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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9032958" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 78: Jan/Feb 2000part 5/5Deepstrike: Not just one, but two Alternity adventures this issue? This is interesting. While the same page count as the fast-play centrefold, this one should take you considerably longer to play out. It is still fairly linear and mission based though, as it presumes the PC's are members of a secret organisation that can call them up any time to give them missions, sending them off to do some James Bond style spy action at a moment's notice. Just going out into the unknown to explore simply for the fun of it is currently pretty rare even in their D&D adventures at the moment and their freshly built systems are even more story focussed. Anyway, your mission, should you choose to accept it, (and you've already been attacked along the way to the rondez-vous point just to make sure you're personally motivated) is to take out a notorious terrorist who's taken over a submarine. Time to go jet-skiing on grav-sleds, as anything larger would be easy to spot approaching. You'll still get attacked by psychic sharks on the way because these things never go smooth and it does make for an awesome looking battle scene. From there you dive down and could sneak your way it when someone goes out the airlock, try to bluff your way in, or resort to explosives or hacking the computer system. The enemy goons will not be too smart, but once you get the attention of the big bad, their resistance will become better co-ordinated. If you get beaten you'll be captured and treated to a villainous monologue rather than killed because that's the genre we're in. You'll also probably get to see a countdown being started for a big missile launch that will cause massive damage to nearby cities if not stopped. This is all pretty fun reading, but feels like it should have been a Top Secret adventure rather than an Alternity one (if that system was still alive) and requires both the players and GM to play along with the genre conventions for it to work. Whether it'll be useful to you or not depends if you like the wackier end of super-spy media. Still, it's much more useful to me than the fast-play adventure, Alternity's statblocks are easily converted into D&D ones and it's a welcome bit of variety so overall it's a qualified success.Map of Mystery goes 3D for a nice big cathedral that'll give you a wide open plan ground floor, plus several small cramped towers and balconies overlooking it for the privileged. You can have a nice big multi-phase combat exploiting both of those, then probably put a dungeon of some kind underneath. This'll speed things along if you want to get sacrilegious.After a couple of mostly boring issues, this one is solidly above average, with both the long and short ones using pretty interesting ideas and a very high amount of non-D&D material. Trouble may be brewing on the horizon, with the all generic, all the time policy of the early 3e years that blighted Dragon as well already looming, but hopefully it'll just be the cream of the crop for the last few 2e issues. Let's find out together as usual.</blockquote>

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