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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9020567" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 77: Nov/Dec 1999part 1/584 pages. Face the wrath of Keraptis!!!! Dragon and Polyhedron are boldly announcing the new edition, while Dungeon is still catering to nostalgia with one of the big silver anniversary tie-ins. How implausible will the evil wizard’s escape from seemingly certain doom have been, and what has he been up to since then? Let’s see if they’ve got the ambition to finish off the millennium in style before trying something completely different in the future. Editorial: Chris delegates the editorial for a second issue in a row. Stephen Danielle matches the feat Tony Diterlizzi pulled off in issue 61 and illustrates the whole issue, (except the Nodwicks) plus filling this space with the story of how he got into this mess in the first place. It’s all the Tomb of Horror’s fault. They went to great effort to show you what was going to be killing you horribly if you made the wrong choice and when he started to make his own adventures he assembled his own visual aids from magazine clippings, then started to edit them to better fit his vision, draw new bits of artwork and before you know it you’re a skilled artist in your own right. So when the magazine wanted to do an old school homage, he was the first guy they called and a good year of hard drawing later (hey, at least it meant he didn’t have to hustle for more jobs in the meantime) here we are. It’s nice when following your passions leads naturally onto bigger things. Well that explains things pretty neatly, while also reminding us how long the process of creating an issue is, with various parts being completed at different times, sometimes years apart before finally putting everything together and reaching publication. If you don’t have the patience for that this probably isn’t the field of work for you. Letters: First letter is very impressed by their reintroduction of antipaladins without making it a mindless hackfest. They weren’t so impressed with the Mere of Dead Men series and the contortions it took to keep each episode fully functional standalone. If you’re going for a big series you need to really commit to it. Second is from a freelancer who recently had her adventure accepted by the magazine (although it’ll still take another half a year to actually appear) highlighting the rigorousness of their editing process. They bounced the manuscript back and forth five times before finally committing and although it was hard work, all the changes were for the better. That’s how they maintain their standards and if you want your adventure to appear in here, you’d better get used to it as well.Third is also full of praise for The Forgotten Man and their recent output in general. Keep both the writing and production values sharp and he may actually subscribe. Fourth is full of ideas for what to do with the Sleeping Dragon Inn. Can they make it into a place the PC’s want to hang out regularly at and get sucked into more urban adventures? There are worse themes they could choose. Fifth Wants to see them do more non D&D adventures, and most definitely does not want an issue to be devoted to a single massive adventure. A regular column of reader-submitted plot seeds would also be nice. Like a traps column, they don’t say no to the idea, but it’ll need a bunch more positive responses before they give it any serious consideration. Sixth has plenty of general praise, and once again singles out The Forgotten Man as particularly good. A mix of old and new ideas gets the best results. Seventh thinks they’re doing too many vanilla modules at the moment. Next adventure series should be a higher level one involving the planes. Probably not all the way through, but a lot of them will climax by going offworld one way or another.Finally, someone wondering what’ll happen to Dungeon when the edition change hits. Glad you asked. All the adventures will switch to the new rules straight away, no gradual transition, no conversion sidebars, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. If you’ve recently submitted one using 2e rules the chances of it getting in the last few issues before then are now very low indeed, but if you get something off straight after getting hold of the new ones they go up quite a bit. Well that’s not going to lead to a bunch of rush jobs where they’re still working from the game balance assumptions of the old edition at all, is it now?</blockquote>

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