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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9200497" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 91/150: Mar/Apr 2002part 5/12Kambranex's Machinations: After stuffing their expanded page count with a record-breaking number of short adventures in quick succession, they finish with a slightly more ambitious medium-sized one that might actually last longer than a single session. A wizard managed to venture into the Belching Vortex of Leuk-O and survive, coming back with new insights on how to merge magic and technology and introduce crossover elements to the Oerth. This obviously requires subjects for his experiments in creating half-machine minions and so the nearby village has been having a very rough time of it, eventually fleeing and hiding out in nearby caves with lots of magnetic rock that interfere with the functioning of the machines. While exploring the mountains, the PC’s come across one person being pursued by a whole gang of cyborg ogres. Hopefully their heroic impulses will prevail over cowardice and they’ll save him, then they’ll stick around to find out the wider context and decide to go to the wizard’s lair, kill him and take his stuff. From there on out it’s a mostly linear trek through a bunch of encounters. An ambush by a bunch of previously assimilated villagers. When you reach the bottom of the volcanic mountain he lairs in, some cyborg spider-eaters are guarding it. If they have both flight and fire resistance, they can skip a big chunk of the adventure and go straight to the top of the mountain, flying over the lava filled caldera to get to the wizard’s lab in the very centre, although they’ll still have to deal with a swarm of rasts. More likely, they’ll have to explore the tunnels in the mountain that are currently lava-free, where you’ll encounter some friendly but irritating magmins who’ll show you the way through if you kill an annoying pyrohydra for them. Then you’ll have to climb up several hundred feet to get to the lab through it’s steam vent, and you’d better not time it wrong. The lab is of course filled with mechanised creatures and other magitech weirdness, but most of it is busy and will only attack if you attack first. Get through all this to the very top and you’ll find Kambranex himself, who it turns out did not get out of the other dimension unscathed and has gradually deteriorated to the point where he’s on perpetual life-support. If you beat his guardians you can unplug him without a fight and shut the place down. (or of course see if you can figure out how to work the tech yourself and take over, muahaha) Between the cyborg body horror, comic relief magmins and tragic climax which pointedly does not end with you fighting the big bad, this winds up feeling like an 80’s sci-fi movie, possibly one with a tie-in toy franchise and cartoon spin-off that’s a lot more sanitised. Since most of the people playing D&D at that time would be 80’s kids, this makes perfect sense as the kind of crossover you can put into Greyhawk without ruining the tone, where Thundercats and Wheeled Warriors travel the stars mixing magic and superscience seamlessly before crashing down on a more primitive world. So despite being a bit more linear than I prefer my adventures, this is still pretty nifty, drawing on established lore for the setting and building on it further in a way that means it too could be referenced in the future. The rules for creating half-machine creatures also look like they would be pretty handy if you were planning on running the Mage vs Machine stuff from Dragon 258 in 3e, so that adds to the general utility of this adventure. I could definitely get quite a bit out of this one even beyond running it as is.</blockquote>

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