Quote from: jadrax;758857You know, this thread has turned out to be way more useful/interesting than I expected it to be.

Yeah, that was a great cat picture.

Quote from: JeremyR;758999Yeah, that was a great cat picture.

Touché!

Dungeon Magazine #20

The Ship of Night
Wolfgang Baur
AD&D
Levels 7-9

This is an underdark adventure, ala D1, to find an abandoned dwarven city and "the ship of night". Some old lame hook wants the party to bring back word of what this weird thing is; her only references are a budget in some accounting references and the name of the project: The Ship of Night. What follows is an underdark adventure straight out of D1, complete with player map and hex & line map of the underdark showing major, minor, and natural passages. I really really really don't like the hook; it strikes me as not trying at all and that MAKES HULK ANGRY!!! A sage wants you to go look in to things. It's not even a Rosebud type thing, which be kind of cool, just the normal everyday old "sage wants us to go". Dragonslayer AND Citizen Kane did it better. The underdark has six programmed encounters and a wandering monster table. The wandering monsters table is used, as instructed, to "liven up a dull section of travel." That is lame. In a dungeon the wanderers act as a kind of push your luck timer; the more time you are in the more danger you are in as your resources are depleted. Wilderness wanderers though, because they only happen once or twice a day, should be full fledged encounters; interesting things that happen with interesting folks, be they monsters or otherwise. This is just a generic underdark wandering monster table that isn't particularly interesting at all, at least not in the way D1, D2, and D3′s were. The five encounters are, generally, less than thrilling. Two are guardposts, straight out of D1. Just little set pieces with derro (the primary enemies in this adventure.) There's also a little derro mining camp, a gargoyle lair, and the main derro encounter, in the lost city the players are traveling to. By far the most interesting encounter is the lair of a drow necromancer. She's got a nice little set up going, along with her juju servants and, remarkably, does NOT attack on sight. Her area is well described and interesting and she's put out there as an ally to the party. I find that sort of thing MUCH more interesting than a plain old 'she attacks immediately!' type of encounter. Roleplay possibilities abound when the monsters & creatures are treated like real people with their own ambitions other than simply murdering the party. Don't get me wrong, I love shivving an NPC in the throat with a dull spoon till their head pops off and then using it for a puppet as much as the next PC, but at least give me the option, and the background support, to talk to them first. That way I can get to know them, get avarice over their treasure, and weigh my chances for murder hobo'ing. There is some oblique references to her being at odds with the derro but this is never really explored or explained, just a reference to 'her enemies the derro.' and another in their section about her being an enemy. I'm not sure if something was left out because of a bad edit or what, but that needed to be expanded upon.

The main derro kingdom/encounter is weird. The whole thing is set up with heavily guarded gates such that you can't sneak in. And the derro attack on sight. But then there's this whole 'market day' thing going on inside, as well as a secret cult opposed to the derro king who is causing all the trouble, and other references that make you think that it should have SOME social component to it. It's a little underpopulated as well, and lacking any notes on what a coordinated response to an attack from the party would entail. That sort of thing is critically important in any lair encounter with intelligent opponents. There's some handwaving about them all being geniuses but not acting together because they are chaotic, but the whole place just feels wrong. A lot of work could turn the derro kingdom in to a Kua-toa style encounter with a social element. You could also just steal the drow necromancer for a different adventure. As with most adventures from this time period, it takes more work to prep and salvage things from it then it is probably worth.

 

 

White Fang
Nudel D. Findley
AD&D Solo

A solo adventure for a 10th level human thief. I don't review Choose Your Own Adventure books, although I sometimes enjoy them. I suspect that every "all thieves" adventure ever written would work better as a solo thief adventure, so there's that.

 

Pride of the Sky
Randy Maxwell
D&D
Levels 8-12

This is an adventure through a man-scorpion temple to grab some long-forgotten loot. It tries REALLY hard to deliver interesting content, and, for the most part, succeeds. But when it's bad it's REALLY bad. The bad starts with the backstory. A floating sky ship business lost one of its ships while it was transporting the treasure horde of a wizard form one city to another. The ship crashed and the players get a map willed to them by a dead relative. I LUV the gonzo of Spelljammer but I don't get in to the magical ren-fair/economy thing that is implied behind the "magical airship transportation service" background. I also don't dig the whole "you get a map via a will" thing. That's a hook that's not trying at all. Maybe some Nigerian 419 scam thing or an underworld deal with shady intent would be a better way to introduce the map to the players. Both are certainly more interesting than "you inherit a will." That kind of curtsey/simplistic stuff that shows up in the world of Mystera/Basic D&D never struck me as cool though, even though basic D&D is my favorite system by a long shot. There's an overland journey involved but nothing interesting in it, just some throw-away encounters on a wandering table that add nothing to the adventure.

The man-scorpion temple, the core of the adventure, is another matter. It is FULL of flavor, but it is poorly communicated in many places. It's supposed to be a cave-like place made out of the skeleton of a HUGE red dragon. The bones and so on make up the ceiling walls of the rooms while a whole shit-ton of melted and slagged treasure make up the floor. That's pretty nice in concept but fails in practice, as the map is just a generic "square rooms" thing and most of the descriptions don't take advantage of the the skeleton or treasure as one of the room elements in anything other than a window-dressing sort of thing. Even then, it's not really well described. The manscorpions get a nice treatment though. They go bare-chested, decorate themselves, braid their hair, and paint their giant scorpion pets/guards with bright colors and intricate patterns. The temple doesn't really do anything interesting, encounter-wise, and the undead section tacked on to the end feels tacked on. Nice concept for the adventure but poorly executed.

Ancient Blood
Grant & David Boucher
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This is an arctic overland expedition followed by the exploration of an old giant fortress. It's got a strong norse feel to it. The players are hired to deliver a box of dried plants (herbal medicine) to a village about 200 miles away. Once there they see the headman/king get killed by a frost giant ghost. They then travel 300 more miles, hopefully, through arctic conditions to get to an old frost giant fortress to break the ghosts curse. There's a whole "wilderness survival guide"/"torture the players with bookkeeping for rations, etc" thing going on that I don't think adds any fun to the adventure at all. I can go to work if I want to find the crossover point to carrying rations/winter supplies to travel speeds. I've played Source of the Nile and it isn't fun. The journey to the village has a nice little wandering monster table that adds some encounter notes/suggestions next to each entry. I like that sort of thing. it prompts the DM to riff off of it and loads their imagination up to run the adventure. Tribesmen are from one of the villages and may travel with the party back. Animals act like animals. These little notes add a lot to the adventure. The programmed encounters, two, are nice also. The party passes by a steaming crack in the ground ... who wants to go look! Just that visual imagery of seeing that after a snow adventure is enough to sucker me in. There's also a nice little encounter with a group of half-ogre trappers. It's written more like a straight up combat, even through they each get names and some description that would imply there can be a social element. The social path would be much cooler and interesting. The village the group reaches has a nice little "get there in a blizzard and be ushered in to the great house to get stranger out of the storm" thing going on which, again, I think builds a lot of cool things up in my mind as I'm reading, which in turn allows me to communicate the scene and feel better to the party. There's a page-long read-aloud in the longhouse that night that ends with a railroaded killing of the chief. That's less cool, but I understand why its there. The group then travels to an old fortress and explores it. Both the journey, a shield-wall, and the fortress proper is full of GREAT imagery. Blood fountains, centuries old sacrifices hung out, and other great little staged scenes. It does have a very 'desolate beauty' thing going on, similar to the snowy cabin/forest in Legend, but much better done, with crunchy snow drifts, giants tables, and eerie silence everywhere. It's got a kind of quiet horror thing going on that only an abandoned and silent place in the snow can deliver, combined with the weird proportions brought by giant sized tables and rooms. A nice nordic gothic feel, if there is such a thing. It's a little slow for my tastes but beefing it up would ruin the slow burn. If someone can figure out how to solve that paradox then this would be worth running, if the "wilderness torture" game problem could also be solved.

Dungeon Magazine #21

I drank most of a 5th of Black Bush in 3 hours yesterday; this is not my finest work.

The Cauldron of Plenty
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a celtic-themed adventure in a giants cave. There are four or five pages of backstory that amount to the characters needs to grab a magic food kettle from a giant in order to feast the kings warband so they'll go raiding. There's a good celtic theming in this, and while the cave is small and straightforward in its layout (about 18 rooms) the adventure does do a good job with the monster. Namely, you can talk to some of the monsters.The wandering table, in particular, for the wilderness areas has a good little sentence or two after each encounter listing which adds quite a bit to the encounters. Goblins are looking for a lair, ghouls with a grievance against their former lord, and ogre looking for a goat or fox to eat. Some of the encounters are ruined by "they attack immediately!" in the case of the ghouls or "they try to get close to the party to attack" in the case of the goblins. But the additional detail there is more than enough to NOT run the encounter that way and that's invaluable. The actual encounters in the cave run to mundane, which is too bad. There a cave with a waterfall in it, but its completely wasted, there's nothing to it. So why is it in the adventure? Everything should contribute to the adventure, and this doesn't, nor do many of the other rooms in the caves. Some of the rooms have a bit of nice window-dressing (a collection of helmets, some quite dented!) and a nice tea storage room. Those are both nice bits of flavor, but they don't save the rooms from the mundane that infect them. The treasures and magic items are not very interesting, for the most part. A wizards lair provides a bit of variety in treasure but "jewelry to value of 3000gp" is not trying at all. There is some nonsense about bargaining withe the giant, and percentages of success, but the real is on one of the solutions mentioned: getting the giant to join the kings warband in exchange for the cauldron. Double-win for the king and win for the giant, a perfect solution!

