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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9013682" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 76: Sep/Oct 1999part 3/5Side Treks - A Day at the Market: There's a Gray Ooze loose in the marketplace! You go years without one and suddenly two turn up just a few months apart from one-another. Probably both inspired by something recent in wider media, like most of these kinds of synchronicity. This one isn't giant sized, but it has just eaten a wand of wonder carried by a wizard who was exploring the sewers and is expending charges erratically as it digests it. Just to make things even more complicated, the first of those summoned a rhino, which is also rampaging through the market, probably requiring you to split the party to fully contain the havoc. Beyond that, the difficulty of this encounter will vary a lot depending on what random results you get each round. (particularly if you're using one of the expanded results tables from the Encyclopedia Magica) So this falls firmly into the playfully chaotic kind of encounter that could be funny, but could also be very scary depending on what those wild surges do and if they cause any long-term transformations to your characters. We haven't had any of those in a while, and this is sufficiently different to it's polyhedron counterpart that they don't feel repetitive put together, so this is very welcome, even if it would be better placed in the april issue.Mertylmane's Road: As is often the case, the cover story is the longest adventure in the issue. Main Map of Mystery man Craig Zipse takes us up to the far north in the middle of winter to get supplies through one of the roughest routes going. War has made the previously safer ones dangerous enough that they feel risking goblins, wolves, yetis and who knows what else on rarely used Mertylmane’s Road is the smarter option. You’ve got to escort a caravan of dogsleds through 300 miles of challenges for not much pay or lose your heroic reputation in the area. Time to get out those rules on what happens if you aren’t properly insulated or start to run low on supplies as you go through a lengthy sequence of mostly linear encounters. Warm up with a small group of bugbears. Then an ambush from a somewhat larger group of orcs. An ominous bunch of frozen bodies from a previous attack by the wayside. (that you can get a bit of information from if your cleric memorised speak with dead today) Then things get a little weirder, as you’re harried by groups of yeti led by our extraplanar cover star, a new monster from the plane of ice created just for this adventure. At this point you reach a fork in the road and are faced with the choice of heading straight to your destination and skipping the second half of the adventure, or going north to find out the cause of all these troubles. Turns out the frost giants are getting expansionistic, and they & their minions have taken over an old dwarven hall. (although they can’t fit in big chunks of it, so they’re busy renovating, leaving it open to the elements in multiple places.) Do you have what it takes to turn back the tide and drive them out of the place? This winds up feeling more like a two-round Polyhedron adventure than a Dungeon one, with the first session a linear sequence of combat encounters and the second a fairly short dungeoncrawl that could also probably be done in a single session. It pushes you hard to do certain things while punishing you for not doing others despite there being very little chance you’d think to do them. (ransoming the giant leaders instead of killing them to prevent this from leading into a blood feud? How many groups would think to do that even if they had the rope to hold a giant-sized captive?) There’s plenty of good elements in here, with an interesting new monster, new magical items and a map that actually covers a large area, but the way they’re put together in the adventure itself is pretty annoying. Frankly, I’d be more interested in seeing them tackle the obvious sequel, where the two human countries have to patch up their differences and join forces to deal with full-on war against the frost giant armies. That would be much more ambitious and to my tastes.</blockquote>

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