Dungeon Magazine #1 - The crappy debut issue


I'm a supporter of the OSR and strongly believe that a decent percentage of the newer products outshine the adventures published back in the Good Old Days. But, content is content and I've not seen many reviews of Dungeon magazine. I know that at least a couple of the adventures in its pages are good enough to use outright and I suspect there are a lot of good ideas to steal. My plan is to publish one review a week, on the weekend. I'm going to keep them fairly short; mostly an abstract and a few general comments so I don't end up repeating myself over and over again.

Having recently completed my collection at GenCon, we're off!

The hook for Calibar isn't terrible. Assault on Edistone Point would make a decent realistic or low-magic adventure. Into the Fire is a decent dragon adventure with good wilderness encounters. Guardians of the Tomb is rough puzzle/trap/monster encounter.

I hate 2e. I hate the magical RenFaire stuff and the magical society environment and the streetlights of continual light and the garbage disposals of spheres of annihilation and the way it treated the magic and wonder as routine, ensuring that nothing was magical or wondrous. I would have SWORN on deck of many things that these were 2e adventures. When checking it turns out that issue #1 came a few years before 2e. Wow. I had no idea that 1e adventures sucked ass so much.

I hate boxed text. My eyes glaze over when I listen OR read it. I start to think about succubi art. I groan. I LOATHE it. There's a lot of boxed text in these adventures. There's also a lot of arbitrary forced decisions. "There's no cleric available to join the party" and the like. It's some kind of enforced DM fiat for no particular reason. It's easily ignored but it shows and reinforces bad style. Along those same lines there's some "You can't do X because it would ruin the adventure" crap. Characters have scry spells for a reason: to keep their 7th levels character alive. Yeah, they are gonna know there's a dragon. Better to let smart players plan than punish someone just so you can surprise them. After all, we're rewarding player skill, right? There is also this annoying tendency in some of these to quote the rules back to you. Weapon Speed rules. Disease rules. Other rules. Great. You know more than me. I'm happy for you. If your adventure depends on me knowing obscure rules then you write a sucky adventure. If your adventure doesn't depend on me knowing obscure rules then why are you wasting all this time telling me about them?

But there is a special place in my heart, next to my ball of white male rage, that is reserved for the Overly Detailed Backstory. Look, I get it: there's dragons and white walkers and they are gonna fight. I don't need page after page of what color gout the swineherds brother has when the swineherd is only barely glimpsed from the road. There is A LOT of space wasted on backstory in these adventures.

I threw up a little in my mouth when reading most of these.

The Dark Tower of Cabilar
by Michael Ashton & Lee Sperry
Levels 4-7

A Prince is setting off to retake his kingdom but he needs his ancestral crown. The backstory is too long but the root of the hook is a decent one with the godmother hiring the party. I can see this as 'one task of many' to retake his kingdom, with a shrewd godmother and so forth. It could be a decent campaign or a good series of adventures to take place sprinkled through the background of a different campaign. It's also just about the only good part to the adventure. A vampire lair with charmed monsters of every type scattered throughout, it's full of boring magic items, monsters just thrown together (although from the Fiend Folio), and bullshit encounters, like a charmed mimic acting as a stairway step. There's a powerful magic items ... usable only in this dungeon that must be destroyed to get out. Lame to the core.

Assault on Eddistone Point
by Patricia Nead Elrod
Levels 1-3

There's some signal towers and the local mayor hasn't heard from the nearby one in awhile. If you go fix whatever then I'll give you 2k in coin. Too much backstory, again, but the ultimate plot involves a merchant house doing some sabotage to get ahead a bit. It's mundane enough to be a decent low-magic adventure or maybe an intro adventure to some kind of City of Intrigue or Merchant Wars campaign. Make me think of Harn. (That's a compliment for a low-magic adventure.)

