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Dungeon Magazine #1 - The crappy debut issue


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grakhirt's Lair
by John Nephew
Levels 1-3

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

The Elven Home
by Anne Gray McReady
Levels 1-3

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

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

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

Guardians of the Tomb
by Carl Smith
Levels 3-5

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

good stuff - subscribed

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

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

That's just his reviewing style.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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



Caermor
by Nigel D. Findley
Levels 2-4

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


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

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

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

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

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

So many worlds from so many imaginations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote from: 1989;689753Man, I would love to have a complete Dungeon collection.

So many worlds from so many imaginations.

I'd rather have the complete Dragon collection (well okay, not "complete", would not want the 3e ones) myself, but yeah. Lots of awesome stuff in Dungeon (and less awesome stuff, but hey the awesome makes it worth it).

Yeah, I don't have many issues of Dragon anymore, but I've got the Archive on CDs, and while Dragon has more cool stuff (for lack of a better word), I get way more use out of Dungeon at the table.

I found the early issues of Dungeon almost as useful as many of the classic modules for using bits and pieces here and there to the homebrew campaign stuff. It was a really great value back in the pre-internet days just for the ready made stablocks, maps, and other bits.

These days with so much usable content available via fansites and blogs, free of charge, the adventure content would need to be much higher to justify paying for it since tidbits & maps aren't so much scarce items anymore.

sweet! dungeon #23 has one of my fav adventures, vineyard vales by Randy Maxwell set in Soderfjord Jarldoms / GAZ#7 Northern Reaches.

this will be a fun ride. Lots of cool stuff in Dungeon

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Nice Horne cover.

This is the first truly useless issue. The adventures have little to no redeeming qualities: nothing of academic interest, little to steal, and uninvolved. And all of this AFTER you read from the editor how tough it is to choose from all the great submissions. I'm still feeling my way in these older product reviews; I'm not quite sure what to focus on.This week it's: some kind of synopsis surrounded by bile.


Kingdom in the Swamp
by John Nephew
Levels 6-9

A little shit halfling thief/borrower wants the parties help in going back to a castle with a vampire in the swamps. His friends we're presumably captured when he fled the scene while the vampire attacked. There's a small swamp adventure followed by the worlds smallest & lamest ten room castle for a vampire to hang out in. The vampire is cursed by Orcus and can never leave the small island in the swamp that his castle sits on. The wandering monsters 'are up to the DMs discretion based on party strength' and the swamp encounters are mostly lame. There's a statue of Orcus that the vamp can see from his castle that would be cool if it played some role in the adventure: IE if there was a social element/break the curse/etc. The swamp does contain the one interesting encounter: an evocative little description about shallow graves full of rotting corpses ... zombies! It's a decent non-D&D-traditional zombies more in-line with how we traditionally think of them, in real life. The castle is small and uninteresting. But that doesn't stop it from being described in endless useless detail. 5 pages of triple-column text for ten rooms. Ouch! The treasure here is very light. 1E is gold=XP, right? There needs to be more build up, a spookier castle, a social element ... just SOMETHING to bring this thing to life. I'd stab the halfing in town and THEN go on the adventure so I didn't have to put up with his cute little thieving 'aw shucks, me?' attitude.



Escape from the Tower of Midnight
by Paul Kane
Levels 2-4 Thieves

This is a tournament module and it shows. Your 'all thief' party starts captured and is executed in 2 days if you can't escape. Getting out of your cell is easy, then you make your way through a 10 level tower. It's supposed to have a strong 'sneak by patrolling guards' element, but that's not well documented, or illustrated. It's just described and because of that you're going to have to put in a lot of work to run it. You get points for knocking people out instead of killing them, even though they are going to put you to death in two days and they've killed all of your friends AND they will your families if you ever tell them your name. It does have one of the few things ideas stealing. There's a running joke that they stole blind the palace of the King of Sark. There's treasure scattered all over the tower from the palace and I found the running joke/content amusing. It's a good reminder that continuity of that sort is a good addition to window dressing.



Fluffly Goes to Heck
by Rick Reid
Levels 3-5

A completely linear joke adventure ala Castle Greyhawk. I'm still bitter about having purchased that thing when it came out, so I'm bitter about this adventure. Recall the silliest Paranoia adventures ever written? Same thing.