 

The Bane of Elfswood
by Stephen J. Smith
D&D
Levels 15-18(!!)

This is a trip through a forest to hunt undead. The high-level challenge comes simply by making the undead 12HD. That's a pretty simplistic way to create a high level adventure. The idea is that the group wanders around the forest, having wandering encounters, and then eventually the primary undead picks up their trail and attacks them. The wandering encounters are generally not great, just a simple list of monsters, almost all of which seem out of place for an elf-protected wood A gargantuan orc is presented as a straight-up combat instead of the cool roleplay experience it could be. Two other wandering encounters involve a band of trader sprites and a pixie wandering hermit. The hermit is particularly irritating since he talks in riddles and doesn't give the whole story of the forest. There are a small handful of programmed hex encounters, six I believe, with the only interesting one being a group of ogres lynching one of their own for cowardice. It's presented as a combat, which is too bad because it has endless social opportunities, if only the encounter offered more detail in that area. There's not much to like in this one, it being just a straight-forward undead hack where the undead are wandering a forest.

 

Jammin'
by James M. Ward
AD&D SJ
(Any Level)

Spelljammer Alert! Speljammer Alert! Spelljammer is, of course, one of the best campaign worlds ever published. And this one by Ward! Note the Ward influence immediately: it's any level. This in spite of the fact that the party will face hordes of weird creatures. This is an Old School attitude. Load up on chickens and blankets, it's time to go plundering! This isn't really a Spelljammer adventure. It's the exploration of a Spelljammer ship that has crashed on the PC's world, and thus perhaps GIVES them a Spelljammer ship to play with. Ward is the soul of brevity: only two pages of background before the adventure begins! The party is hired by a of a thief to go check out the ship and turn over a finders fee to the rogue (classical usage of the term) and the a couple of thieves guilds. The ship is 22-ish encounters with ... the undead! So many of these adventures would be so much better with an elevator pitch right up front to get you in the mood while reading. Ghost ship, tattered sails, skeletons around, spectre captain whose goal is to wipe out all life in the universe. If you went in knowing that then the adventure makes A LOT more sense. The captain floats around and keeps an eye on the party: fleeting shapes just out of vision, ghostly faces in walls, the usual ghostly stuff. Then when he thinks he knows who he is dealing with, he comes at them. Supplementing the spectre are a bunch of "balls of bones"; a rally clever way to store and launch your crew at another ship, IMHO. They are stacked up and just WAITING for someone to mess with them so the whole pile comes down and they reanimate. There's great magic items in the adventure, like a book that you can shove food in to and pull food out of, and ghostly wheelocks (which I don't usually get in to, but they work well here) and a small amount of backstory in a BRIEF ships journey to give a little background. I usually HATE logs & journals and diaries, find them just a cheap way to communicate things. A ships log makes sense though, and, besides, doesn't really play much part in the adventure, just being a cute add-on for players who are interested in discovery. I note that the ship crashed because of a lack of magic items items for the furnace, yet the ship seemed stuffed with magic. Go Figure. Oh, and the helm on this ship is a Black Dragon throne/recliner thing with the furnace in fact of that. I imagine the dragons eyes glowing when the thing is fired up! Who WOUND"T want that? You'd have to be crazy! That's the key to a good item, it makes the party drool over it and thing "Awesome!". Sword, +1 doesn't do that. Ring of Feather Falling doesn't do that. Black Dragon throne with glowing red eyes DOES it. Nice job on this adventure.

 

Incident at Strathern Point
by Matthew Maaske
AD&D
Levels 8-10

This is an adventure at an abandoned river trading station, that turns out to have some demons in residence. It's got a nice realistic looking map and a grim and gritty feel. The demons, four of them, are well described with lots of variation to their features. The layout of the station has lots of interesting features to get in to trouble with: a barrel ramp, rough cut steps outside, a couple of towers to fall of of, and a barge to end up on. I really like this, you can just imagine PC's getting trapped in a tower, leaping off of it, being assaulted by barrels, and slipping on the rough stairs as they run. The variety of terrain and features in the map bring a nice little tactical feel to it while still feeling VERY realistic of a river trading station. More so than most of the adventures, this one feels real, hence the grim and gritty vibe. It deals with death, trauma, demons, domestic abuse, and revenge in a really good way. This FEELS like a demon-haunted adventure. It's wordy and the treasure count seems low to me, but it delivers. It would work well in either Harn or 2E, which I think speaks well to its design. The best encounters kind of stick with you. You read them one, maybe twice, and they are completely internalized. You need not hardly refer to the encounters again during play, its like you wrote it yourself. This entire adventure is like that. Read it once, maybe twice, and just run it with the map and maybe some creature stats. That's all you need.

The Chest of the Aloeids
by Craig Barrett
AD&D
Levels 6-8

This is a linear adventure in ancient Greece. The players get transported there, back in time, and go on an adventure to save Hermes before he became a full god and ensure the gives the lyre to Apollo. The characters see an omen. From that point on they are led around by the nose, told to go from a to b to c, and have the adventures at each location before moving on. It's not that he individual encounters are good or bad, its that the characters are led around by the nose to most of them. Getting off the railroad means fighting your way through hordes of centaurs. Go to a oracle shrine nearby to get your omen read, get transported to ancient Greece, meet a hunter, who directs you to a village, who sends you to a beekeeper, who takes you to a caste. They all have a decently Greek feel to them, but in total it doesn't feel like Greece, or even a region. It just feels like a set of disconnected events. The citadel of the Cyclopes, the finale, may be the worst. It's got a map and lots of rooms but just has a general description. The players are meant to find Hermes and then they get to watch him run around a play a joke on the cyclops. Whoop-de-doo. I love being a spectator when I 'play' D&D. Too many of the encounters are too tough for he party and yet presented like violence is the answer. I must say though the rewards are good. It works out to be a kind of wish for each character, but takes the form of a kind of cell phone to Hermes. You got him out of trouble so he'll show up and get you out of trouble. I like those sorts of things. I don't think players gets wishes frequently enough, especially when they come so strongly flavored.

Dungeon Magazine #22

This is not a strong review. One adventure is a joke adventure, one is a 1-on-1 adventure, and one features tinker gnomes. I don't need D&D to be serious, but I do need it to not suck.

Once upon a time when I was young I saved up my money and went to the game store. In front of me was WG7 – Castle Greyhawk. I was so excited. Perhaps this was my personal Loss of Innocence. I don't know, but I do know that joke adventures are hard to pull off. A lot of what I do with these reviews is motivated by combatting the bullshit synopsis that publishers use to market their games. Yeah, I want quality, or at least my definition if it. Yeah, I get to feed the habit by buying RPG products and tell myself its ok since I review them. But I try hard to tell people what the adventure is ABOUT, so you can figure out if it fits your needs and your definition of quality.

I won't hit that high mark in this review.

The Dark Forest
by Daniel Salas
AD&D
Levels 2-3

This is an adventure in a little seven room cave system. It is certainly the best adventure in this issue and tries a couple of things that are unusual for Dungeon. It starts with the group coming up behind a small trade caravan is four wagons and over a hundred guards. They are attacked by flinds, and in the process the caravan makes peaceful contact with the party. The wagons are each independent and at night approach the party to sell things (at least the ones who are merchants.) Finally the group is approached by one of them who wants to hire the party to go get some red fungus from a cave nearby. The caravan reacts realistically, the party are not guards, the merchants have some flavor to them and actually DO have things to sell the party. Not just generic "healing potion" or "+1 ring", but paintings and books and the like. Even the hiring of the party for the mission is worked out in a fashion that is not just a throw-away. It all works together. The cave system has a dwarf maze that is handled in a a non-standard, abstracted way. Room 2 is at LEAST 6000′ feet long, and maze-like. The party eventually stumbles on a group of mycanoids. THAT ARE NOT HOSTILE! They actually talk to the party! The group can negotiate with them to get the fungus. This leads to a ceremony in a fungus garden, and then a spore-circle ceremony that MAY leave everyone a coma ... or gifted with healing potions that infect the party with weird fungal infections ... BAD ASS! There's eventually a big combat with a flind group and the mycanoids. This is a small adventure and doesn't have much in the way of treasure of unusual things, and it has, of course, the endless text of the time. The beginning is strong, as is the mycanoid sections and the abstracted maze is at least an interesting mechanic. The middle portion is weak, with the party just kind of hanging out in the (uninteresting) fungus garden for a few hours while (boring) wandering monsters happen. Generic wandering monsters. But, it tires.

 

The Leopard Men
by David Howery
AD&D
Levels 8-10

This is a small swamp journey the end in a raid on an evil temple. The hook is nicely morally ambiguous. A big shot in a jungle trading post wants the party to take care of The Leopard Men, an evil cult that is subjugating the various native tribes. It's a win-win-win: the big shot gets to open up trade with the locals, the locals get to trade for things they want, and the big shot gets to loot the leopard men temple which is stuffed FULL of loot from decades of tribute from the locals. This sort of moral ambiguity makes the set up quite a bit more interesting to game through than a simple morality play would be. The journey through the swamp is lame, although I found the imagery of water fowl and crane nicely evocative. The swamp wanderers are just generic and the programmed encounters are all hostile. Instead of the bullywugs or lizard men or cannibals being social encounters that COULD end up in combat instead they are just boring old "they attack!" encounters. This in spite of the fact that all of the groups are natural enemies of the leopard men cult and hate them. Being allied with cannibals would be much more fun to role-play through the rest of the adventure. The leopard men are all monks and their temple is a boring and mundane affair. "This room has several meditation mats on the floor and bundles of sleeping blankets stacked by the east wall. A scarred dummy stands in a corner." Not exactly a paragon if interesting. The read-aloud doesn't mention it, but there are 19 leopard-men in the room. That's 19 chances to add some individuality to what's going on, none of which is realized. There's a garbage chute with a black pudding at the bottom. My own personal sign of a crappy adventure is the presence of spheres of annihilation, black puddings, etc, located in the bottom of drains and waste chutes. As soon as I see that I have a pretty good idea that the adventure will suck. There's not really much in the way of an organized defense and in spite of having named NPC leaders, nothing is done with them. It would have been nicer to see hunting parties or tactics or an organized defense or some kind of weird jungle temple effects ... but alas it is not to be.

