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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9063974" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 81: Jul/Aug 2000part 4/5The Door to Darkness: After their first adventure series finished, there was a fair amount of discourse on what to do next. One idea that was thrown around more seriously than the rest was a series of low level adventures revolving around the Sleeping Dragon inn. In the end, they’ve kept it a one-off, but it’s still obvious that more work has gone into the design of this little adventure than usual. Anyway, the PC’s are staying at the inn when an illusionist decides to prank the inn staff & patrons. Unfortunately, the inn was built on an an ancient ruined elven city and certain magic works at boosted effectiveness there, causing his spells to spiral out of control. Each room has a different flavour of weirdness as people panic and you run from one side of the inn trying to figure out what’s going on. When you do corner the guy responsible his overuse of illusion magic tears open a gate to a mysterious shadowy realm filled with the illusionary monsters encountered earlier in the adventure, only they’ve got rather more bite this time around. Better make sure you’re on the right side of it when the spells expire and it closes. A short and light-hearted adventure, but one designed to leave a lot of questions still open at the end that could lead to further adventures as you try to figure out how to operate the portal intentionally and what’s on the other end. It also has an unusual amount of attention paid to scaling, with three different sets of stats for every encounter depending what level the PC’s are coming in. Like Ray’s adventure last issue, this has a lot of uses both as is and as components for your worldbuilding. It’s a fitting note to say farewell to the most worldbuilding heavy edition on and quite likeable overall. The centrefold is a massive full color poster map of the Sleeping Dragon inn, so you can take it out, unfold it and use it as a full-sized battlemat for your minis. Having been rather underwhelmed by it’s appearance in Dragon first time around, it all makes much more sense in here, after reading the regular rumination in the letters pages about building a setting and adventures around it. Ashtar's Temple: After three adventures that have all pushed the envelope in various ways, it’s time to give 1st level characters yet another basic introductory adventure. A ruined temple taken over by bandits? It would be very helpful if you cleared that out so the a new priest could move in and renovate. There’s also rumours that the temple is haunted. Unfortunately, the ghost is confined to the lower levels, which explains why she hasn’t already taken care of the bandits for you. This turns out to be an adventure of two halves. The aboveground bit with the bandits in the temple, where they’re watching in shifts, respond to your actions intelligently and are willing to negotiate if it looks like they can’t beat you in a fight. Then once you venture underground, it’s more of a static dungeoncrawl where you fight the various mostly mundane creatures that have moved into the rooms, giant frogs, centipedes, spiders, weasels, etc. Once you’ve got rid of all of them, the ghost will be able to pass on peacefully and reveals the location of the treasury key as a parting gift. So this manages to work decently as an introduction to both 2e and 1e style adventuring, although putting the biggest and most tactically interesting fight near the start of the adventure makes the rest feel a little anticlimactic. I guess mixing up the order of encounters is another way to keep things from getting boring as a designer when we already have so many other adventures covering similar ground. Usable but unexceptional. Nodwick experiences the classic cartoon method of getting rid of unwanted bandages.</blockquote>

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