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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6277589" data-attributes="member: 27780">Best of Dragon Magazine 5part 2/4Instant adventures: I've seen quite a lot of articles over the years that help you get an adventure going quickly when you're short on ideas. In light of that, this particular one doesn't seem that impressive, as it has neither proper random tables to take the brainwork out of it, or the kind of detail that Dungeoncraft managed over the years. Sorry, but I'm afraid you've been superseded, and can remain in the archives. Modern monsters: Ed Greenwood continues to play fast and loose with the 4th wall, as he will do for many years to come, making sure that if D&D PC's find themselves on modern day earth, they'll have plenty of suitable challenges, even at higher levels. (after all, a tank is the equal of many big ugly monsters. ) Yet again, we're reminded that a few decades ago, more fantasy stories were set on earth in the distant past/future, or had protagonists from the real world transported there, and even stories that started off with no apparent connections to present day earth would develop them. That trend is very interesting to examine. How many coins in a coffer: Ah yes, the great hassle of encumbrance, weights and volumes. If you compare D&D coins to real world ones, they seem absurdly big and heavy. I think that falls under the category of excessive abstraction. Of course, since this stuff gets ignored a lot of the time, it's only a problem if you let it be one. I think at this point, this is best left as water under the bridge, and a vague hope that they'll pay more attention to the math in future editions. Certainly not worth obsessing over when we could be having fun instead. What do you call a 25th level wizard: The oldest article in this collection, this still looks pretty short and goofy, as a semirandom way of generating long pretentious titles, but is also still useful for any system, and possibly not as ridiculous as some real world people's lists of titles. Meh, it fills a gap in the page count neatly. Sometimes that's the important thing when you're an editor and have some hard choices to make about what to include or leave out. Ruins: This reminder that the adventure can start before you go underground by exploring abandoned buildings, along with an extensive list of examples still seems pretty decent, as well as being good practice for your repurposing skills. What kind of monsters would move into a ruined building, and how would they fiddle with it's original layout to make it feel more like home for them? It's not a no-brainer like the random dungeon generation tables, but you can still refer back to this one again and again and find something useful to your current situation. I think it deserves it's position here. Libraries: This bit of random generation, giving you a random topic for a book plucked off the shelf in a library also seems like a lifesaver in the middle of a session. It is indeed the kind of thing that will show up repeatedly, so you might as well bookmark it, because you know how easily stuff like this gets lost if you don't keep up to date with your dewey decimal system sorting. Short but sweet, it could probably be made more comprehensive and applicable to games other than D&D style fantasy, but I'm not complaining too much about that.</blockquote>

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