 
Tomb It May Concern
by Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This is a one-on-one adventure for a paladin. A paladin with amnesia. *groan* It's a quest to find his warhorse, which turns out to be a little amulet that can turn in to a horse. In a little nine-room tomb. Full of undead. I can think of few things more boring. There's a room, some pretext of a boring description and then endless paragraphs describing the skeletons or zombies. Everything immediately attacks. The rooms get boring little descriptions like "full of ruined sofas and tapestries." A kind of generic decay description that infests the fantasy adventure market. "This was once the lair's armor but holds little more than dust now." Then why did you put it in the adventure? Because a room with dust is fun? Because you are constructing a realistic view of what an abandoned room would look like? Because that's fun? The was the hobby strays from its task is amazing. We're here to have fun. PUT SOMETHING IN THE FUCKING ROOM! Something that the group can interact with. Something that does something. The Evil Bad Guy knows the paladin is in his tomb "but waits here to see if the person entering his lair is a worthy opponent." I am so sick of that lame excuse. It was tired and lame in 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and it's tired and lame now. The evil undead bad guy attacks immediately and unceasingly. There's a surprise. There's nothing here.

 
Unchained!
by Bruce Norman
AD&D DL
Levels 6-10

LOATHE.
Dragonlance. Tinker gnomes. Gully dwarves. Are you still reading? Why? Why would you keep reading after I disclosed all of that? In this adventure you wander through a forest trying to kill a clockwork dragon possessed by an evil dragon spirit. The party gets techno items from the gnomes, which turns the adventure in to more of a trip to R&D in Paranoia than a D&D adventure. Dead knight bodies, a pissy wounded copper dragon, a gully dwarf village. This is just an utter piece of shit. Wander the forest in the company of a gully dwarf guide while doing nothing but encountering boring patrols and lame wandering encounters. An NPC mage shows up, crazy, who is mildly amusing. It's not enough. This thing is 14 pages long and has six encounters. The designer tries to interject some flavor by giving some of the wanderers some personality but there's no way its going to come through in the brief combats that happen. This adventure is an exercise in how much torture the players can take from the designer & DM. Gully Dwarves! Bullshit tinker gnome crap! Oh boy, what FUN! I can't wait to try on the iron man armor that malfunctions! Returning the dead bodies of the knights gets you some recognition from their order, which is a nice touch. The NPC mage was previously driven mad by the tinker gnomes, so, maybe, a better way to run the adventure would be to ally with him and wipe out the tinker gnomes and gully dwarves. Murder Hobos .... HO! Sic semper evello mortem Kender!

Holy shit! That's a great campaign idea! Mashup the necromongers from Riddick with the BEST D&D game world, Spelljammer! The party roams the D&D universe wiping out the most annoying people. Think of the pure unadulterated JOY of wiping out gully dwarves, tinker gnomes, and kender! Dragonlance would be like El Dorado, the culmination and reward for all the hard work cleansing the other planets! Too much, you think?
 

Rank Amateurs
by John Terra
D&D
Levels 1-3

Hey, John Terra, FUCK. YOU. ASSHOLE. The designer, John Terra, contributed to one of the worst RPG products of all time: WG7 Castle Greyhawk. In this pile of steaming crap he has the players taking on the role of the humanoids. They go to a humanoid inn, explore some ruins, and go to a town on a mission is diplomacy. And almost everyone talks in a new jersey/gangster accent; how fun! This is a joke adventure. I like humor in my adventures but I don't like adventures written by people who don't like D&D. Bar fights, drinking contests, more bar fights, follow the marked trail, explore some ruins with the bugbear ghosts that talk in the same lame jersey slang. There is a nice skeleton pit where they claw and grab at ankles and a hill giant NPC to make friends with. Once the group gets to town the townspeople attack and you get to cut your way back to the gates.

Dungeon Magazine #23

The Vineyard Vales
by Randy Maxwell
D&D
Level 2-4

This is a Scandinavian/viking themed adventure. The party wanders around the countryside having encounters on the way to/from two adventure sites. The countryside encounter really makes this adventure, and if you read those encounters first (which are at the end of the adventure) and then go back and read the other encounters, you'll have a much better time in your head figuring out the adventure. Giant locusts are eating the locals crops. There's no lord, this is an independent freehold, and no one wants to invite a jarl in. The group is hired to go after the locusts while the locals are out battling the locusts. That has a hint of lameness about it; how many times have we read "we can't be bothered" or "were busy and cant do it" as a lame excuse to get the party involved. And that's exactly what I thought, but then the wandering encounters do something more. There are some large battles between the locals and the various bad guys. This background scenery adds a lot to the adventure and to the hook. We get to see groups of farmers and locals banding together to protect their lands. Rather than their being some paternalistic "were too weak to defend ourselves" nonsense, there is instead much greater buy in to hook. The group eventually learns some lizard men are behind things. The vibe here though is not the noble savage but rather a kind of cannibal beast-man feel, fitting in well with the lower-tech/lower-fantasy environment. Captives, refugees, burning farmsteads, wandering mercenaries, large pitched battles, all very nice and fitting in well with the lower-tech/magic theme. The first adventure site is nothing special, just a cave with shriekers and a giant toad. The second is a kind of ruined courtyard with a lot of lizard men running around in it. Or, rather, parts of it. It would have been nicer, I think, if the lizard men were out in the compound with guards, cannibal feasts, etc, instead of hold up in buildings lie the barn. But ... then you get to burn the barn down and kill the folks running out, so, six of one. The mundane treasure here gets a little love, with silver-inlaid scroll tubes and jeweled dagger sheaths, but then nothing is done with the magic items. The wandering encounters are what really bring this adventure to life and add the flavor.

The Pyramid of Jenkel
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 8-10

Evil demon is luring adventurers to their doom in a village temple. Most of the village is willfully ignoring what is going on. This has A LOT of backstory, three pages worth. It all amounts to a MOSTLY buried clocktower showing up one day in the middle of a village. Hence the "buried pyramid." The demon at the bottom corrupts a priest and he starts modifying the local festivals to include animal sacrifices ... and luring adventurers in to it. He does this by ... sending out people in to the wild to spread rumors .. that they believe so detect lies/alignment/blah blah blah don't work on them. I hate that shit. It's a weak way for the DM to screw over the party and a crutch for not putting in the design work required to get the hook moving. The village is described in WAY too much detail. Almost every entry seems to give us a short tutorial on how medieval farming practices work. There's also a nice section how the gatekeeper purchases vegetables from the local general store. WTF? NONE of this is relevant to the adventure. It's absurd. Underneath the clocktower is a small portion of a ruined city. That could be cool, but there's too many creatures hanging out in their little houses and not enough "sneaking through he ruined city" going on. There's an attempt to add color, trolls with livestock and mephits in hawaiian shirts and fedoras, but there's not enough interactivity to support it. It's combined with a "bad guy wears a ring lets him control the area the undead can roam in." LAME. Just do something else. The magic treasure is generic and the mundane treasure little; gems in particular just get generic values. I like the Marlith demon being evil and corrupting the villager thing, but the entire clocktower and ruined city are boring and generic.

Old Sea-Dog
By THomas M. Kane
AD&D
Levels 2-5

This is an absurd adventure, but its got a big chaotic ending. In a port town, a lords prize fighting dog is missing and he needs it back. The party is hired, investigate, find some clues, go to a ship where the dog is, and then all hell breaks loose in three or four way fight on the ship. This may be the closest thing I've ever seen to an actual "big crazy pirate ship battle" outside of the movies ... and there are no real pirates and the ship is probably at port when it goes down. It doesn't mess around at the beginning but jumps right in, which is VERY unusual for a Dungeon adventure. It's got some good city encounters, including a noble lord running down people in the street, good natured constables who shut down investigations, drunks, beggars, and gamblers. There's a good inn encounter with a couple of loose rumors about the dog which are handled well: a minimum of words and nice little surround of "treat the staff nice/work on their defects" to pump them for information. The ship is built to be snuck on to, by a variety of means/mechanisms, from stealth to social. After that, guards & wards show up and three factions duke it out on the ship. Maybe a little more description of crazy shit to happen on the ship would be nice, but it's an otherwise great setting for an almost mass combat. Seven pages make a tight little adventure for a great night of play.