Trouble at Grog's
by Grant & David Boucher
Level 1

A 'solve the mystery' adventure in a small village featuring ham-handed diversity lessons about 1/2 orcs and 1/2 ogres. The village is described in verbose detail that manages to convey nothing much of interest. The interactions between the villagers is almost exclusively limited to 'hate 1/2 breeds.' They are not even characitures, that would mean they had a personality. Way too much text and not enough interesting content. Like all mysteries it gimps the characters: if you capture someone hired to beat you up then Charm Person doesn't reveal who hired them ... because they are too scared. Uh huh. Why don't you just say 'I wrote a weak adventure.' There's other interesting choices as well: can't find the tracks? A friendly ranger helps you out! Can't find X? A friendly Deus Ex helps you out! I can't find a decent adventure. Who's gonna help me out? There's something like 23 pages of content here. There might be something like four pages of useful content. A half-ogre bar could be fun. Too bad they sucked the life out of it with the lesson they are teaching. What was that half-orc bar? Krom's Throat? Now THAT's an ethnic bar!

You seem to have skipped issue #3.

It is hard for me to separate the utility of Dungeon from nostalgia.  I was 14 or so when it first came out and subscribed immediately, from issue #1 to #150 (and converting the remaining money to Pathfinder's AP, which I'm still subscribed to 70-odd issues later).  I submitted a couple of ideas, all rejected, and still have the rejection letters from Roger Moore somewhere.  I finally got published in Dungeon with a letter in issue #150.  Ok, not an adventure, but life (college, marriage, and kids) got in the way and I had to lower the bar for my goal of appearing in Dungeon when WotC announced they were terminating it.  Shame, that.

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Hey! I found issue #3 tucked inside a different issues cover! Yeah me! I think this is a pretty strong issue, overall. Many of the adventures seem to tie in to the Wilderness Survival Guide through the use of bullshit environmental rules for desert, sea, and snow. The last adventure is amusing to me because of its clear illustration of the Asshole DM problem. Players are’nt the only ones who try to win D&D!

I got a joke!
Baby seal runs in to a club!

Falcon’s Peak
by David Howery
Levels 1-3

This is the adventure that several others in the OSR wish they were. It’s a fairly ‘realistic’ exploration of a small bandit fortress thought to be abandoned and rumored to have an undiscovered treasure horde in it. It’s been occupied by a new group of bandits, does have a treasure horde in it, and while small is fairly well done. It feels more like a tactical assault on a real place. Here’s the keep, here’s the patrols, here’s the watches, and here’s an obvious hole in the bad guys plan. It ALMOST keeps to that formula but doesn’t beat the thing to death (unlike the points I make in reviews.) There are several good uses of elevation in the adventure: the keep is n a hill, entry is up a cleared slope with boulders on the top, there’s a cave system with a portion you have to “boost up” to access the rest, and a parapet with guards patrolling. The ‘hidden’ part of the fortress, with the old treasure, has a good reason for being hidden AND for the presence of other dead adventurers. It does all of this with a scarcity of words (for this era anyway) and without droning on and on. The mundane treasure is well described and interesting and there’s enough loot/coinage to make it seem like someone for once actually read the XP tables & level charts in the PHB. The wilderness component is small but compliments the main adventure, with the group maybe stumbling upon a patrol of bandits they can pump for information. There’s also a ‘consequences’ section where it points out some of the bandits/etc are not in the fortress and will arrive back in a few days time. This is a pretty good ‘gritty’ adventure. I tend to like my D&D a little more weird but Sp’pc Ops’ D&D can be fun also. With some more personalized magic items I’d say this would rate VERY highly in my book.

