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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9217097" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 92/151: May/Jun 2002part 3/12The Swarm: We had to deal with a Borg situation last issue. Now we have the more organic kind of hive as a swarm of eusocial spiders have moved into mount Athrof, working together with goblins to take it from the dwarves that were it’s previous owners. (the fact that they took it from the goblins by violence a generation ago as well is of course completely irrelevant <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) The PC’s will encounter the refugee dwarves on the road, arguing about their next move. After a few minutes, this will be interrupted by another attack of hive spiders, dragging the PC’s into the fight whether they like it or not. Hopefully they’ll decide to do the heroic thing and stick around afterwards to retake the mountain & rescue any survivors. This leads into a nonlinear, mazy little dungeoncrawl with lots of random encounters padding it out, but relatively few fixed ones aside from when you reach the hive’s queen. So this is relatively old school in the way it’s designed, giving you plenty of room to customise it and letting the PC’s wander for a while rather than just throwing one encounter after another at them in quick succession, maybe having a chance to rest & heal, maybe having to deal with wandering monster attacks in the middle of the night. Overall, another one on the decent but unexceptional level, with enough tricks & traps to keep you on your toes, the novelty of a new monster you need to figure out the quirks of, but not doing anything groundbreaking.Side Treks - Return of the Blessed Damozel: Like the critical threat, this side trek is designed to introduce a recurring antagonist who’s probably too tough to kill first time you encounter him, but won’t stick around and fight to the death. The PC’s come across an old woman berating a young man. Since he lost his fiancee he’s fallen into bad company & joined a gang and her ghost is not pleased about this. Shaming him out of this path turns out to not be too hard, but unfortunately the gang is the kind that doesn’t take kindly to quitters and the rest of them will rock up ready to rumble. To make things much worse their boss is secretly a rakshasa and will support the gang with magic and his hellcat pets, but avoid revealing his true nature or getting into a physical fight and retreat if it looks like his minions are going to lose. This of course leaves things wide open for him to come back later and get revenge with another scheme. But hey, at least you’ll have made a new ally as well. So once again they’re encouraging enemies that have motivations beyond killing the PC’s straight away with no regard for their own safety and planning ahead for a more interesting campaign, which I definitely approve of. The danger of course is doing too many similar things in quick succession, which is less pleasing as diminishing returns set in fast.</blockquote>

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