Deception Pass
by Rich Stump
AD&D
Levels 7-9

This is a frustrating adventure with some Ogre Magi, in both an ambush and a lair, who are pretending to be someone else. There's s nice little scene with a town meeting to start the adventure off. The various NPC's in the town are all there, along with others, and the party just kind of stumble in to it. It feels like a real town meeting in a rough & trouble place, and the various NPCs have more color and personality to them than is usual in a Dungeon Magazine ... without it being overboard. The town is a little over-described ... I'm not sure I need to know the full story of how The Iron Horse Inn got its name, or that food prices ate 102% of book standard. There are a lot of rumors, which is nice, but they are a little generic and could be beefed up with some more exciting language. "A hermit lives in the wooded vale south of the pass. Don't disturb him – he owns a powerful magic staff." That's too generic for my tastes. I'm looking for a story about crazy old ben who has a lazer staff , or crazy old Ichibod and how he fought off a giant by using his staff to turn him to a manta ray. Effects and color, not flavorless fact. The Magi attack the parties caravan in the pass, but they are all disguised as something else and pretending to be mages, etc. Face magic wands and staves and the like to cover up their powers. To win out the day the party needs to get of the 7 magi down to 2/3 of their HP, which causes them to flee. The lair portion of the adventure then comes in to play, with the lair housing a great number of charmed people/creatures in the service of the Magi. The lair map is moderately interesting but it suffers from the usual lack of a coordinated defense. The Magi are supposed to be super intelligent but instead tend to hang out in a single place and each area ends up being mostly isolated combats from the others. The charmed NPC's are moderately interesting but they all attack immediately and thus die without that coming in to effect. The rooms in the ruins are not that interesting, being little more than abandoned rooms with dust and broken furniture occupied, maybe, by a charmed person who attacks immediately ... in isolation from everyone else. The Ogre Magi, working together, are good opponents, and the concept of the charmed staff could have added a nice touch. The lack of social element and/or the gimmick of them pretending to be other creatures/mages when they attack, feels out of place. The lack of the fantastic in the locations, magic, and treasure, is quite disappointing.

Haha, that's awesome. I DMed a pickup game using Urse of the Aeloids right off the rack in a comic shop's back room one time.

It was horrible, but we didn't know any better.   We had fun anyway.

Old Sea-Dog is a fun one.  I've run it at least 4 times over the years.  The last few times I've had newb players who just attack the guards at the dock (or announce they are there for the dog) and don't try to stealth or bullshit their way onto the ship.  The main antagonist always leaves a lasting impression and can be a good enemy to pop up later.

Dungeon Magazine #24



In the Dread of Night
By Ann Dupois
D&D
Level 1-3

This is a six-level wizards tower with a nice little village attached. Weird things are afoot in and around the village and they are convinced its the nearby wizard and his orc servants. But he let them in to look around and everything seemed ok to them. But shit keeps happening and now the village leaders have disappeared also. He is, of course, evil. The village here gets five or six pages. There's a nice map that's almost Harn-like (that's a compliment.) The villagers each get a little description and some rumors they know, and in addition there are some general rumors and rumors that only children know. A lot of the villagers come off a bit bland, without much interesting character, in spite of the two or three paragraphs that describe the occupants of each hovel. The rumors are good though, and a couple of the hovels get some decent character descriptions that ARE brief and memorable. This could really use a table for the village occupants and what they know and their memorable traits. To do the village justice you need that sort of reference to help run it as they wander from place to place. The tower gets a nice little outdoor map showing a hill, outbuilding, and some wolf guards chained by the front door. I liked those details a lot. Not just a boring little entrance but "on a hill" and "wolves chained to the front door." The interior of the tower has about thirty rooms over seven levels. The tower is a weird mix of too much magic and not enough weird. There are glow globes that light rooms and a trapped fire elemental and piping system for hot water, etc. I really don't get in to that kind of a "magical economy" sort of setting. This is then combined with a lack of the weird. Dude is an evil sorcerer and his tower feels boring and generic. This might work in a Harn-like setting but room after room of generic contents (Pantry, bedroom, bathroom, storage room) isn't the kind of Magic & Whimsy, Wonder & The Fantastic! That's what I'm looking for. This isn't that. There's not really a coordinated defense of the tower, so it's another "guards die in place"a adventure. It's too bad. If you combined the village and plot with a nice weird tower you'd have something more interesting. As it is, it's a low-magic adventure, at best, and that's being generous.

A Hitch in Time
By Williw Walsh
AD&D
Levels 7-10

This is a ten room tomb with a gimmick: when you leave everything you picked up disappears and everything inside is reset to a state before you visited. There's the usual nonsense about getting hired and vetted and blah blah blah to go on the mission. There's also an attempt at a good wilderness wandering table. Each creature gets a little description of what its doing, but the action is generally a bit misplaced. The giant 2-headed trolls just attack outright, because they are hunting. We need a little more, like, they throw stuff from the top of a waterfall or jump out of a tree, or something. Just a little bit more. Likewise the other wilderness encounters try to add a bit of variety/description but don't really hit the mark. The encounters need a bit more description to add some variety and imagination to them. The tomb is nothing more than the usual trap/stasis-monster fest. These sort of set-piece things may be my least-favorite kind of adventure. There's a bit of weird stuff, like the statues that represent he stages of the buried sages life that have different effects on the party, but for the most part the place is static and relies far too much on magic mouths speaking command words that release status fields that house monsters. One or two of the descriptive bits are ok, like a box made of cured leather stretched over a wooden frame. That's some decent detail. Even the parts that are supposed to be weird, like the lab where clay golems are made, complete with molds, are a bit on the dry side. It suffers from what I like to call "1E Syndrome." This is where things make sense but are boring. Like magic mouths saying command words that release temporal status areas full of rust monsters. There's no wonder and mystery in that. So, Tomb of Horrors light, with a little reset gimmick. As Aziz would say, not really my cup of tea, because I don't like huge piece of shit in my tea. But maybe you're in to this kind of gimmick/ToH stuff. You poor, poor, soul. You deserve better.

Thunder Under Needlespire
By James Jacobs
AD&D
Levels 8-12

This is an underdark adventure with a strong "talk to the evil monsters" element. Underground gnomes are being impacted by earthquakes. They saw some mind flayers recently and think they are behind it. The party is sent to resolve the situation. There are eight adventure locations in the Underdark, with three of them being multi-rooms complexes, two quite large. Alas, the adventure sucks. The gnome halls where you start out are extensively described, even though you're just picking up a mission there and there's pretty much zero chance that combat will break out. The other two larger locations are a mind flayer outpost and a mind flayer city, both of which probably will NOT result in the kind of combat that would require an extensive map. All three of these are clearly social encounters and yet they are described room by room, with an extensive number of rooms each, just like you were exploring a dungeon. The outpost could be be forgiven for this, since its first contact with the mind flayers, but the city is a death trap to attack. There's just no reason for the descriptions. It's like you were docking at a warf in a city to get a tax stamp from the harbormaster before moving on the same day, and the entire city was described, room by room. I suppose you could reuse it, but then again you can say that for ANYTHING. The idea is that you make contact with the outpost, they convince you to parley, take you to the mind flayer city where you find out they are NOT behind it, but a big earth elemental thing is, and they want you to go fix the situation. The wrench is the drow chick running around who wants the elemental to destabilize the region. But she's just a combat encounter and doesn't show up as a social element, city or not. The under dark wandering monster tables are lame and boring ad just consist of a monster listing. The exception is for the 'special' encounters. There are 6 of these, occurring 1 in 20, which have more detail and are more interesting. A drow war party, a Rakshasa, a haunt and a water naga, for example. There add a little variety but the description emphasis is on realism rather than how they enhance play with the party. IE: the naga hides and the party stabs it, rather than the naga is an information broker or has a fetch quest or the like. The mind flayers at the outpost gets names, but not personalities, while the ones at the city get personalities, but not names. This is spite of the fact that the party will interact with the outpost flayers much more, the city encounter being mostly soliloquy. The big encounter at the end with the giant earth elemental monster and dark elf agent could use a more set-piece nature. More environmental stuff, ropes to swing from, or something stuff like that. As is it's just a big room with a monster at one end, the agent hiding, and some chasms. Rope bridges, stone ledges, rubble to jump off of, etc, would have made this a more memorable boss monster fight.

Dungeon Magazine #25


The Standing Stones of Sundown
By Paul May
AD&D
Levels 3 OR 9

This is a brief village investigation followed by a set-piece combat in the village. The village has some standing stones in the middle and a chalk design on the hill. Two of the stones have gone missing and the village mage has turned up dead. Weird, eh? The party pokes around the village, finds the mages journal that reveals he turned the stones back to flesh, then find the mages ring that he did it with. A holy day comes around and a vrock attacks to get at the sacred chalice from the church. So ... nothing you do makes any difference because the vrock will attack, out of nowhere, on the holy day. Oh, you can go dig around in some journals (oh boy! Story exposition via journal!), and you can kill a zombie and bring the rest of the stone circle back to life. But you won't learn what's going on and none of it will help or predict what it coming. Thirteen pages for that seems a bit much. And there's virtually no detail for the village or the people in it. The whole "standing stone are actually flesh-to-stone shamans from a FAR earlier age" thing is nice. And when you bring them back they die in interesting way because of the erosion the stones saw. Most of what you need to know about this adventure comes from the following, near the beginning of the adventure: if good-aligned PC's decline to go to the church then the DM should give each a diety-sent affliction, like a boil on the nose, as a warning. The adventure is further burdened with a terrific need to explain everything and there is a great deal of effort put in to keeping the party in the dark. Speak with dead requiring tongues, farm boys who have not seen their employers, dead mages who never saw their attackers ... it's all a set up to no purpose.

Hellfire Hostages
By Allen Varney
Marvel Super Heroes

I'm not really qualified to review a MSH adventure; I loathe the superhero genre. I think this has terrorists taking over a club for rich people, who are actually all evil super villains. Uh ... that is all. [Insert amusing story about The Great Man Alive, a Champions character with the disadvantage "Dead".]

