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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9366812" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 99/158: June 2003part 2/8Critical Threats: We have two of these in quick succession before we get to any proper adventures. First is a particularly large spooky crypt to stumble across. 400’ high, with the bottom part flooded, with a massive headless statue in the middle and loads of sarcophagi around the edges. The perfect place to have a dramatic final boss fight, or to spend hours searching all the coffins on all the floors for that specific macguffin that’s been interred in one of them. I can definitely think of multiple video game examples of both of those concepts, so although it’s a bit of a cliche it’s definitely a very usable one. Second is Phyx, a Choker who’s managed to accumulate enough class levels to qualify for Assassin. He was captured and trained by the Drow, who honed his skills to the extreme with their cruel training methods until an attack went particularly badly and the whole house was wiped out in retaliation. He managed to slip away in the chaos and now sneakily kills any spellcasters he encounters, having developed a pathological hatred of them over his time of enslavement. So you could find yourself making an alliance with him, but it’d be a fragile one against a common enemy, that’d be at risk as soon as he realises there are spellcasters in your party as well unless you very carefully work through his trauma. Far more likely the first thing you’ll know about him is when he springs a trap on you when you’re exploring the underdark. But since he’s pretty good at getting away if the fight goes against him, you may have more opportunities to develop some kind of relationship. This one definitely packs a lot of interesting ideas into its small package. Quadripartite: What could cause the gods of good and evil to work together? Only a threat to the very foundation of the world that they fight over, that would destroy the world or change it so radically that morals as we know them lose all context. Dragonlance just barely managed to deal with the threat of Chaos, and it changed the very cosmology of the world for decades, with the consequences still felt today. Oerth’s brush with the Far Realm, on the other hand, is likely to be less devastating, as they have a lot more gods, who are less inclined to go off in a strop for centuries because people aren’t worshipping them the way they want. Anyway, the PC’s are contacted by a priest of Nerull, who’ll deliver the exposition that the town of Shiboleth is ground zero for a new Far Realm incursion and they need to get hold of a macguffin called a Primal Anchor to have a chance of stopping it. This is of course hidden in a shrine full of puzzles designed so only the right sort of people can get hold of it. (which is obviously why he hasn’t already taken it himself) When you solve the first riddle to get in, you find out that the macguffin has been split into 4 pieces, which need to be combined in a magic cauldron to be used. On each side of the cauldron is another riddle, which you need to solve to get to each piece. You’ll get teleported to 4 different locations around the world, each with their own distinct challenges. A brass tower in the desert full of fire creatures. A sealed crypt full of undead. An icy tundra where you’ll face frost giants & winter wolves. The middle of the sea, where they’ll be promptly swallowed by a mechanical leviathan which has the final piece as its heart. Thankfully as soon as you find a piece you all get conveniently teleported back to the shrine, giving you room to rest up before tackling another one.Once you’ve done all of these (in any order) you then have to go and use it on the colossal abomination rampaging across the land, which is still a decent challenge even after being weakened. Then once you’ve done that, it would be a very good idea if you followed the trail of destruction back to the cultists who summoned it in the first place, who predictably use the Alienist prestige class from their recent sourcebooks. If you didn’t kill the priest of Nerull earlier, he’ll try to steal the artifact and sneak off sometime during these last two fights, setting up further adventures. Another example of their new willingness to embrace epic but cheesy plots, this packs a lot into its page count and definitely looks like it could fill quite a few sessions. If you like old school nonsensical puzzle dungeons, putting together macguffins and fighting giant monsters it embraces the bit more wholeheartedly than 99% of adventures in here and definitely deserves some praise for that.</blockquote>

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