Grakhirt's Lair
by John Nephew
Levels 1-3

Local heroic lord comes up with some lame excuse why he can't go solve a problem with norkers and instead sends the party. Local NPC's of note stair in to the air and whistle while twiddling thumbs when asked for help. This is mostly a lame dungeon crawl that ends with an invisible assassin assassinating a party member. That's uncool. One part of the text spends almost half a page describing the operation and construction of a single secret door ... I can taste the bile coming up again ... There is a monster you can talk to and a little monster intrigue the party can play a part in, but the monsters all fight to the death and don't go get help and their uber-super boss scries the party the entire time but doesn't help any of his minions out ... IE: the designer wants the boss fight to be cool so he gave the DM a way to Cosmic Zap anything interesting the party does. Lame. There are some decent loose ends at the end that could be turned in to more adventures.

The Elven Home
by Anne Gray McReady
Levels 1-3

A fey home, so the Elves in the title are more 'fey' than traditional D&D elf that has had all of the whimsical fairy sucked out of them. I like fey, but this one was hit & miss. This seemed a little mundane for a fey home and was organized pretty poorly. It's more a short side-trek or wilderness locale than an adventure. A couple of the outdoor elements are interesting. Needs to be A LOT shorter and A LOT more evocative.

Into the Fire
by Grant & David Boucher
Levels 6-10

The cover adventure ... so a dragon. The usual 'too much backstory' nonsense but overall a decent adventure and the highlight of the issue. The backstory and hook aren't TOO terrible, once you wade through all the text, but neither are they average. The king sends you to look in to blah blah blah. There's a decent amount of wilderness travel in this and those encounters are decent. They are LARGE encounters. Hordes of pilgrims. LOTS of soldiers (~100) on patrol. A force of 20 ogres or 12 trolls or 100 bandits. I thought that an above-average number of the random wilderness encounters were terse but evocative. Not quite old Wilderlands territory but pretty decent. The dragons lair is pretty good and it's presented as a challenging 88hp foe. There's a wizard's tower that seems almost like an afterthought and is not done well at all; I wanted more weird magic stuff in there. The dragon has too many gimp items: anti-scrying, cold protection, etc. I guess it makes sense he would use them if he had them, but it seems a little too convenient and 'lets gimp the players' to me. There's a decent non-standard magic sword and lots of hooks to follow-up on. One of the better high-level adventures, I think.

Guardians of the Tomb
by Carl Smith
Levels 3-5

Another short one. Just a single room tomb on a swampy island. The party gets locked in and is then assaulted by SCORES of shadows. Ouch. Extremely verbose and ultimately more trap than adventure, since there's almost no treasure.Would make a decent wilderness encounter, if you were an asshole DM that thinks 3x as many shadows (3HD, drain STR) as characters (levels 3-5) is fun.

good stuff - subscribed

Sounds like it's going to be a long painful slog and an astronomically low useful content ratio.

Quote from: Roger the GS;687330Sounds like it's going to be a long painful slog and an astronomically low useful content ratio.

That's just his reviewing style.

It's ironic he hates long introductory text, yet constantly uses it in his reviews.

Quote from: JeremyR;687366That's just his reviewing style.

It's ironic he hates long introductory text, yet constantly uses it in his reviews.

Actually, I confirmed his opinions with a bootleg peek at the issue in question. Pretty lackluster stuff for the inaugural issue.

Well, this is going to be fun. We've got what? Ten years of 2e issues to get through while the reviewer spews bile? Sounds as enjoyable as "The Complete Annotations to The Forge by RPGPundit".

Quote from: Roger the GS;687330Sounds like it's going to be a long painful slog and an astronomically low useful content ratio.

Dungeon was still a lot more useful than most of the modules that tsr published during this period.

Dungeon's output during the 2e period was pretty much the only source of decent-to-good AD&D adventures for people who didn't have the classics.

Quote from: TristramEvans;687405Well, this is going to be fun. We've got what? Ten years of 2e issues to get through while the reviewer spews bile? Sounds as enjoyable as "The Complete Annotations to The Forge by RPGPundit".

Sounds like fun to me. But then, my lack of sanity is not remotely in question at this point, so I do not consider myself a reliable source.

Good stuff Bryce! Hopefully the quality of the content improves as the magazine finds its feet. Given the time period, however, it might be like panning for the odd gold nugget from a river if dross.