Of Kings Unknown
By Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a ten-room lair/tomb full of moon orcs. Those are normal orcs who eat moon melons and have some random benefits. So. Orcs. It literally takes a column of text to tell you five entries on a table for random INT. -4. -2. Normal. +2. +4. So ... padded to hell and back. I know, right? Padding in Dungeon Magazine! The lair/tomb is pretty small, at ten rooms, and the layout is a simple branching one. The first five rooms fit on one page, along with the map. The mutant orcs are a nice concept but poorly implemented; clumsy with too much text that looses the A W E S O M E they could be. Hell, mutant anything is cool. [Uh ... Everyone knows that Gamma World is my One True Love, right?] The dungeon sucks. The first room is nice trapped door/murder hole guardroom set up thing. The adventure notes a few reinforcements when the shit hits the fan, but not much beyond that and nothing about the leadership jointing the frat. The leadership is disappointing as well. They get names, and individual lair rooms, and have some semblance of personality. There will, however, be no chance to interact with them and so all that they ever were or will be is lost in an instant. It's a hell of a thing, killing an ma^h^h orc. Oh yeah, and it's more fun to talk to someone and THEN kill them then it is to just hack them down.

One of the greatest examples in all Christendom of bad room writing is contained herein. It's not platonic, but pretty damn close. I leave you with it, as an example of the joy you can find herein: "4. Trophy Room. This room once contained trophies of war. Swords, spears, and armor of all kinds were dedicated here to the everlasting glory of the fallen orc leaders. Centuries ago, the walls were draped with elven banners, dwarves sigils, gnome heraldry, and the flags and standards of men, goblins, and various orc tribes. The moonorc leaders have stripped the room of anything useful in order to outfit the tribe. The weapons and armor were quickly divided among the warriors, while the flags and banners were torn down and used for blankets or ripped apart and resewn into bags, sacks, and clothing. The room now contains only refuse and rusty, unusable equipment."

Hrothgar's Resing Place
By Stephen J. Smith
D&D
Levels 4-7

This is a small eleven room two-level cave complex. It feels more realistic than a lot of caves, probably because of the nooks, crannies, and major ledge. It's a little bizarre. There's about a page of introductory background text/journal for the players to find. There's a regional map that doesn't come in to play at all except to locate the adventure in The Known World ... but there's nothing special about the location and no wilderness adventure. The adventure is launched in to almost immediately (at least by Dungeon Magazine standards) and ends up being a tight little affair. The Wanderers table is nothing special ("they attack immediately!") but the caveman, proper, is interesting. It's got a couple of loops and seems more like a realistic cave. The way from the upper level to the lower is a huge chasm. There are ledges, nooks, and crannies. I really like cave adventurers that feel like caves and this one, while not Stonesky, gets close enough to satisfy. Inside is a motley assortment of creatures, from trolls to harpies, to giant worms. A spider attacks, lowering itself on silk, while climbing down a ledge. Harpies and trolls don't like each other (more could have been done with that.) The adventure is nice little one, and includes a non-standard magic sword and some treasure that you can repair to make it worth even more! Reviewing Dungeon Magazine is not a pleasant affair, but this is a little ray of hope in the darkness. So much so that I went back to rpggeek to see what else the author had written. This isn't OD&D, but more like some kind of ... Harn-like environment. Quiet, primitive, tight. I wouldn't have a problem running it. It even has some cave toads with paralyzing eyes!

A Rose for Talakara
By Wolgang Baur & Steve Kurtz
AD&D
Levels 8-12

Danger! Poser Alert! Danger! Poser Alert! Hmmm,ok, maybe not poser. See that cover, with the black knight holding the black rose? Yeah, you know what means: Someone read Ravenloft. In this case it's Wolfgang Bauer. Checking his publishing history, we can see these early Dungeon adventures appear to be his first published items. This adventure is some kind of mash-up of Ravenloft and LOTR. Bob, Witch-Kingof Angmar, is under the control of Sue, Dark Lord of Evil. She's got his magic circlet and he's tired of being alive. He lures some adventurers to her evil volcano-land Dol Gulder and hopes they pop her ass so he can finally be free. And he's a gardener because it brings some respite to his tired soul. [As a totally coincidental aside: does anyone know what the official emoticon is for "puking ones guts up?"] Oh, wait, wait! I gets better! The tagline for this adventure is "Red for Love, white for purity, black for death." I wanted to blame Vampire for this, but it looks like it came out a year later. This is a hack-fest in a monster-filled fortress of Sue.

The first two or three pages are the setup. Lot's of tortured souls, murdered high priests, black roses left as calling card, mysterious notes "My master bids you join him at his home" blah blah blah. Evil bad guy taunts players. Hang on, let me quote ... "His imprisoned soul known only restlessness and torment." The whole backstory hook involves a complicated timeline and special magical items and blah blah blah blah. The usual set up nonsense. The group is paid $10k each to go find the killer of the high priest. Lots of clues are left for the party, since the poor poor tortured soul wants the party to find him. There's four or five wilderness encounters on the way to Mordor, at least two of which are totally bizarre, but not in a good way. The first is with a band of fire giants. Each has a name and a personality that goes on for quite some word count. They attack immediately and no doubt die ignominious deaths at the hands of 8th-12th level PC's. Why pay all this detail to creatures which die immediately in 10 minutes of pure combat? And yes, later on in the fortress, the party encounter 8 elf prisoners who get NO detail at all, in spite of the fact they are eager to join the party and wipe out the evil menace. WTF?! The party also meets Radagast in the wilderness. This encounter takes a full page. The druid tells the party ... well, nothing at all. The designer has spent a full page on a meaningless encounter. There's also a decent, and deadly, encounter with Salamanders in a lava river. They grab people and dive under the lava. Ouch! But nice!

Dol Guldur gets a pretty extensive write up, with about 70 encounters. Gatehouse, courtyard, keep, it's all there. It's also some kind of monster circus. There's a medusa in the garden, harpies in the towers, skeletons at the gates, shambling mound gardeners, fire elementals for hot & cold running water (ug!) The place has a decently interesting castle layout that reminds me of MERP products and the monster circus isn't any worse than I6. There is the usual nonsense with room descriptions, like the paragraph that describes the history of a pool of dried blood. Yes, an entire paragraph to tell us that a pool of loos on the battlements is from where some skeletons shot an escaping priest. No body. Not fresh. Just some dried blood. The Witch King "tests" the pc's, of course, by sending bad guys against them, and arranges to lead them to Sue. There's also a whole complicated "wizard locked doors and gem keys" thing, which smacks of magical economy. Oh, and of course Sue has cast a bunch of wishes so passwall, teleport, etc don't work inside her fortress. IE: the designer was too lazy to come up with an adequate adventure and/or scale the adventure to a level appropriate to passwall/teleport.

The place isn't terrible, but it's not all that interesting either. Kind of like a Ravenloft-light. An attempt at Realism that gets mired in some kind of jr. high Vampire the Masquerade nonsense. Sad face is Sad.

Dungeon Magazine #26

The Letters section of Dungeon magazine may be the most amusing thing an RPG enthusiast can read in 2014. "You suck! I will never buy your magazine again because you published a MSH adventure!" Response: "Ok. Enjoy the Tope Secret adventure in this issue." It's also nice to see that the rules lawyer and pedantic reader have always been present in the hobby.

The advancement in adventure design is also noticeable. You can run almost any level of The Darkness Beneath, from Fight On! Magazine, with just a brief read-through. Dungeon Magazine adventures, of this era anyway, seem to require an in-depth reading, a photocopy, and strong highlighter/margin notes work to get in to a runnable fashion. I complain a lot about newer stuff but almost all of it is more coherent than the older stuff.

The Inheritance
By Paul F. Culotta
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This is an assault on a small keep of 23 or so rooms, taken over by hobgoblins. It's got a nice tactical/sandbox feel to it and could be a nice part of a new campaign kick off. Someone inherits a keep from their dead uncle on the condition that they kick out the humanoids that kicked HIM out. What follows is a brief description of a small keep, which is actually more of a fortified manor home in terms of size. The hobgoblins are given the rigid and organized military structure that describes them, with good guards and good responses to alarms/intruders. You get a decent feel of how they run the place and thus it turns in to a kind of infiltration mission ... hence the sandbox label. Contributing to that are short descriptions of the tribe and the region the keep sits in, as well as how it related to Waterdeep. This is ALMOST enough information to have it act as a home base. A couple of more hooks and maybe a small description of a nearby village or tenants/neighbors would have turned it in to a full scale "home base" adventure supplement. The hobgoblins each get names and personalities, which is a bit unusual. If the party were to ally with them then it may come in to play, but the bulk to the adventure is laid out like a hack-fest, with maybe one of two of the hobgoblins willing to talk before attacking. The hobgoblin and regional background add a lot but its not clear it will come up at all unless this is springboard to larger adventure. It runs long, because of the verbosity of the descriptions, for what it is, but that seems to be the style of the time. It is one of the stronger adventures in the magazines run thus far. Batter monster/treasure descriptions and a STRONG edit to pare it down would turn it in to a pretty good thing to run. A much better infiltration adventure than any "you are all thieves. Break in and steal this thing" adventure that I've ever seen.

Operation:Fire Sale
By John Terra
Top Secret

I'm not qualified to review Super Heroes but I most certainly am for modern spy adventures, having played in a Danger International campaign for something like eight years. Dominic Conrad, Sven Jormungdr, and Imp Shantier shall live forever in the annals of tradecraft!

