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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9175430" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon Issue 89: Nov/Dec 2001part 4/6Headless: Didn’t we just have to deal with rolling heads in Polyhedron. Now we have to deal with headless undead in this adventure? I guess that’s two monsters from one body, which is very efficient use of resources for a necromancer. Maybe you could make the spirit into some kind of incorporeal undead as well and stretch it even further. Actually, it turns out that we only have to worry about the wraiths and spectres, as the heads are needed by a Derro savant trying to build a gate to the abyss and win Orcus’s (who you’re not expected to fight in the adventure, but is fully statted out just in case the PC’s really screw up) favour and the bodies are just waste byproducts. She needs a LOT of them to make it work though and obviously that attracts the attention of heroes one way or another. Off you head to the icy mountains of Sterich to stop them, preferably before the final ritual is completed and the deadgate is opened for business. Despite the big bad being a Derro, the dungeon was originally a frost giant one and so it’s built on a massive scale, with relatively few rooms, but all the rooms and corridors at least double normal size. (no worries about how the big monsters get in or out here) Rather than trust minions who might rebel, many of her minions are simulacrums, including multiple ones of herself, so you’ll already have beaten multiple weaker versions of her before you get a nasty surprise facing the real thing. So this is a fairly typical James Jacobs adventure: a well above average number of creatures that can inflict permanent damage upon your characters, some clever exploits of 3e rules minutia and a climactic final encounter where you really don’t want the creature trapped in another realm of existence to come over here. Like Steve Kurtz, he has a definite set of things he does over and over that most writers don’t and he’s sticking to them. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on whether you like those particular tropes as well. Nodwick’s party abuses speak with dead to beat the final encounter in puntastic style.</blockquote>

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