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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9055996" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 80: May/Jun 2000part 4/5Side Treks - Sarfion's Collection: Double ooh. Looks like this is the first mention in Dungeon of the Far Realm, Bruce Cordell’s (quite successful) attempt at putting a bit more Call of Cthulhu in our D&D. As is often the case, it starts with a wizard opening a gate there. If he wasn’t mad before, he is now. Now he’s a servant of the Neh-Thalggu, capturing other wizards so they can extract their brains. He’s terrorised and geased the other wizards in his magic school so they can’t talk and there’s not much they can do, but all these mysterious disappearances are bound to attract attention sooner or later, or he’ll pick on the wrong group of PC’s. Since this is only a Side Trek, anyone investigating the place will soon find his secret lab and the abomination lurking there. Both he and the brain collector will try to flee through a gate when their HP gets low. Following is really not recommended in this case. So this is basically just a smaller fantasy-focussed version of the DG adventure in Polyhedron UK. Must be something in the water if both sides of the pond are independently coming up with the same idea at the same time. Since the implementation of this one is less railroady I’m inclined to prefer it out of the two despite reading it second. A Head for Business: Our non D&D adventure of the issue goes a bit Roger Bacon for it’s inspiration. We’re off to an earth very similar to our own, only filled with paranormal weirdness for our first Alternity: Dark Matter adventure. A small-time criminal happened to witness a battle between Sandmen and Hoffman Institute agents. He managed to preserve one of the sandmen heads before their nanites could self-destruct it, hook it up to a computer and force it to speak. Despite it’s deliberate crypticness he’s still managed to get the info to construct some useful supertech and sell it on the black market. This of course attracted the attention of other sandmen who now want to plug the leak with extreme prejudice. Their first attempt attracts the attention of both your agency and the FBI and now you need to figure out what’s going on and stop several further sandman attacks. Capturing the guy and the head is also recommended once you know the score, although destroying it is also an acceptable outcome as at least it means more of them are less likely to show up in the future. Another medium length one which may well actually turn out rather shorter than intended unless the players take the specific solutions intended to get to the next scene, which are not always the most obvious choices. This definitely shows the limitations in trying to write a particular story rather than having branches in your map or plot. Not one I would have put on the pass pile if it were for D&D, but at least they’re trying and it’s an accessible enough read explaining all the lore in a way that makes sense to people who haven’t got the books. Hopefully it can still get a few more people buying Alternity and sending stuff in, then we’ll have enough choice of adventures to apply stricter quality control.</blockquote>

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