This is a straightforward investigation adventure with some opportunities for gunplay if the characters get found out. Someone at a west german army base is passing on secrets and the party is tasked with find out who. There's a great timeline involved, along with location descriptions that are very appropriate for the adventure. IE: short-ish. "It's a normal house. In the bedroom in a false vanity drawer you find ...". The descriptions are, in fact, much longer than that but not quite so long as to be unmanageable .. At least as long as your highlighter is at the ready. The reality of the scenario is that the party has to be very much on their toes or they will fail the mission. This then is the major flaw. Three hours in to the timeline almost certainly decides the adventure outcome. Hints and clues are never a parties strong suit and I doubt VERY much if they will pick up enough after the "3 hour window" to get to an interesting outcome. It's more than likely they are duped and the adventure ends up being a snorefest with no real gunplay, torture, or excitement. I was quite pleased with the level of detail provided but the short timeline will almost certainly cause a fail ... meaning no fun.

Caravan Guards
By Steven Smith
D&D
Level 6-8

A sucky adventure. How do you know to trust me on that? Someone is wearing an amulet of proof against detection and ESP. That ALWAYS means sucky adventure. The party joins a caravan, supports it in a couple of monster attacks, and then is attacked by the caravan when they transform in to monsters that night. Every possible trick in the GM book is made to screw with the party so "the big reveal" can be a surprise. They don't lie. They don't detect evil. They don't detect as BLAH. They can control their transformations. They can blah blah blah. It's a DM railroad of epic proportion. I would say it is completely not worth anyones times except for two things. First, the caravan attack encounters are of a nice length. They are short, just a fews sentences or so each (12 bugbears attack by blah blah blah) and the caravan keeps some meals ready, polymorphed in to birds and turtles, in cages. This could lead to some great little adventure hooks as the party turns the prisoners in to NPC's.

Deadfalls of Nightwood Trail
By Jay Ouzts
AD&D
Levels 3-4

This isn't really an adventure but rather an encounter. Some spriggan has set up a trap in the forest in between two trees. There's a lot of stupid and unnecessary backstory present that tells of how the spriggan and ettercap and spider came together to seethe trap. This kind of extreme history/reasoning never made sense to me. This thing suffers a great deal from the authors "I NEED it to make SENSE" syndrome. You need a pretext of believability, you don't need to rationalize everything from what's in the books. Just do something new ... THAT'S WHAT THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE THE ITEMS IN THE BOOK DID. Two pages for s deadfall trap==All that is wrong in the world==1

The Cure and the Quest
By Craig Barrett & Christopher Kederich
AD&D
Levels 4-8

This is a short little multi-day wilderness adventure that ends in a little puzzle room. The hook is problematic, which colors the entirety of what would otherwise be a decent little quest. The party finds a book in a clearing while setting up camp for the night. Touching it curses the party with certain death in 4 nights unless they go destroy the book. Fortunately, the way to destroy it is only 2-3 days away. That's kind of a suck ass hook. Specifically, each day the party is attacked by a special monster. The first day 1, then 2, then 4, then 16, then 256, then an unlimited number. The punishment doesn't fit the crime, so to speak. This feels like major transgression territory rather than roadside hook territory. Maybe a 4-fer, of 16-fer, over the long term of the campaign, but 256/continuous is a TPK. All for doing what the players should be doing ... pushing buttons. "If's the PC choose to ignore the warning and do not follow the quest then the DM is free to destroy them at his lea sure" This is the kind of DM behavior that a generation learned from. LAME. There are maybe three programmed encounters in the wilderness, two of which are moderately interesting while one is just "giant weasels attack." The party runs across a tortured ranger and a patrol of soldiers form an expeditionary force. Both of those are going to have great role-play opportunities. There's a local baron/king after the same location the party is going to and he's the reason the ranger is tortured. I always like patrols of soldiers and the fact that this one leads them to the despot should end up being great fun. The Dukes' camp at the location the party is traveling to could have used a more ... tactical? Map to show the locations of the soldiers, tents, guards, and so on, since a sneak and/or running combat seems almost inevitable. The end of the adventure has a nice extra-dimensional space to explore that FEELS wondrous ... or at least as wondrous as was possible in Dungeon in 1990. A magical valley, a shimmering doorway, and a mobius strip dungeon. Entering the room from one side of the strip allows you to create things and from the other side allows you to destroy things. Nice touch. The magical valley could use a bit more 'magical' description, but at least there's a magic doorway int he middle of the air. There's a handful of magic items present, like a ring of protection against stirges and a few other similarly unique items. Those were nice, even the ones that more closely resembled book items. The mundane treasure is just generic though. This is an adventure is a couple of good encounters, including the final one, but is lacking in the overall feel. The magical focus that is the subject of the quest needs an uplift, much of the wilderness journey is mundane and boring, and the hook, as given, sucks ass. This could be salvaged though by someone who cared. But is it worth your time to do so?

Nine-Tenths of the Law
By Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 7-10

This is an investigation adventure in a town. The group is hired to find someone, who turns out to be a lycanthrope. And possessed by the local evil sorcerer though dead. He wants his magic soul jewel back and is running around killing folk to get it. There are three locations described. Each has some information to learn from someone, if the party gets there soon enough. If they don't then there's a body/crime scene to follow up on. Eventually the party learns about a caper at the Museum (ug!) and perhaps tracks the dead-but-not sorcerer back to his sewer lair (ug!) It's hard to recommend this. I;m predisposed to like this kind of adventure because the best campaign I ever ran was all in on one city. I like the open-ended nature of city games. The three various locations are handled well enough, and there's some thought paid to the thieves guild: what they can tell the players and how they react. For some reason I got a very 'Sopranos' vibe from the thieves guild in this adventure, which I can very much groove on. I'm to sure if it came from the adventure proper or popped in for another reason, but it brought a new appreciation of he adventure to me, or at least that one aspect of the adventure. The backstory is hard to buy in to, as is the hook. The city is not detailed and a city without flavor is atrocious to run. The clue sites are well done though, as is the thieves guild. WAY too much time is spent on the tactics of the various sewer dwellers, so much so that it feels more like a 4e section. Did I mention the clue sites? The Captain of the Guard who bought himself in? The lowlife wife of the guy missing who's shacked up with some other lowlife? The wizard dude who doesn't care about anything else? Those clue scenes, and the guild are VERY well done. Almost like the designer ripped them from Cops or some street reality show. That's what makes this adventure work. Good enough to steal ideas from, if not good enough to run.

Dungeon Magazine #27

Hello darkness my old friend ...

While I don't usual comment on the editorials and letters, the editorial does mention the need to make the adventures more DM friendly and to add more flavor the adventures. Hmmmm ...

Tarfil's Tomb
By Charles Neverdowski
D&D
Levels 10-14

This is a six room tomb with no interesting features. It reminds me of the Demotivater "Perhaps the purpose for your life is to serve as an example to others." Uh ... I don't even know where to start. There's more than a FULL page of read-aloud text that is meant to serve as the introduction the adventure. I have no idea at all how or why someone either thought this was a good idea and/or let it get past an edit. Holy man has vision, sends you to tomb of old hero. You can't kill the L1 holy man. He's destined for great things. Says so right there in the DM text. Plays no other role in the adventure, but that doesn't matter. Text says you can't kill him. You have to walk/ride there, because of the storms. Otherwise your 14th level heroes would be able to skip a completely random and pointless side-trek. There's this dude you can hire as a guide. During your journey you get attacked by werewolves (Remember, you gotta do a land journey so you can encounter this meaningless drivel.) Dude has a silver weapon and protects your 14th level PC's from the werewolves. If they start to get away he kills the lead werewolf, then cradles it, overwrought that it's his sister. If you didn't pick him up as a guide then he comes charging out of the forest alone to do the same thing, out of nowhere. I'm not opposed to the guide having a werewolf sister, but forcing it down this way is very lame indeed.

Hit the barrows where the old hero is and there's a Banshee waiting. She's been talked in to guarding the important barrow by the EHP. Uh huh. There is a decent one-line descriptions of her "she erupts out of the ground with hollowed eyes and a gaping mouth!" I like that kind of description for the monsters instead of a generic "banshee." When I mention extra flavor that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Not paragraph after paragraph but just a little more. Inside the tomb is a ... pit vipers, yellow mold, low level undead waiting to be destroyed. (Seriously, what's the Destory for Undead if you're level 14? DO 3/4/5HD undead even have a chance? Do 10HD undead have a chance?) There's more gimp stuff inside, like a padlock that can only be unlocked with a key or wish. No knocks, No picking. Just a key. Guarded by monsters. It's this kind of forced behavior that I find SUCH a turn off. Why not just let the party use their skills and abilities THAT THEY'VE EARNED to overcome obstacles? Why force them in to a fight ... just so you can spring your uber-cool Mujina on them? There's a beholder that was convinced to guard the tomb and then the EHP and his minions who, of course, finish their summoning ritual just as the party enters .. No matter when they enter. There's a nice evil book but, as usual, its set up so the party can't have it and use it. L A M E!

Juggernaut
By Roger E. Moore
AD&D
Levels 4-7

This is introduced as a quick two-page adventure. It's actually five pages and not really an adventure. Some goblins find a magic mastodon and ride it around, with nets, raiding. It's straight out of Elimensters dog training adventure ("Heal!") in that the the command word is the name of one of the goblins .. Conquer. There's a little map showing the goblins lair but its not keyed, and some stats for the goblins and a couple of notes on goblin tactics. Because we have two leave room for THE TWO FULL PAGES OF BACKSTORY. Dude, seriously? The adventure is essentially a single encounter with goblins on a magic mastodon. Cool idea. Not an adventure and too many words.