Blood on the Snow
by Thomas M Kane
Levels 3-7

Art by Jaquay and maps by Diesel! This is an arctic/sub-artic mystery adventure. The characters are hired to go on a seal hunt and find out who the traitor is. Mystery adventures don’t work in D&D. The characters cast a spell and the mystery is over in short order. This one tries though. The adventure is long, in game time. Training takes a month and the seal hunt is two weeks long. There’s a good timeline of events that will happen if the party doesn’t derail things. It’s mentioned that the party CAN derail things and that the DM will need to go with the flow once that happens. More advice in that arena would have been helpful. As is the adventure is going to take a LONG time to prep. The wilderness/frontier town is well detailed, the timeline is extensive but not pedantic, and the NPC’s/hunters on the hunt are well detailed with decent personalities and motivations. Overall this would be great adventure if it were not set in a land with Detect Alignment, Detect Lies, Augury, Commune, etc. It’s going to take time to prep it. A LOT of time. It’s unclear if the payoff/treasure is worth going on the adventure. Another strong viking adventure if you were doing DOgs of War/Northlands Saga type gaming and put the prep in.

The Deadly Sea
by Carol & Robert Pasnak
Levels 4-7

This is really a two-part adventure. The first part has the group assaulting a small thirty room keep. Bandits took it over and now the party is trying to take it back and find the people who once lived there. It starts with a HARD slog up a cliffside and an almost certain pitched-battle at the front of the keep. There are fewer options for the assault than the Falcon’s Peak adventure and fewer three dimensional notes, although, again, the first battle is up a cliffside path. Then again, the party is higher level and perhaps has access to invisibility and fly. The interior is not all that exciting and is further toned-down by a pseudo-dragon that tells the party where to go and what to do once they gain the entrance hall. Part two has the former family asking the group to to attack/explore an undersea triton lair to find the guys captured sea-elf wife. This part is slightly more interesting, as long as you take the view that the tritons are something like an 19th century english manorial estate. Except under the sea. There is little to no ‘sea’ feel from this, except maybe as window dressing. So as an adventure adventure for a more civilized time it’s interesting but as for having an undersea feel … not so much. I keep imaging that final scene with the mermaid king from the The Smashing Pumpkins video ‘Tonight.’ Except this adventure has a lot less flavor … but a weird civilized vibe that I kind of dig.

The Book With No End
by Richard W. Emerich
Levels 8-12

This was written by an asshole GM who thinks players have access to too many magic items. It starts with your 12th level character being offered 1,000 gp to go an adventure and fetch an artifact. Uh huh. Blah blah blah bullshit backstory. Oh hey, I forgot, you get a potion of Sweet Water if you the mission! The whole thing is full of advice on how to gimp the players. Don’t give the players an even break. Don’t let them use their divination magic. Don’t let them have fun. Blah Blah Blah. It seems that the gods don’t like talking to your 12th level clerics. Oh Well. Or, rather, maybe I god hasn’t figured out yet that his stats are in Deities & Demigods and I can shiv him the throat as easily as I can a kender NPC? The adventure map is a good one but the rooms are full of death traps, players gimping, and a whole lot of other junior high type adventure design. This includes a giant disembodied magical voice chiding the characters with things like “Naughty Naughty! Don’t ruin my fun!” Ooooo, a chess board puzzle! How original! There is also an excruciating amount of detail in certain rooms like the dining room and kitchen, for example, that has absolutely no effect on game play. Perhaps the only decent part of the adventure are the detailed notes at the end detailing the information that the characters can find in the various books in libraries prior to their journey. It reminds me of the stereotypical Call Of Cthulhu adventure where you go to the towns library, newspaper office, and historical society. The whole “heres what your research find. You need to put it together to find the dungeon.” is something that a lot of D&D adventures just assume and don’t show.

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Highlight: The Kappa of Pachee Bridge

I still don't know what the purpose of these reviews is so I'm not sure what to highlight and what to complain about. I'm currently on a "synopsis & abstract with a couple of comments on why I'd never run it" kick. Seven adventures in this one. The one that appeals most is the OA adventure, although shiv'n Mylvin Wimbly should be fun also, but not in the way the author envisioned. The manic need for verbosity is InSaNe! The purpose of the text is not to create a rich world with fully flavored backgrounds for everyone and everything. The purpose of the text is to help the DM run the damn thing; aim the text and content at things that the players will interact with not a laundry list of the contents of my kitchen drawer.

