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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9162159" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 88: Sep/Oct 2001part 2/6The Door from Everywhere: Roger Moore is our established name kicking things off with a massive adventure, which leaves me slightly less worried coming in than the last two issues, but still not entirely confident this made it in on it’s own merits. The fact that it’s a Forgotten Realms one revolving around recent big metaplot events increases that worry again. The king of Cormyr died in a non-raisable way in a recent novel, there’s an inexperienced regent on the throne and a whole load of threats both internal and external that have the country in a bit of a mess. The PC’s are hired to deal with bandits along the Moonsea Ride. This turns out to be a lot more complicated than expected. There’s a set of ruins with a magical portal in it and a whole bunch of factions are fighting over the prize, with things made more challenging due to the fact that magic is unstable in the vicinity. The portal leads to an ancient Netherese fortress with a whole load of other portals, only some of which are functional. (of course, you could always use the ones that currently go nowhere to further expand the adventure) Each of the other locations has it’s own challenges. Can you explore these places without dying and secure it, giving you an easy way to jaunt around the realms and accelerate trade? (a distinctly tricky ongoing challenge when new challengers could come from any portal at any time) Or will you decide it’s too dangerous and shut it all down so no-one can use it, which is the default solution the adventure expects of you, leaving Cormyr safer but stuck at the same old tech level. So this is an updating of the ancient magitech portal network idea we saw for Mystara in issue 7, and genericised in issue 10. A cool concept that definitely deserves reviving for a new generation, as it both makes for interesting adventures in itself and can make travel in future adventures a lot easier for mid-level parties. It’s not without it’s flaws though, as this is very Forgotten Realms specific and would take a lot of work to convert to another setting, plus it’s written in a style that harks back to the very worst parts of 2e, spending a good quarter of it’s pagecount on backstory and mundane setting details before the actual adventure gets going. Still very usable if you’re playing a FR campaign, but another case where this could have been both shorter and better if they’d edited it with the same strictness they do freelance submissions.</blockquote>

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