Courier Service
By Ted James & Thomas Zuvich
AD&D
Levels 3-6

Fourteen pages for ... three? encounters. Maybe a new record? The party is hired to deliver a package (taxes) from a remote village to the capitol, in winter, and with a deadline. It's a race, with environmental hazards, wandering monsters, and a couple of noble ne'er-do-wells to spice things up. There are roughly six pre-programmed encounters over the course of around 40 days of travel through the snow. Bandits, who shoot at horses. A straightforward monster attack. A windy bridge that can delay travel. A blizzard. A small town, and an avalanche. The bridge encounter is interesting since it's a very straight forward "risk vs. time delay" type of encounter. There are about 7 creature encounters on the wandering table and about three weather related ones ... I'm not sure that's enough to sustain a 45+ day adventure ... at 33% per day that's about 15 encounters ... this is a slow burn adventure. The meddlers only show up a bit and are absent from the middle of the adventure, which doesn't really lend the feeling I think the writer was hoping for? There's a questionable decision or two, like sealing the tax inside a wizard-locked container. How much more fun would it be to put the constant temptation under the players noses? I'm not sure about this one. The length (45 days) make me thick it's a little slow and full or drudgery, but a decent amount of the wandering and programmed encounters are strong ... they are more than just straight up monster fights and offer some interesting opportunities, like protecting the horses and make judgements on who to trust. I suspect you could get some good play out of this one ... and not even have to put a massive amount of effort in to get it.

Bride for a Fox
By Craig Barrett
AD&D OA
Levels 4-8

The PC's are hired to go rescue a slave girl, which ends up being wilderness adventure on the journey to catch her abductors. This continues the fine tradition of OA adventures in Dungeon Magazine; the vat majority of which are of very high quality. In reviewing this I was struck by how similar OA is to Paranoia, without the PvP of course. Bizarre things and a rigid hierarchy make for Living in Interesting Times! Anyway, Fat Bastard made a deal with a Fox spirit and got rich from it. Now its time for him to hand over his daughter as payment, but instead he substitutes a slave girl, who is his daughters best friend. Something goes wrong, a servant sent to hire the PC's is mightily confused with details, there is a pile of assassins on the tail of Fat Bastard, and THEN you get to throw in all of the fun of D&D with an OA twist. Bird-men, spiders, spirit-creatures and the like. There are six or so programmed encounters on the trail of the slave girl/daughter. I was impressed by the ... expansive? sandboxy? Nature of the encounters. One has some giants hunting humans in a ruin. You get a nice little area map, some starting locations, and what the people are trying to do/accomplish. A perfect base recipe for mixing in the chaos and Rube Goldberg plans that PC's always bring. Several of the others are more like this than not also. That kind of encounter is really something I can get in to. Enough information and set up to build on. Again, a very strong OA adventure. This makes me want to run an OA campaign.

The School of Nekris
By Lisa Smedman
AD&D
Levels 6-12

This is a school of necromancy presented as a normal adventure. A handful to a dozen level 1 & 2 wizards and a couple of 18th level ones. It's got a REALLY big wind-up, with a halfling village, basket weavers, and a lot of background that doesn't really contribute to the adventure. Unlike most, though, it DOES have a few things to steal and/or some subtle humor. There are a couple of throw away lines about the halfling baster weaving industry and the river/name origins that are pretty cute and worth stealing. The rest of the adventure is really centered around the school for necromancy, located underneath a graveyard. It's only got about 11 keyed rooms (not continuing the individual dorm rooms) and it on a fairly linear shotgun shack layout. The students and instructors are kind of scattered around, along with a classroom schedule and some details like initiation rites and so on. As an adventure it's a pretty crappy one. Slaughter some level 1 students and navigate 2 level 18 mages (and a crippled dragon.) As an adventure it fails. There's not much to do/see. As a LOCATION it's great, and well worth stealing! I can see snagging most of this and dropping it in to a city, or near one anyway, and making it a morally questionable resource for the PCs to take advantage of. "Nope, no one around here to cast raise dead ... well, except for THOSE guys, out by the river." The students and staff have personalities that are just a cut above throw-away. You could certainly take the personalities and the spirit/ideas behind the set up and use it to great effect in your game. There's the usual poor organization and such to wade through, but an hour or so with a pencil and notepad would let you cull some notes for a wonderful little place. In fact, I'm going to do that now for my Dungeonland campaign ... Kryshal just got a new magic school!

Dungeon Magazine #28

Spelljammer baby! Kick! ASS!

Also, Steve Stolph, from Medina Ohio, wants to know why an NPC Druid in a previous Dungeon adventure has a spell that is not on the list of allowed Druid spells. Published adventures set an example for people and for many will be how they learn to play. OD&D NPC wizards shot lazer beams from their nipples and summoned blue cloud of sparkly shrinking dust. Rules are for players. Judges judge.

Sometimes I want to retire from my job and make a career of rewriting these adventures to make them actually useful. This issue shows hope. Photocopy or cut/paste would do wonders for several of the adventures herein.

The Pipes of Doom
Kristofer Wade
AD&D/Battlesystem
Levels 6-10

This little railroad is composed of 7 encounters, all in a row, squeezed in between two Battlesystem battles. Evil Iggy has a little mashed-up evil army composed of a dozen different creature types and is attacking the little Hamlet of Pigstye. The party is recruited to help and lead the good guys army. The first day they loose, badly, because a lich employed by Evil Iggy has some magic bagpipes. That night the bagpipes are stolen by from Korred. The party is sent in to get the pipes so they can't be used again. You then suffer through 5 unavoidable and boring fights (werewolves, trolls, owl bears, dragon, manticore) before some elves lead to the Korrad. There they laugh at you while fucking with you. Evil heroes attack, you defeat them, and are given the pipes as a reward. On the next days battle the party has a better chance thanks to the artifact not being in Evil Iggy's army.

This thing rubs me raw on so many levels. The first Battlesystem battle is irrelevant; it's just a plot hook to show off the pipes. The mashed-up army of ogres, orcs, loch, drow, fire giant, humans, demons is something I have ALWAYS hated. You have to stretch pretty far to come up with a backstory to make it all work. The railroaded encounters in the woods are just there to drain resources. They are not interesting at all and offer little more then "they attack." Then of course the Korrad and their arrogance/laughter at the party. That's right, I enjoy having my 10th level PC laughed at because of some DM bullshit. And of course, they are actually good guys because they fight to capture instead of kill. "Why do you interrupt our dancing?" Because you, Mr Korrad, like all the Kender and Dragonborn and Gnomes before you, deserve death. Oh, and the pipes, of course, can't be used by the party. Why the hell would you ever want to give something powerful to the party, heaven forbid. Ug. The only positive trait I found here was one of the kneaders of the good army is evil. Something similar was done in Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle and I liked it then as well. The portrayal of competent, evil, and non-phychotic leadership is few & far between in D&D and the game could use more of it.

Manden's Meathooks
Allen Varney
D&D
Levels 4-6

Two pages describing a straightforward ambush by brigands who use a Hurricane Lamp. You need two pages for that?

Sleepless
Michael Shel
AD&D
Levels 9-12

This is an exploration/fetch quest inside a keep with about eight levels and fifths rooms. What makes it interesting is ... the faction play! There are a ton of NPC's running around the place and then four OTHER groups show up. You see, the arch-mage that lived here died. Kind of. And he sold his soul to multiple parties in exchange for power. And then he died. But his soul didn't show up. So the buyers and/or their agents show up in the castle to see what's up and collect. And his castle is stuffed full of his apprentices and staff. AND the party are lied to to get them in to the adventure. And the Soul Patrols are lied to. We end up with something that FEELS very social but can turn in to an explosion at any moment. The designer gets usability to a large degree. The NPC's are detailed in a table THAT ALSO NOTES WHERE THEY CAN BE FOUND IN THE KEYED ENTRIES. The Soul Patrols have personalities, as do the apprentices and the castle rooms have a bit of flair to them ... some of them anyway. Hell even the hook is good: while passing by at night the party sees a tower of the castle erupt in eldritch green flame and then sees a body hanging from the window. Which then falls to the ground as the party approaches. There's no way in fucking hell ANYBODY is going to ignore that hook, no matter how jaded the player. And that is the key to a good hook: an appeal to the player rather than the character. My chief complaint would be that too much space is spent describing the mundane portions of the castle. No one needs a paragraph to describe a normal hallway. One of the NPC's also wears one of those annoying "can't detect my lie/read my mind" things, in order to launch the adventure. I REALLY hate that kind of thing, and there's several "can't passwall and can't teleport" sorts of things going on with the castle walls, another axe of mine. Lowering the power level would have taken care of that nicely. There's a lot of crap in Dungeon that is not worth looking at or saving. This is not one of those. At a minimum you could steal the hook, NPC's, floor plan ,and visitors easily enough, in about 5 minutes, and then maybe spend some time with some quick notes on the castle and you'd have a pretty good adventure. "Ah, yes Sirs, excuse me. A Mr. Demon Prince of Layer 546 is here. He says he has come calling about the soul? Would it be too much trouble for me to ask of you ...?"

Night of Fear
Mark Lucas
D&D
Level 1

Doppleganger in an inn. 13 people in the inn and the ganger wants to take the place of one and not kill TOO many of the others. He's tired of traveling and thinks taking over an inn would be a swell idea, but he needs those employees intact so he doesn't actually have to work! This is too long for what it is. The NPC's should be laid out in a table with less emphasis on stats and gear and more on quick personality reference, for use during play by the ref. There is a nice little table of "stupid things the NPC's say after each murder." which I think would be VERY helpful during a game. It's presented as the typical keyed encounter setting but, again, it would have been much better with a very minimally keyed map. A cute trick of using animals to detect the ganger is presented, but otherwise I don't need an exhaustive list of the contents of a serving girls room in order to run this.

