Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9367794" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 99/158: June 2003part 3/8Map of Mystery is also a double bill. First is a Githzerai Monastery on the edge of a massive chasm in hostile terrain, which definitely helps make it more defensible. Lots of little cells for the monks to sleep and a large communal area in the middle. Second is a temple of Boccob, which is smaller and in more pleasant surroundings, but built on surprisingly similar lines. I guess they’re both religious institutions, and despite their very different ideologies still have the same practical day to day logistical concerns. That’s an important lesson to teach GM’s who aren’t trying to make endlessly sprawling nonsensical deathtrap dungeons.Mount Zogon: Tony Mosely has been putting his own interestingly misanthropic perspective on the adventuring life over in Dragon for over a year now. Now he expands his workload with another comic in the same style. (and probably world as well) Galeena is a young druid who got a bit pre-emptive with the whole killing other druids to advance in rank business. This earned her an “accelerated graduation” from druid school, which both she and her talking mushroom seem completely unbothered by. Where will she go next? (the clue is in the title) Fish Story: After one big adventure where it’s obvious who the heroes, villains and even worse villains are right from the start, it’s time to do one with a little more moral ambiguity. The PC’s arrive at the small town of Spate’s Grove, only to find it in a bit of a crisis. A bunch of locathahs have taken over the watermill and are making demands in Aquan, which unfortunately no-one in the village speaks. Presuming someone in the party does, (or has translation magic) and you don’t leap straight to the violent approach you’ll find out that they’re refugees, as the lake they live in has been attacked and they made an ancient treaty with the town’s ancestors for mutual support. Unless you want to break the rules of hospitality and fight them, or have them doing the equivalent of crashing in the townsfolks basements indefinitely until more accommodation can be built the best solution would be going back to the lake and clearing out the troublemaker. This turns out to be a fairly complicated business. The trouble is being caused by the ghost of an evil locathah who was trying to unravel the secrets at the bottom of the lake. A wizard once bound a water elemental down there to ensure there was always a plentiful supply of water in the region and the ghost wants to figure out the secret of it’s binding and take control. The elemental is of course very bored and lonely after centuries of being trapped down there and wants to be free, but if you just kill or banish it, the water levels will drop dramatically, leaving the other locathah unable to live there anymore anyway. To get the best ending, you need to lay the ghost to rest (which you can’t do just by beating it in a fight) and free the elemental but persuade it to stick around and be friends with the locathah, which isn’t quite as preferable to it as going home to the plane of water, but a lot better than the previous situation. So there is a “perfect” ending here where you don’t have to do much fighting and everybody lives except the ones who were already dead, but there are also a lot of lesser success states the more murderhoboey PC groups are more likely to stumble into. That makes this a very pleasingly written little adventure with plenty of hidden depths that you could run through with multiple groups and get very different results with. Not a record breaker, but well above average even by Dungeon’s standards.</blockquote>

Verification