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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9057191" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 80: May/Jun 2000part 5/5Side Treks - The Trouble with Trillochs: Time for another adventure that puts the spotlight on previously overlooked monsters. What people think is merely a haunted battlefield with the usual complement of undead to clear out is actually the lair of a necromancer. Unfortunately for him, his summoning of creatures from the negative energy plane turned out fatally and now there’s a Trilloch trapped here, making all the other creatures in the vicinity increasingly aggressive. These include Pech, Galeb Duhr and an Xag-Yi, as well as the expected undead, making sure your cleric won’t dominate the entire adventure. Packing a wilderness bit and 10 rooms into 3 pages, this is a pretty dense little adventure, which is nice to see, and the unusual monsters require unusual tactics to fight effectively. This can go into the solidly above average but not exceptional category which I’d have no problem dipping into if I needed a quick adventure that wouldn’t fill a whole session. The Scar: Ah, here’s a tie-in I remember from the first time around and have been looking forward to actually seeing. Ray Winninger’s example setting gradually built up in Dragon over several years, culminating in this adventure. We’re catapulted into an epic story of an ageing nature goddess and the machinations of evil forces who want to replace her with an evil daughter in the belief that will let them dominate the world. Unfortunately, you’re just 1st level slaves being held in a crumbling ancient temple digging for the macguffin they’re after. Like many a slavemaster, they’re not overly concerned with giving their property enough food & sleep to do this indefinitely, which means you need to figure out how to escape before you lose all your HP to the exhaustion rules. If you can get your equipment back, do some general damage to them (although you definitely won’t be able to beat the Death Knight who’s set up as the big bad for the plot arc in a straight fight yet) or uncover more info about the larger scale story along the way, those are all bonuses. So you have a mildly irritating railroading start to the adventure, but from then on out it’s a very open-ended one which is played in a nonstandard way and designed as not just a single adventure, but seeded with long term plot ideas that could result from it and how to make them work not only in Ray’s campaign world, but various other ones as well. The temple itself is unusually large for a dungeon location these days, with lots of twists and turns and easily repurposed into a more conventional dungeoncrawl. This is all well above average in both design rigour and density of useful stuff and very welcome to finally see.An issue filled with good but not exceptional adventures, this is one that doesn’t break any new ground, but at least does what it’s trying to do well. They obviously have a lot of choices for these last few 2e issues. Let’s see if the final one maintains that standard, and just how dramatically things change after that point in both style and quality.</blockquote>

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