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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9235168" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 93/152: Jul/Aug 2002part 5/10The Storm Lord's Keep: Last issue they did an adventure designed to take you from 20th level into epic realms. Now they have one to keep those 21st level characters busy for a little longer before the DM has to come up with everything themselves. James Wyatt takes us up to the Sulhaut mountains, where the cloud giants are seeking revenge because another adventuring party slew the Storm Lord’s daughter. The PC’s happen to be in the way when he attacks the village containing the last one, with no concern for collateral damage. Unless they act fast, most of the village will be scry & fried by weather magic before he sends in a team of giants riding rocs to finish off any survivors. (ie, you, since you have far more hp & better saves than all these NPC’s) Despite their overwhelming power, the giants will use decent tactics on top of that so they’re still a significant challenge for a party of that level, particularly if you’re still trying to save other people rather than just thinking about yourselves. Presuming you survive the fight and saved at least one other person, you’ll get to hear the backstory. You’d better go and fight him, or run far far away and protect yourself from scrying, (and deal with the guilt of knowing that he’ll be destroying lots more villages before some other heroes successfully stop him) because more attacks will be along every few hours until you do. Of course, he’s up in his cloud island, so you not only need to expend some magic flying or teleporting up there, but also on shielding from the cold and thin air once you arrive, possibly facing further opposition from flying giants and thunder worms along the way. Once there, you have a large castle to sneak or fight your way through, with plenty of attention paid to both how it’s guarded and day-to-day life there. Of course, the Storm King will be in the very highest and hardest to reach part of it, shielded from scrying, so unless the players are particularly genre savvy, they’ll wind up going through a whole load more challenges before they get a chance to dissuade him from his rampage. If you do simply kill him without engaging in conversation, you find out the hard way that he wasn’t simply doing this out of spite. His daughter’s soul had been trapped in a gem by the surviving adventurer from earlier and he wanted to raise her because they’re part of an ancient bloodline keeping a Chichimec imprisoned. With both of them dead, you have an even more apocalyptic and impossible to reason with threat unleashed upon the world. So like the other big adventure this issue, you have an obvious solution that involves pure violence, but if you think to talk to people and do some research with the magical divination powers you could easily have bought at that level, there’s an easier and less violent alternative ending that you could discover. That puts this well up from last issue’s high level adventure, as it’s considerably less fragile when put up against an over-optimised party and is designed to make for an interesting story however they react to it, with enemies that are proactive and use their powers intelligently. That’s how you make epic levels interesting, not moving them in a straight line when they have so many other ways to get from A to Z. Table Talk: The editorial this time is mostly about putting the spotlight on one of their favourite D20 companies. Necromancer Games have been consistently popular since their first releases, with their slogan of “Third Edition rules, First Edition feel” capturing all the people who never stopped playing old school style and felt alienated by TSR’s direction over the course of the 90’s. Now they’re releasing the Tome of Horrors, a mammoth collection of monsters from previous editions that haven’t got official stats from WotC yet. Good thing they haven’t got strict about asserting the concept of Product Identity for the monsters that don’t have a preexisting mythological basis. So this is a reminder that we’re still a few years away from when the WotC higher-ups would get cold feet about the concept of the OGL and start trying to close the door after the horses were already well and truly out of the stable. There haven’t been any big crashes yet, it’s all one big unruly community with new companies joining all the time, leapfrogging off each other’s advancements in a way that was previously impossible and there’s room for both trying new things and bringing back old ones that fell out of fashion. Before you know it, that’ll be over, it’ll coalesce into a few big companies dominating once again and people will be nostalgic for this era of gaming as well.</blockquote>

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