Quote from: TristramEvans;687405Well, this is going to be fun. We've got what? Ten years of 2e issues to get through while the reviewer spews bile? Sounds as enjoyable as "The Complete Annotations to The Forge by RPGPundit".

Less, actually. Pundit can be pretty fun when he goes at it guns blazing.

JeremyR Summary: Academically interesting, SUX, Low-magic/Harn-ish, generic.

It's important to remember that Dungeon Magazine is still in 1e land, 2e not having appeared yet. A cursory search shows that the only other set of review of Dungeon magazine are on rpg.net, and the poster only made it to issue #17 in two years of writing. My views seem to vary significantly from his. The Dungeon Index, a summary of all adventures, appears to currently be down.



The Titan's Dream
by W. Todo Todorsky
Levels 5-9

This is an adventure through a Titan's dream. It's a weird and confused, or maybe disjointed?, affair. Of all the dream adventures I've seen it tends to be one of the better ones. Which still means it's total bullshit, but it tries harder than the others. An incredibly long and useless backstory and introduction lays out the situation: there are three dreams, each with five acts in them. The players randomly wander about from act to act and dream to dream in no particular order until they do the right thing in an act. That act is then unavailable. Once they complete everything then the titan wakes up, they are released, and they can proceed with the bullshit hook from the backstory.

I'm being a bit too hard on the backstory. The titan here is a classical greek titan sitting in a classic greek temple. He's an oracle and the party is sent to him to solve a dilemma for The King. The Titan eventually answers in a riddle. That's actually a pretty appealing scenario once you yank out all of the specifics. Yanking this adventure and providing the titan as an oracle for the party to go visit to find out how to do X could be pretty interesting. It's the kind of classic adventure trope that I can really get in to.

The dreaming ... not so much. Same old issues ... no real threat and no real consequences. Fake XP awards and fake treasures. Yeah, sure, the party can die. Dream adventures always do that. But somehow these always seem like 'kp duty' adventures; they feel like punishment and no one cares about the outcomes.

Each act has a brief description, two paragraphs or so (Yeah! Terse!) and then some suggested tasks that the party can complete to 'win' the act. Generally if the party does some kind of good or heroic act then they pass and if they don't then they get to repeat the act at some later stage. For example. Merchant Bob didn't sacrifice to Poseidon so he stole Bobs fiancé. Act 1 has the party arriving outside Bobs house in the midst of a crowd just after Bob has learned the news. The party can pray to a god to intercede on Bobs behalf, volunteer to go on a quest to recover his fiancé, or restore order in the somewhat rowdy crowd. All of those are examples of a pass condition. Very classical. Most of the potential combat situations have a couple of suggested tasks that don't involve combat. There's no magic items available in the adventure, they all dissolve when you return from the dream, but some coinage, 2,000-5,000 per character is suggested as being allowed to bring out. That's not too bad at the lower end of the adventure scale (level 5) but at the upper end (9) it may be more worthwhile to kill the titan and loot his ass.

As an early type of story game driven by the D&D engine it's kind of interesting, as is it's reliance on the Greek Classics. Maybe a good Mazes & Minotaurs adventure? I want to like this adventure but it may be that my 'hate dream adventures' conditioning is too strong.

WTF is up with the lack of treasure/XP in these things?


In The Dwarven King's Court
by Willie Walsh
Levels 3-5

The characters get to investigate some thefts in the court of a dwarf King. Let me get this out of the way: mysteries don't work in D&D, or most RPG's. The players have access to just too many ways to get information. At this level we have Augury, Detect Charm, Know Alignment, Speak with Animals and maybe Speak with Dead and Locate Object. And that's just the clerics list. Druids and Wizards will have their own allotment. The only way past this problem is with a bizarre assortment of customer tailored magic items just to fuck with the players and deny them the powers their characters have earned. So, the adventure sucks.