The Rotting Willow
by Edward O, Bromley III
AD&D
Level 7-9

There's a village near a swamp and the villagers are weird in the way they treat dwarves, halflings, gnomes and other short people. Eventually you learn they are being terrorized by some bogarts. The party tries to kill them but the bogarts probably run away. The village is uninspiring and the adventure short but FAR too long for what it is. There's no reward "the DM should determine what treasure is in their lair." Thanks fuckwit. Maybe you forgot that I'm paying YOU for YOUR imagination. The bad guys live in an old treehouse in a swamp but are mostly found in the village: a missed opportunity for a decently described swamp hunt.

Lady of the Lake
by Laura Ferguson
AD&D
Level 1

The party stumbles upon a dying woman who requests they take her to a certain lake. Maybe the villagers nearby know where it is? Really really short adventure stretched out to many pages. It got an ... airy feel to it. Kind of fairy-like, although I don't recall there being any faeries. I think she does a decent job of communicating the wonder of D&D to n00bs, but its short in content, long in words, and the village needs a lot more help. There's a double wraith encounter which, while it helps with the airy feel, is a TPK at level 1 I'd guess. This is a really basic adventure but I dig the traditional pre-tolkein vibe.

The Stolen Power
by Robert Kelk
AD&D
Levels 1-3

Hitting on many crappy points: the party is sent after a book of infinite spells that was stolen by an evil cult. "Deerstalker", and NPC is sent with the party. As far as I can tell, there's no reason for the NPC to join up except to save the parties asses. He doesn't even meddle or have a personality worth listing. Lame.There's a decent number of wilderness encounters with unicorns, faerie dragons,, moondogs and the like which will parlay with the party, as well as flessing dmihumans. That part is actually nice and shows how both good and evil cratures can be integrated in to a wilderness/wanderers in a non-combat way. The core adventure, in the hideout, is smallish and full of detail that doesn't matter. This is a good example of text background and descriptions that don't help the DM get the 'core' of the room and provide trivia detail over content aimed at the players.

The Kappa of Pachee Bridge
by Jay Batista
AD&D-OA
Levels 2-5

My favorite in the issue ... but maybe because of the OA commoner/adventurer power fantasy. Villagers beg the party to help them; a kappa is eating their children. The creatures and people in this adventure are treated like they are real, with real personalities and motivations. The kappa comes off as more alien than evil, although it's a relatable alien. The whole thing FEELS right. It feels like a good OA adventure and the aspects of it that make it good also make 'normal' AD&D adventures good. You can relate to the villagers and the monsters and things talk to you and treasure is interesting and the environment is interesting. The villagers don't have much detail past a couple of the notables, but they are well done. 5 pages, once of which is a map, are better than everything else in this issue combined.

The Trouble with Mylvin Wimbly
by Andrew McCray
D&D
Levels 1-3

A mage hired a halfling bodyguard, recruited some orcs, and then the halfling had second thoughts when the orcs attacked some of his old adventuring party friends. He's on the run! Fucking halflings. Should side with the mage and hunt the bastard down. I fucking hate the rascally/innocent halfling meme. The core is kind of interesting with a mage hiring bodyguards and then recruiting orcs to help him in his plots, along with the moral crisis in the halflings old pals showing up and him having to pick sides. But the 'rascally halfling' thing ruins it. There's not much to this other than a brief chase through a very small forest and the three-room hideout of the mage.

The Eyes of Evil
by Tom Hickerson
AD&D
Level 10+

Manticores & men terrorizing a remote village. No real motivation except to be a hero. A very simple cave complex with only one interesting room: a chasm/vertical lava tube room. The rooms are just monster listing expanded to fill lots of space with no real content in them. The final room, right after the chasm, has a beholder, which may fit the vertical room well and turn in to an interesting tactical challenge for the level 10+ heroes. Lots of missed opportunities in this one, from cave environment to vile clerics, to things to talk to. Instead it's just rooms of stuff to kill and loot.

