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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9135817" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 86: May/Jun 2001part 2/6Anvil of Time: Oh no. Our first adventure is not only a Dragonlance one, but a Dragonlance time travel adventure by the king of cheese himself, Tracy Hickman. Just as in the original Ravenloft module, you’re teleported straight into the adventure from anywhere in the multiverse with no chance to resist and no way to escape without going through the challenges. (Well, you could leave the dungeon itself, but until you also find the proper code, you’ll be stuck on Krynn, probably in another time period to the one you came from. Depending where and when you started, this might be an improvement) You have to explore the  eponymous Anvil of Time, a dungeon/time machine that exists in multiple ages simultaneously, and figure out how it works. In the process you’ll wind up in the 4th, 3rd and 2nd ages of Krynn at just the right times to interact with important historical figures when they were also visiting the place. Meet Fistandantilus using the Anvil to steal lore from across time and space, Lord Soth when he was still a living paladin, get dragonhunting advice from Huma himself in the 2nd age and maybe even get to wield a dragonlance yourself against a young red dragon. (not enough room for a larger one to fit through the doors in here) No 5th age variant though (although if you’re playing it in an ongoing campaign where the PC’s are natives it’s likely they’ll be from then, since that’s when the most recently released stuff is set) and he doesn’t even mention that period, reminding us that he wasn’t involved with big chunks of the game side of things and fell out with TSR/WotC at multiple points over the life of the setting. So this is basically a Dragonlance version of Castles Forlorn, giving you a greatest hits tour of multiple important moments in Krynns’s history and forcing you to engage with them to solve the puzzle of how to get back home. It has a mix of fair encounters and ones with important historical figures that are overleveled which you’re really not supposed to fight, because if you killed them it would screw up the timestream and who knows how the present might be different when you get back. After the forced beginning it’s not actually that railroady, which means it does offer a lot of opportunities for you to make significant changes to the setting that go outside the bounds of what’s written here, forcing the DM to make up a whole ton of stuff in response to keep the game going. It falls into the category of adventures that are interesting, but also potentially problematic to the functioning of your campaign in a way that they’d never let a normal freelancer write. The conversion to the 3e rules is also a lot rougher than the official books a few years later, with the correspondences between the core and dragonlance gods sometimes rather baffling. Definitely one you should think very carefully about using before you do, particularly in an ongoing campaign rather than a one-shot where you can just ignore any particularly messy consequences. Overall, easily the most annoying 3e adventure in here so far, but still miles better than Bill Slavisek’s Council of Wyrms & Dark Sun railroads, which still hold the bottom slots for all-round awfully designed adventures that would never have been published if not for the name attached to them.</blockquote>

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