Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9174343" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 89: Nov/Dec 2001part 3/6Rivers of Blood: Another tie-in adventure straight away as we’re off to 10th century eastern Europe to supplement the themed stuff in Dragon 290. Several different chieftains are fighting for control over the lands around Kiev, (Plus ca change) and the PC’s get to play an important part. They’ll be expected to side with the underdog, and protect the village of Ovotsk. However, they’re sufficiently outnumbered enough that whether they win or lose the battle, it’s obvious they can’t win the war and so the remaining villagers flee. You have to lead a ragtag bunch of refugees along the Dneiper, which unfortunately means going through dangerous rapids, a haunted wood and the witch fens. An ogre wants you to pay tribute to the spirit of the river, which is entirely real and will be another much tougher combat encounter if you kill him instead of paying up. The witch will lure some of the dumbass villagers away so you need to rescue them before they become lunch. Finally you’ll reach the town of Sarbas, which thankfully is owned by a relative of your boss so they’ll be very hospitable. While resting and recovering, you find out that the warlord you fought on the battlefield earlier is selling the slaves he took here, giving you a perfect opportunity to deal with him one way or another without all his army and rescue even more villagers. So this is less basic than the previous adventure, but it’s even more linear, being very much a tournament style adventure where you may get various degrees of success or failure, but if you don’t go in the direction it expects you to or try something too smart the whole thing falls apart because there’s nothing written outside the rails. That’s not satisfying setting-building at all. Dealing with two sub-par promotional tie-ins in a row leaves me rather irked with this issue.</blockquote>

Verification