Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9128008" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 85: Mar/Apr 2001part 4/6Lord of the Scarlet Tide: They’ve clearly relaxed their word count limits since the edition change, as James Jacobs gives us a 36 page mammoth that’s not quite as massive as Monte’s last issue, but still comfortably larger than any single-parter for previous editions. It’s time for a world-threatening adventure of the sort they’d never let a freelancer do as an eldritch fungus spreads across the land taking over people’s brains and turning them into the slaves of an ancient imprisoned lovecraftian monstrosity. Can it use them to break free, or will the PC’s manage to foil it? Fortunately, like many a real world fungus, it doesn’t do well exposed to direct sunlight and fresh air so it’s not a completely unstoppable plague. The PC’s arrive in Narwell shortly after the first wave and are attacked by a gang of scarlet children who haven’t learnt subtlety yet. If they survive that first challenge they’ll rapidly be inducted into the resistance and given a good infodump. Do they dare venture down into the wells that the fungus came up through and attack it at the source? Like Kingdom of the Ghouls, you’d better pack as many anti-disease effects as you can get hold of and pay extra attention to protecting your cleric if you want to get through this one, because nearly every encounter (or just drinking the water without boiling it first) has decent odds of you winding up infected and joining the other side if not treated within a few hours. A good reminder that James is very pointedly not one of the people who worked on nerfing energy drain, poison, disease, etc in the new edition and many of his monsters feature inventive new variants on long-term status effects that can really make your players sweat even after the battle is over. From this rather linear start, you then have a fairly large, twisty underground area to wander with lots of different monsters only bound together by the fungal template forced upon them, plus a few uninfected holdouts doing the best they can. It’s all realistically dark and damp so that’s another drain on your resources to deal with, albeit a relatively minor one at the expected character level. If you’re quick you can rescue the remnants of a previous adventuring party sent down and add them to your ranks. You might be able to ally with some of the uninfected monsters but this is a much more dicey prospect for various interesting reasons. Eventually, you’ll find your way to a whole city full of infected kuo-toa, where you can finally find out what’s behind it and reseal it if you’re sneaky. Or if they’re much higher level, they could release the eldritch abomination and kill it for good, as James is kind enough to give it full stats even though it’s way out of the standard challenge range. Either way, it’s a loadbearing boss situation and the fungus loses all its potency without the connection to its master. So I can draw a clear parallel between this and his earlier work in Dungeon (powerful monster mostly trapped but managing to influence the world regardless) and see how he’s refined his implementation over time. Since he’ll use a pretty similar idea again but even larger scale in the Savage Tide adventure path (they both even have tide in the name) I guess those are pretty common in his own campaigns. Not hugely original then, but challenging, has plenty of distinctive flavour and could last quite a while, particularly if the players dawdle or go off on a tangent, giving the fungus time to spread and the DM room to come up with the details of how it affects the rest of the campaign world. It’s nice to have another adventure that’s more about the big concept that could make up a whole campaign than the specific set of rooms and monsters.</blockquote>

Verification