Hirward's Task
by Rich Stump
AD&D
Levels 4-7

The party is sent by an archmage to his headquarters to defeat a hostile air elemental. That drive him out. He abandoned all his followers/servants. You get 4,000 gp. If you take anything then the mage, who has eidetic memory, hunts you down and kills you. How much XP is a level 15 mage worth? The map layout is decent, over two levels, and there's a decent mix of people to talk to and interact with in the fortress, but they don't really offer anything. They have a description that concentrates on their history but not on things that help them interact with the party. Except the assholes who attack on sight or "are so frightened they attack", which happens all too regularly. There's some decent window-dressing, but it still doesn't feel too much like a wizards lair ... not like Many Gates of the Gann. There are one or two nice items; a wand of defoliation comes to mind, but of course you can't keep them. The map here is decent enough and even includes an intelligently designed outdoor area, although its small. The lack of interactivity in a mages lair and the victorian mania for cataloging rooms is disappointing.

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There's a whole lot of 'set things up to screw the party over' stuff in this issue. L.A.M.E. The wilderness crawl the end is ok, as if the concept of the non-eucledian dungeon ... that's well worth stealing to do something of your own with. Please feel free to tell me I'm wrong about The Brothers.

After the Storm
by Nick Kopsiniss & Patrick Goshtigian
AD&D
Levels 8-10

This is a weird little adventure in a bay after a big storm. The party hears rumors about stuff washing up on shore that indicates a famous pirate and his ship have wrecked on some well-known reefs in the bay. Rumors of treasure abound! After a lot of overwrought introduction there's a nice little rumor table and a pretty brutal wandering monster table. Suffice it to say that leaving the rowboat is a REALLY bad idea ... but it's nice that the monsters respect the personal space of people in a boat and never attack folks in one. Weird. The bay/cove has a number of pretty standard encounters: giant octopus, giant oyster, a wreck, and the pirate ship. There are, of course, undead pirates in the wreck and the thing is stuffed FULL of magic weapons. There's a decent little were-shark encounter that kind of surrounds and touches many parts of the adventure, which is nice. There's also an old hermit that causes some trouble through false rumors, which is nice also. Otherwise .. pretty standard under the sea adventure with some nice wrapping that surrounds it.

White Death
by Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 4-7

This is a short little four encounter dragons lair encounter with a short wilderness adventure that feels tacked on after the fact. A town council hires the party to deal with a white dragon. Not unheard of, if I think of the party as a group of german mercenaries during one of the big civil wars. They make their living off of fur traders, etc, and that's not happening because of the dragon. The journey is maybe 100 miles from the town to the dragons lair, with about 6 standard arctic wandering monsters in a table. The lair is a single room with a dragon on a big pile of gold. A dead dragon. The real dragon is hiding on a ledge and jumps the party. End of adventure. Five pages is short, but it should be A LOT shorter for what you are getting.

Bristanam's Cairn
by John Nephew
AD&D
Levels 8-12

A hermit and a cairn nearby on a stormy night. The hermit tries to rip down the cairn every night because he goes insane and then he builds it back every day when sane. Inside is a death knight. The smartest thing to do is to do just the hermit. Problem Solved! The BULLSHIT death knight has an Anything Sword that allows it to be any magical sword, from round to round. It has three charges. IE: Just enough to fuck the party over and keep them from having it. Lame. Any adventure in which someone wears an amulet guarantees it's proof against detection. PC's should kill all amulet wearers on sight, always, in every adventure they ever undertake.

House of the Brothers
by Mark S. Shipley
AD&D
Levels 6-10

The party stumbles over a cave with a couple of giant brothers in it. They are always aware. They sniff out rangers first. They are given magic items and as many set ups as possible to push everything possible in their favor. Their is D&D in "players vs. DM mode" which is completely lame D&D. There is some good treasure description here in the eight rooms of their lair. Enameled mail and the like. It's mixed in with boring mundane treasure but the adventure does have a nod here and there to more evocative descriptions.

Forbidden Mountain
by Larry Church
AD&
Levels 4-7

This is an adventure in a non-eucledian geometry dungeon. A lot of words go in to describing how this works and the effects on game play. That part is pretty cool. The dungeon has 12 room interconnected with a fair number of hallways that should provide a decent adventure with the non-eucledian element. The problem is that the room encounters proper are boring as hell. The monsters have some surface flavor text them. "blue giant porcupines" and "yellow-and-blue owlbears" but the creatures are nothing more than some color changes. There's nothing really going on in the rooms at all. There's a box with "do not open" on it and a "void room" similar to a sphere on annihilation. There's also a non-magic sword that can be made magical through the intervention of the gods. Those last two elements are relatively cool, as is the non-eucleudian part. The rest is devoid of interesting content.

