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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9419674" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 100/159: July 2003part 3/10100 issues of Dungeon Magazine: This is pretty similar to the retrospective in issue 300 of Dragon, looking at the ups and downs, although as they’re younger and have had fewer editors it’s easier to get them back. Only Anthony & Michelle are missing, and they were only here for a few issues anyway so who cares? Roger Moore tried to take some of the workload off the games division, only to wind up with more than he bargained for in the chaos of Kim Mohan’s departure. After a couple of years they found Barbara and the two of them became a solid tag team for nearly a decade, doing most of the work on a magazine each and helping out with the other one where needed. Eventually she needed an assistant too and they lured promising freelancer Wolfgang Baur into the office. He didn’t stay long, but his time at the slush pile gave him a new appreciation of how few the good submissions are and how to spot them. Dave Gross reminds us that a good adventure starts with a map, so you know what’s out there if the players don’t follow the story and try something else. Chris Perkins reminds us just how many adventures he submitted that didn’t get published, and lists 10 of them, mostly on the sillier end where it’s quite clear why they rejected them, plus a mammoth Planescape one that would have filled two entire issues that they might have liked, but just wouldn’t have worked in those pre-adventure path days. All are pretty clear that Dungeon is a team effort not only between the staff, but the many people who submit adventures. Even the slews of bad ones show how many people care and want to be involved and without the competition they wouldn’t be able to keep the magazine as good as it is. All fairly heartwarming. Like Dragon, they show all the previous covers in miniature along the edges of the pages and like Dragon, this does make the modern ones look worse by comparison due to all the annoying promotional stuff they now put on the covers. Not all their decisions are good then, but enough to keep the place going and new readers coming in. Old Embers Never Die: It has been many years since we fought Flame, possibly even centuries IC, so it’s very unlikely you’ll be fighting him for a third time with the same characters. Nevertheless, this adventure remains in continuity with the previous ones, coming up with an amusingly convoluted reason for his return. In fact, he’s back twice! Firstly, a kobold priestess unearthed and animated his skeleton. Secondly, he left a small piece of his flesh with the githyanki for cloning, so now there’s a younger version of him missing a load of memories newly arrived on the prime material trying to amass another hoard. You could encounter either individually, but of course it’s more fun if you wind up doing both in the right order and finding out about the lore connecting them. So you’ll be chasing the troublesome kobolds of the Bogwoods, which involves going through swampy terrain filled with lizards, oozes, ghouls, will o’ wisps and other such unpleasantness. Eventually you’ll get to the kobold lair, which is a short, linear dungeon that culminates in an encounter with a gargantuan dragon skeleton in a room with no exits large enough for it to get out of. (unless they can temporarily de-animate it and carry the bones out individually or something.) So straight away, they’re making a basic design error that the original adventure avoided and whether that’s IC stupidity on the part of the kobolds or OOC bad writing I’m not sure. Since you’ll find out if you search the place properly afterwards that the kobold priestess has been engaging in a bunch of failed experiments to give the skeleton it’s intelligence and memories back I’ll be charitable and go for the one where she’s a dumbass meddling with forces she doesn’t understand. (and might well kill her even if she succeeded. ) This exposition will also give you the rough location of Flame’s previous lair, which she planed to visit in the hope of collecting “spiritual residue”. This leads you to the Western Mountains for the second half of the adventure, which is your basic silver anniversary return to the x format where you have the same map, but new monsters, including several different types of half-dragons, as apparently Flame got lonely during his time there. Explore it and you’ll eventually reach Flame himself, who is smaller than in the original adventure and only has a fraction of the treasure, (but still enough to be a logistical challenge getting home and spending) but is still a higher EL than in 1e because dragons in general are much more powerful now. So this is two short adventures, which put together aren’t terrible, but aren’t as imaginative as the original, with less depth of personality or thought put into the tactics of the creatures that you’re encountering, how they relate to their environment and much longer statblocks filling up the space instead. It feels like nostalgic pandering by someone not quite as smart as the original writer. Another case where commissioning a tie-in from a staff writer results in something not quite as good as the adventures which fought their way out of the slush pile on merit alone. It’s still competently done enough to be usable, but no-one would be getting excited about it if the serial numbers were filed off and it was presented as an all-new adventure. Nodwick has the unenviable task of trying to get Flame to pay child support.</blockquote>

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