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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8986457" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 74: May/June 1999part 4/5Night of the Bloodbirds: Stirges. Y'know, we haven't actually seen that many of those around lately. They were a staple in the days of big ol' dungeoncrawls with regular rolling for random encounters, but faded away with the rise of more plot-centric adventures. Some people obviously still like them though, as we got a recent second ecology on them in Dragon and now this. A farm is having trouble with large quantities of them attacking their cows and asks for help. Should be simple enough right? Nah, this is still the 2e era so they've got to complicate it up with some plot. The boom in the stirge population isn't just part of natural breeding cycles in response to good food supply and favourable environmental conditions, but being actively bred and trained by a tribe of hobgoblins led by an ogre mage, then set upon their rivals. To stop the problem from coming back, you'll have to follow the surviving stirges back home when they retreat, or engage in an active search of the nearby wilderness instead of just waiting around at the farm for trouble. As usual for an adventure like this, there are several other things out there you could encounter depending on which way you wander, of various degrees of helpfulness if you're smart enough to talk to them instead of just attacking. Another adventure that's quite short for it's size that's in the midground between sandbox and linear plot-driven adventure. Quite usable but not exceptional along any axis.Preemptive Strike: Paul Culotta is back again for the longest adventure this issue and also one of the highest level ones they've ever done. It's time to drag the PC's away from their domain management for a kingdom level threat. The red dragons and fire giants of the smoking mountains have teamed up, which means you need to get out your griffons, pegasi, flying carpets or whatever else you've accumulated over the years and dust off those arial combat rules for some epic dogfights. If you don't already have something to do the job, you'll be given a griffon and a crash course in controlling them, with plenty of potential for comedic mishaps over the several days of frantic training. You can also get a carpet of flying from the lair of a bunch of perytons that attack along the way, (good month for them for some reason) and/or persuade a local copper dragon to join the fight if you approach him diplomatically enough. Once you've assembled your crack team of mismatched flyers, you've got to head to the castle on top of mount bellows, where you have a massive fight with multiple fire giants riding red dragons, then dismount and head into the castle & dungeons beneath it to deal with the remaining fire giants and their firenewt minions. A serious threat on a kind of epic scale they rarely do in here and using rules they use even more rarely, while not forgetting to put some moments of whimsy along the way, this is great fun to read and looks like it'd be pretty awesome to play as well, although the high bar for entry means not that many groups will be able to play it as part of a proper campaign starting from 1st level. If you have managed to work your way up and accumulate a good selection of magical items and followers, this looks like a good capstone to get you to actually use them all to full effect instead of just hoarding all those one-use items forever, against enemies who also do cool things in battle rather than just having big numbers. If you're in a position to use it I can thoroughly recommend you do so.</blockquote>

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