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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9321619" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 97/156: Mar/Apr 2003part 5/10Demonblade: Time to go back to the old formula of finding an ancient artifact that goes on to cause all manner of trouble in the modern age. Only this time it’s not a giant mecha, but just your basic evil intelligent magical sword with a demon bound in it. Another idiot thought they could get the upper hand and wound up being turned into a meat puppet. Now they’re attracting more lower-planar creatures to their service and turning the land into a messed up hellscape. Guess who’s going to have to stop them, then figure out a way to hide away or destroy the artifact so this doesn’t happen again. You’ll be attacked by a patrol of humans & trolls with a leader riding a nightmare, who will initially fight to capture rather than kill, so if you lose you have a second chance as prisoners before being sacrificed to summon more demons to the area. If you also don’t kill them all at once you can easily get some exposition about what’s going on, although sensitive info like the password to get into the castle will take a little more persuasive effort. Pressing onwards, you’ll soon get to the abandoned village of Manderaun, which as usual for these things holds further clues, a few hiding survivors, bits of treasure and plenty of monstrous patrols if you hang around in the open like dumbasses. Eventually you’ll have to figure out how to assault the castle where the big bad lairs, which is filled with demons, undead, human minions and lots of gruesome tableaus of the people who weren’t so amenable to conversion. Eventually you’ll fight the big bad in a dramatic confrontation on the rooftop, his body fully transformed into a Balor and able to use his flight and ranged blasting powers to full effect. If you beat him, any surviving monsters flee, but now you have the twin questions of what to do with the sword and how to deal with the power vacuum in the area & attract people back to the village, either of which could make up an adventure in itself. The kind of adventure that doesn’t do anything new or unexpected, but does at least do what it it does quite competently, isn’t afraid to get dark and twisted to show you just how nasty the demons involved are, and has a new prestige class in the appendix to sweeten the deal. Sometimes you’ve got to use the old classics despite everyone knowing how the story goes and at least the editorial regime now lets them show a bit more gore.Table Talk: Having announced that they’re going monthly in a comically throwaway manner on the other side of the issue, this side talks about what this will actually mean for the contents. Things will be going down to around 100 pages an issue, which means you’ll still be getting slightly more content per year than before. (albeit at a much higher price) They’ll be favouring each side 60/40 in alternating issues, and you’ll only be getting minigames every other month, with the alternate ones used to do more existing D20 game and RPGA articles. So it’s not quite a full return to the pre merger Polyhedron days, but it is definitely a step backwards aimed at mollifying the people who were previously subscribed to Polyhedron but not Dungeon and felt a bit cheated by what they got over the past year. Looking at how few issues there are left it obviously still doesn’t work out long-term, but we’ll see which side the strongest complaints come from as we get there.</blockquote>

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