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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9024276" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 77: Nov/Dec 1999part 4/5Ex Keraptis Cum Amore: Another instance where the cover adventure is more ambitious than all the other adventures in the issue put together and the only one designed to last more than a session. Once again Keraptis (or someone saying they're Keraptis) has absconded with the powerful magical items retrieved from White Plume mountain a couple of decades ago, leaving a piece of parchment with a cryptic riddle behind. This is almost definitely a trap, but are you going to let a little thing like that stop you? Don't bore us, get to the chorus. It's time for a high level deathtrap dungeon that exists for the sole purpose of attracting adventurers and adding them & their stuff to its master's collection. Backstory is kept to a single page rather than waffling on, you're not breaking through the walls to do the encounters out of order unless you're even more ridiculously overpowered than intended, trouble can come from any angle and all the most interesting ways you can die are lovingly illustrated in the centrefold art booklet. It's exactly what it sets out to be, an old school throwback that's both more dungeony and more dragony than everything else in the issue put together. Many of the rooms can be bypassed without fighting if you solve the riddles, but said riddles are in an ancient language so you'll only be able to do so if you kept up your studies or memorised those magical translation spells. Getting through may involve retreating to rest and heal up repeatedly, which fortunately it will give you the room to do. (as long as you packed enough supplies.) The climactic final encounter takes you to a demiplane where you face the big bad and a ton of minions in a gladiatorial arena. If you fail to kill him for good (and oh does he have precautions agains that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> ) he will of course become a vengeful recurring nemesis. A good reminder of just how much fun you can have when you stop being ashamed of playing D&D and wholeheartedly embrace it's tropes, but also how rarely they do that these days, watering it down with lots of padding that's very unlikely to be of use in actual play. Will you just get on with it, for Zagyg's sake?!!!!Side Treks - Stage Fright: Time for a combination of two gimmicks we've seen before, but not put together. In issue 39 they had an adventure set in a theatre. In issue 43 they had a Slaad chestburster situation. What if the lead actor was infected and the chestbursting happened live on stage while the PC's are in the audience?! You'll need to step up and do the heroic thing straight away before it grows to full size and starts infecting more people, which won't take long if it gets down to the basement and gorges itself on the rodent population. The question of if you should stop to pick up your full set of armor & weaponry will be a significant one. (another reason why any smart group invests in portable holes or transforming outfits) So yeah, this is Alien in a theatre. Whether it'll land for you group depends on if that premise sounds awesome to them, or a little too derivative and cheesy. It all feels very 2eish, with a lot of backstory for the size of the actual encounter. It makes exactly the same basic lore error its predecessor does, of having Red Slaad produce more red ones with their infection instead of blue ones. Overall, probably not one I'd use, but more because I don't see my players taking a trip to the theatre as something that'd arise naturally IC in the course of play.</blockquote>

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