Visitors from Above
Shonn Everett
AD&D Spelljammer
Levels 4-8

This is ... strange. While listed as a Spelljammer adventure it's really just a plain jane adventure and a couple of Spelljammer ships on the ground that COULD be explored. It takes almost 6 pages of background and (boring) fluff before something happens. The party sees a falling star, follows it, finds a dwarf you tells them his buddies were captured by pirates. The players follow, assault a ship and then go to some mines where the leaders are, along with the dwarf captives. When the adventure is over you get to go to a big dwarf spell jammer base in space and maybe be given a small ship. The layout of the adventure is horrible and it's far too verbose in most places. We get a list of the pirate crew but then have to fight the text to see where they are located on the ship. Compare to the Sleepless adventure in this issue where it summarized the NPC's and in the same table told you were they were located. The ship is extensively keyed, but not really to any good effect. It's got Brown Mold freezers and black pudding garbage disposals ad the like, which I generally find abhor ant. But the mind flayer 'home canning of brains' WAS a nice little touch, in the freezer. The patrols of guards and the like were great, as are the siege weaponry on the ship, but the breakdown in the exhaustive detail provided of the interior. The second half of the adventure is in some old mines to free the dwarves. It's got a nice isometric map and while the encounters are not all that exciting the thee-dimensional nature of the map does a lot to save this portion. It's combined with a homicidal mage with some fly and invisibility spells and an entire table of suggested tactics for the mage to screw with the party. This is one of the better "hit & run" mage adventures I've seen. The environment is varied enough, and the scenario not totally gimpy and set up, that its believable while still having a lot of interesting opportunities. There's also, notably, a non-standard magic item that is both powerful and cursed ... but maybe not enough to make the party throw it away. That sort of Deal with Devil kind of item is exactly the sort of thing that should be in D&D adventures. The artifacts in the 1e DMG were cool because of those small enigmatic backstories AND the cursed nature of the items.

I wanted to say "thanks" for doing this! It's been years since I've gone through my Dungeon magazines, and your summary/analysis of the adventures is very helpful.

Dungeon Magazine #29

I drink heavily in order to forget previous issues of Dungeon Magazine. This makes me prone to saying things like "This is the BEST ADVENTURE EVER in Dungeon Magazine!" My humbleness is matched only by my propensity for hyperbole. The last adventure in this, from Willie Walsh, is VERY good. I'm as surprised in saying that as you are in reading it, if you've been following along.

Nymph's Reward
Jeff Fairbourn
AD&D
Levels 4-5

This is a wilderness/cave exploration mission to find a potion for a nymph. She wants you to go to this cave full of orcs/ogres and get this potion to save her nymph sister, who has been cursed. The wilderness has three of four adventures and the cave has another twenty or so encounters. When the party comes back they find out (probably) that the nymph is actually a hag and the potion lets her regain her true form. There's soooo much going on in this adventure, from a design standpoint, that I don't really understand. You meet some Harpers in the woods. They are powerful and if you mess with them then you get your ass kicked after the adventure by a different group of Harpers. Why? Why not make them weak and give them some great treasure to loot? Put the big red shiny button in front of the players. The potion turns out to be a potion of magic resistance ... but it only works on the hag. Why? Why not let the players use it if they want to? It's not going to unbalance things. After the party gets the potion for the hag she attacks them. Why? They did a great job for her! WOuldn't the game be much more fun if the party had this kind of amoral/evil associate they could go visit from time to time? Just like with theHarpers ... why not give the players a choice and tempt them instead of deciding why they HSOULD do and enforcing it through the rules of the adventure? Everything in this adventure sucks. Monsters attack out of spite, even though they should have other motivations. The treasure is all book item items, and boring old +1 swords and shields at that. This should be a great little place of ruff & ready dudes, a bro-house now that the master is away. Wrestle some orcs and kick back, maybe! The adventure is SOOOO much more limiting the way it is written.

Ex Libris
Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 5-8

This is an exploration of an old library to recover books. It has a gimmick; the library is made up of rooms that slide around like one of those sliding tiles puzzles, you know, the ones with the empty tile spot that you slide the other tiles around? Same thing, but the rooms of the library slide around without the control of the party and they are trapped until they find out how to control it. The tiles were included as a supplement to the magazine. (Mine were partially cut out and missing two.) This has two sections: one in the buildings outside the library and one in the sliding library section. The mundane section is boring and has some hevuvas running around doing "evil things" such as "praying in a mocking way" and the like. Uh ... show, don't tell. Maybe it's a problem with the Standards people, but I hate being told something is evil. Show me. Put some heads on stakes. Flay someone, still alive. The reaction of the PLAYERS will be better. Then again, we're in the 2E demon-but-not-really-called-that era, so this may be a Standards thing. Idk, all I know is it sucks. Lots of long descriptions of mundane rooms with nothing interesting going on. There ARE some special mechanics listed, such as "scrambling out of a pool of water when being attacked by dismembered hands" and other sorts of things. I like these sorts of things, as long as they don't take up too much space. They get a little long in this adventure, but I appreciate the idea. The moving rooms section is LAME. You have this very cool mechanic but it's not taken advantage of. Instead you get a bunch of books, most of which are cursed in some way to summon monsters or kill you. And yet you need to open the books to find the puzzle solution to get out of the library. Maybe I'm being too harsh. It just seems VERY repetitive. Find book, open book, kill summoned creature. Move on. Certainly there is some room there to come up with some interesting tactics to minimize things, but 15 rooms full of this overstays its welcome. It needs other hooks. It doesn't have them.

Through the Night
Leonard Wilson
AD&D
Levels 1-2

A twofer sidetrack about an abandoned inn an an invisible stalker roaming around it. It's not really anything at all. Just one boring & mundane room description after another with no interesting going on, and then an invisible stalker.

'Til Death Do Us Part
J. Mark Bicking
AD&D
Levels 8-10

FUCK! After reviewing that Willie Walsh adventure I have no patience for this or Ex Libris. A ghost and a Groaning Spirit live in an abbey, according to the WAYYYYYYY too long backstory that attempts to justify every detail of everything. They ambush travelers and have a trap set up so that a mezzoloth is let out of an Iron Flask when a door is opened. This is just one of the numerous death trap adventures where everything is set up and the dice loaded against the party. "They anticipated ..." this and "they have prepared ..." that. It's nothing more than an 11-room eight page 4e encounter. There's a metric shit ton of justifications for what is going on: the pits were dug by Justin when he was soul jarred" or "the magic webs are another one of Justins creations before he was killed" and so on. Just let magic be magic. You don't need to explain magic, Mr. Technocracy. I DESPISE these sort of set-up adventures. There are a couple of interesting treasures. A cursed scroll that causes you to grow an extra head that babbles gibberish all the time, and a music box that, when played, causes all to hear it to covet it. Also, a human skull hanging from a thick iron chain, a Greenstone amulet. These are all great. If the adventure, encounters, and rooms had detail like this then I would be lauding the adventure instead of damning it. The ghost used a wish spell to attach the Iron Flash to the back of a door. Seriously? You think that's fun and/or interesting? That's lazy.

Mightier than the Sword
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-4

This adventure is absurd, in every wonderful sense of that word. It may be the best adventure Dungeon has published up to this point. You know how good it is? I LOVED THE BACKSTORY! I HATE long backstories, but I LOVED this one. One of the things I like about D&D adventures is when the players come up with crazy ideas on how to do something and we get to watch the comedy/tragedy that unfolds as they implement their zany plan. In the same genre is the adventure where the characters are the straight men. There's some kind of zaniness going on around the characters and the players are trying to wade through it all. This is, probably, one of the few ways to do humor in D&D, and I LOVE IT. Everything in this adventure is completely plausible and makes sense. And when you take it as a whole, as an outsider, you'll be left saying: What the FUCK is going on here? Are you people INSANE?! This is a faction adventure. And therefore an adventure with NPC's . These are very good things to have in an adventure. The players and their characters will always interact with the world around them, especially in a village adventure like this, and having strongly imagined NPC's goes a VERY long way to brining an adventure to life.
[Pontification OFF]
In a small town one of the scribes has invented ... a metal nib for the end of a quill. The guild of scribes now hates him. The ink makers love him. The Goose Breeders Association hates him. The paper manufacturers are in both camps. The druids hate him. Essentially, everyone in this small town has an opinion, entirely plausible. And then the scribe turns up dead. The council, divided in to the two camps, seeks an independent prosecutor to investigate. Oh, and there's a Committee on Public Recriminations running around also. And in to this quite plausible and quite absurd set up the party is tossed. And it's wonderful. There are mobs laying wreaths and jumping to conclusions, the competent, the incompetent, random wanderers ... in fact, lets talk about the wanderers. There's a small overland adventure to get to the village. The party is accompanied by the messenger who delivered to them the offer. Except there are two, one from each faction, and they hate each other and compete to see who's better and yet won't go so far as to kill each other. It's brilliant! And then the wanderers come in to play. There are 8 or so of these and each has a little set up to riff off of. One is with a normal hedgehod. If asked, via a Speak spell, he comes down completely neutral on the issue of the quill nibs, as long as hedgehog quills are not in consideration. THIS IS BRILLIANT. EVERYONE should have an opinion! (Not all do, but as the DM I'll sure as fuck riff on that one things and turn EVERYONE in to having an opinion!!!) This thing suffers a bit from 'the style at the time' issues. A summary of NPC's would have been useful and some of the text gets a bit long. But, the adventure is GOLD! If you need to suffer through one old adventure with too much text this year then THIS is the one.

Quotean abandoned inn an an invisible stalker roaming around it

I think you missed the point of this one.  It's a slithering tracker, a type of ooze that killed the people at the inn.  The room descriptions are supposed to mislead the party into thinking a vampire killed them.  It's a cool adventure if run as a horror story.