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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9044921" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon issue 79: Mar/Apr 2000part 5/5The Akriloth: Our final offering is by far the highest level and least generic, being heavily tied into recent Forgotten Realms supplements and their metaplot. Mel Odom's Threat from the Sea trilogy saw the various races of the Sea of Fallen Stars threatened by the armies of Iakhovas the Ravager. He was heroically defeated, but the city of Voalidru remains an undead-infested ruin. Perfect place for adventurers of both the heroic rescuer and mercenary looter varieties. To make things more dramatic, apparently a magic horn in the temple of Eadro has the power to repel undead, which could be the key to clearing the city. Obviously, your adventuring party gets hired to retrieve it. Despite there being a whole load of sea to travel and city to explore, it then skips straight to the temple part. That doesn't mean it's short though, as the temple is a massive 4 level complex they devote 18 pages to. Despite this, more than half the rooms are left undescribed, with a short random generation table at the end so you can make the place feel less empty if you want. So this is a throwback to Undermountain, only underwater, which is another style of adventure design they've hardly used at all in recent years. It feels like less than half of a potential bigger adventure, with tons of room for the DM to add more details before, during and after the temple to make the adventure longer and more personalised. It doesn't hit the heights of epics like Kingdom of the Ghouls or Tortles of the Purple Sage, both of which manage to cover far larger areas while also making the adventure feel less sketchy, but it still deserves fairly high marks for being an ambitious adventure using a less common kind of format, plus a few more for being an underwater adventure that takes it in it's stride that the PC's already know what they're doing down there. If only they had made it a multiparter that did the whole concept justice instead of leaving the rest of it up to you.We have a second helping of Maps of Mystery this time, showing us another abandoned keep in the same issue (conveniently given a location on the wider map) and the two levels of dungeon below it. The second of these leads to some more natural looking caves which have open ends so you can head into the underdark and possibly link this up with other maps. Maybe things coming up from those is why it wound up abandoned in the first place. This issue feels like they're already moving into the policies they'll adopt next edition, with lots of well-written but very generic low level adventures with more actual dungeoncrawling in them than the 2e years. Still, two higher level, more unusual ones as well is a better batting average than the last few issues and they're all very usable, so I can't complain too much. Overall, it's still a net positive to my resources and another step closer to completion, so onward we go.</blockquote>

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