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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9138865" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 86: May/Jun 2001part 5/6Mysterious Ways: Our final adventure is another long and highly setting specific one, as Thomas Harlan takes us off to crusades era earth for a tie in with his series of short stories in Dragon of the same theme. Like the Robin Hood adventure a few issues ago (which is obviously set in the same era, so using them in the same campaign seems quite doable if your PC’s are the globe-trotting types) magic is considerably rarer than the average D&D setting and mostly viewed through a christian framework. But there is still some very powerful magic out there, including the True Cross, which makes it harder to contact the lower planes just by existing. There’s always someone who thinks maybe more demons and magic in the world would actually be a good thing, for them at least, so an evil sorcerer steals the True Cross in a vulnerable moment when it was being moved from one place to another. Guess who has to get it back and preserve the status quo for the world without anyone ever knowing. Follow the trail from Bethlehem to the dead sea, where they have to get to the top of the Masada plateau. There they’ll need to stop them from summoning the demon that’ll carry the True Cross away. Fortunately, failing at this doesn’t end the story there. You’ll still get a chance to chase it to the city of Petra where the true mastermind of this scheme lurks, to stop him before he finally figures out how to destroy the cross and open a permanent gate to the abyss. If you succeeded in retrieving the cross, you’ll still get info revealing that this is where you should be headed next to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again, but you won’t have to rush there to stop the ritual and can come in better prepared. Either way, you’ll wind up fighting much the same set of encounters in the same order, but at least it’s not the bad kind of railroad that makes no allowances for anything but one outcome and falls apart if the players or dice do anything unexpected. Decent for a tournament style adventure, with some nicely written setpieces, but mostly linear and quite specific in setting, so it wouldn’t work in a lot of ongoing campaigns. Still better than the average Polyhedron one, but probably not one I’m ever going to use.</blockquote>

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