Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9216157" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 92/151: May/Jun 2002part 2/12Interlopers of Ruun-khazai: As is increasingly frequent, our cover story is one by an official WotC writer that’s also a tie-in to their latest book. David Noonan shows us how to use the Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook in ways you might not immediately think of as we visit a githyanki fortress in the astral plane. It disappeared mysteriously a century ago and has now reappeared just as mysteriously. What happened and what dangers & treasures might be found within? Unfortunately, you’re not the only one curious about this, and you get there at the same time as both Githyanki and Githzerai expeditionary forces. You might be able to join forces with the Githzerai if you’re very silver-tongued, but more likely you’ll wind up in a complex four-way hit & run battle between both of them and the current owner of the place, a single high level githyanki who faked his death to avoid becoming lich-queen chow and is really not keen on the other ones finding out he’s still alive. He’ll use scrying and remote magic to harry all sides and avoid confrontation until you get right into the middle of the fortress and are in a position to take his stuff, at which point he’ll have to act directly out of desperation. Of course, since it’s the astral plane and this is only a small island the place is very three dimensional, so you could explore it in all sorts of orders and the amount of time you spend on it could vary widely. This is actually pretty interesting then, designed so your experience with it will vary massively from group to group depending on the choices both the players and DM make, where the groups meet up and how they react to each other. The map design is considerably superior to Steve Kurtz’s take on the concept back in issue 43 and it’s completely devoid of railroading, giving you a decent amount of room to do it in a pure hack & slash way or take a more social approach with the rival factions.  If you made more than one of the invading groups PC’s you could have a very interesting and tense skirmish game. Since it manages to be both well above average in design rigour and unusual in format, I can wind up recommending this one after all. Sometimes what you need is a new sourcebook to help you deliver a fresh take on how to put an adventure together. Critical Threats: This column is relatively small scale statistically, which actually means they can concentrate more on the personality of the subject. A salamander with a single level of fighter? That doesn’t seem like much in terms of extra combat prowess, but you shouldn’t underestimate fighter bonus feats, which he’s spent on improving his mounted combat skills. Now he rides a Thoqqua and is unexpectedly good at doing ride-by attacks. Despite being small size he’s tougher than most of the marauding humanoids you’ll encounter at low level so he can give you a nasty shock, and he revels in the destructive effect his mere presence has on the prime material plane. He seems like a good recurring antagonist to fight at low level, use his riding skills to get away when the battle turns against him, and then fight again with a few more levels added each time at multiple points through the campaign, even if he probably doesn’t have the smarts to be the ultimate big bad. There are plenty of examples of antagonists like that in computer games so why not try one in your campaign and hope the players don’t get a string of crits and kill him before they can form any emotional attachment.</blockquote>

Verification