ideas. Third praises them for putting more ideas for continuing the adventures in recent issues. It's a good way to ease novice GM's into writing more of their own campaign instead of just using prefab adventures. Fourth is generally positive about their recent developments, but would like more themed issues. That'd be more useful if you want a bunch of connected adventures than waiting months for the next instalment in a series. Fifth would also prefer their next big set of linked adventures be delivered in one big load instead of spread out. In the meantime, keep up the good quality maps and Nodwick hilarity. Sixth also wants any adventure series delivered over a shorter timescale and kept as generic as possible so lots of different campaigns can use it. Seventh is mildly annoyed that the mere of dead men is all the way up in the northwest away from the well detailed forgotten realms locations. If you want a shorter trek to & from the Dales & Cormyr you could put it in the swamps of the Vast instead without too much trouble.Finally, another reminder that just because an adventure is for one system, doesn't mean you can't convert it to different one. Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu, even Star Trek, all have had adventures from here used in his campaigns. Maybe they could get native ones that people could convert to D&D instead sometime.</blockquote>

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