A decent attempt is made at a character-driven story by giving some decent details of a dozen or so key NPC's, their personalities and how they act and react. It's like a Poirot mystery: everyone has something to hide. This is ten ruined by providing overly long and uselessly detailed room descriptions in order that they make up the majority of the page count. It would have been REALLY helpful to have had all of the NPC's detailed on one summary page for the DM to refer to during play. Of course, detecting one secret door virtually ends the adventure before is starts, through the use of a ghost and his ring of wishes. The hook is lame: the characters get visions telling them to go the dwarf kingdom. How about you don't even make an effort next time?

There's a lot of stuff to explore with the NPC's and with the environment/rooms (incriminating evidence and red herrings) and if you put some hard work in to prep'ing it you could get a decent murder mystery to run. But then the party will ruin it in 5 minutes by casting a spell.

But, hey, you get 500gp at the end of the adventure! Talk about a rip off ...



Caermor
by Nigel D. Findley
Levels 2-4

A devil worshipper cult in a remote village. This is a pretty tight little adventure. It's got a good low-magic/peasants feel to it and a couple of strong NPC's. It's got the "too many words" problem and could use a lot more village color: more locales and NPC's to interact with. Some local 'petty evil' types have summoned a devil ... and it worked! They are now in over their heads and don't realize it. The villagers blame someone else for their troubles (ripper apart sheep, etc), and can be stirred by the evil doers. There's a decent little 'insular mob' vibe that goes well with the 'inbred morons' vibe. It really conveys the spirit of some of those elements from the Lovecraft stories. There's another group of adventurers in the village but almost nothing is done with them. There's an attempt at giving them personality but not much in the way of a timeline for them. If you fleshed this out a bit while summarizing a lot of the content in the adventure then it would make a decent low-level game.


The Keep at Koralgesh
by Robert Giacomozzi & Jonathan Simmons
Levels 1-3

This is a decently-sized four-level dungeon. It's a BASIC adventure and so we have to sit through the usual condescending crap, like "don't tell players they just found a +1 sword" and so on. Only a page and a half of backstory/introduction, only half of which is read-aloud, so this one wins the "briefest introduction" award. There's a slightly generic feel to this combined with some random specific content. It reminds me a lot of the Palace of the Silver Princess or Castle Amber or maybe even the Lost City ... the way their content was bit generic and then they would have something specific. Really a kind of disconnected set of encounters, I guess.

There's a very nice rumor table included as well as some creepy-ish wilderness wandering monster entries in order to highten the tension prior to reaching the dungeon. The first level is my favorite: caves with lava pits, fissures, and a couple of puzzle type rooms. The second level has a totally generic looking map (hints of symmetry. Ug!), with levels three and four having more interesting "keep interior" maps.

It's quite an extensive adventure with a decent number of things to discover. It's just the generic magic items, generic monsters, generic rooms, etc that I'm having a problem with. I'm probably being too hard on this ... it's not weird and I like weird & unique but it DOES have that same strong vibe that Silver Princess, Castle Amber, and Lost City have. Those are not terrible adventures (as I recall them, anyway ...) and neither is this one. It just needs a lot of work, IMHO, to beef up the creatures and magic items.

Man, I would love to have a complete Dungeon collection.

So many worlds from so many imaginations.

I've got a nearly complete run of TSR-era Dungeon magazine, and it's worth its weight in gold. Sure, lots of the adventures are lousy, but lots of them are great, and even the worst ones can be strip mined for material (e.g. maps, NPCs, outlines, locales, monsters, etc).

I've yet to see a published dream adventure that works.

At the table, the only dream adventures that work are ones that still have meaningful consequences and rewards for the "real world". Since the dream is fake, this usually means useful oracular information.

(For example, in my current campaign several of the PCs have lost large chunks of their memories. A recent dream sequence revealed details of the memories they lost. This was a reward more precious than gold for them.)

But the sorts of rewards and consequences that work in a dream adventure are hyper-customized to the individual PCs experiencing the dream. It's impossible for a published adventure to provide that sort of experience.

Writing this, I do recall that I once ran an adventure in which half the party ended up in a dream and half the party was still in the real world. The distinction here was that the actions taken in the dream world could affect the real world. I suppose an adventure like that might work although it would still be relatively difficult to pull it off. (In my case, the entire thing was unplanned. Actually, both of the dream adventures I've described here were unplanned.)