Tortles of the Purple Sage – Part 1
by Merle & Jackie Rasmussen
D&D
Levels 4-10

This is a BIG wilderness journey through the Known World, around the Savage Coast area. The party is hired to escort a group of Tortles (bipedal turtles) to their ancient spawning grounds in the north. It's VERY general but has 18 programmed encounters that can show up in various regions of the LARGE map. Rare flowers/spices with 3′ long dragonsflys. A thundering herd of animals on a plain ... followed by a grass fire. Weird stuff on the beach. Weird falling stuff from the sky. (a rain of flesh & blood from the sky , one of the options, is cool!) It might be thought of as 'Isle of Dread, but on land." It's going to take a decent amount of DM work but this could serve as decent mini-campaign for your game if you put the work in to expand the ruined cities, NPC's, and so on.

issue #6 sounds terrible. I wonder how many issues it takes them to find their feet with good stories and adventures

151 issues?

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A couple of potentially decent setting adventures in this issue. Several offer a more open-ended play style without railroading that makes them more interesting to me.. They are also going to take A LOT of work to turn in to something playable. There's also a circus adventure, as featured on the cover art. What is the fascination with the circus and carnival? I get the festivals are an important part of village life but no circus ever appeared in a D&D adventure that did not have something fishy going on. Smart players would just have their characters burn it down and put everyone to the sword summarily. It's called 'Risk Mitigation.'


Nightshade
by Nigel Findley
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This adventure has the party going to a wizards house in town to pick up a potion. It's short by Dungeon standards, just 5 pages. You meat an NPC and he pays you to go pick up a potion. You go to the wizards house and pick it up. You get attacked by some paid thugs on the way to deliver it. Adventure over. What it does well is hint at other uses, so it's more presenting several interesting NPCs and situations and then tacking on a pretext so as to call it an adventure. The NPC hook is a bit foppish, with plots and enemies. The wizards falls much more closely to the Reprobate side of the spectrum. That makes him, and his bizarro home, much more interesting than the vast majority of wizards TSR and WOTC ever published. There's really nothing new or unusual in his home (bizarre wizard stuff!), the wizard (he's a reprobate) the hook NPC (fop with plots) or the thugs (run away or get revenge.) What is unusual is that all of this useful detail was included in a Dungeon Magazine adventure; it's quite unusual to see. I've giving this a solid C+/B- for content you can steal and reuse for your game. It's not ground-breaking but it is decent. So, better than the vast majority of crap out there, old or new.


Tortles of the Purple Sage - Part 2
by Merle & Jackie Rasmussen
D&D
Levels 4-10

Part 2 of the exhaustive overview of the lands around the tortles. This is exhaustive in generic and useless detail, mostly of a trading post called Richland. I like the idea of a frontier trading post; it's a nice change from the little usual Keep on the Borderlands type frontier land holding. The problem is that this thing is exhaustive in generic detail. "Fuller: this textile worker processes cloth by shrinking & pressing it to increase its weight." And there are scores of examples of content like that. It add absolutely nothing to the site. No NPC's, no colorful content, no hooks. There are priestly societies call The Lawful Brotherhood and the Neutral Faction. It tries to add some flavor with Trader Jack, the guy in charge, but it's too little. It's too bad; the map of outpost doesn't suck too much (needs more surrounding/supporting lands to support all the tradesmen) and the concept of a frontier trading post is a good one. In general, trading posts and mining camps, towns, don't get enough D&D coverage.


The Matchmakers
by Patrician Nead Elrod
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This is an open-ended city adventure in which the characters are paid to help a young lady elope. Two merchant houses, both alike in stature, in fair Povero. You get a decent description of the city, the characters involved, her routine, details on the places she hangs out, a schedule for a couple of events to frame the action, and a couple of complications. Good complications like: oops, that guy was actually a jerk, or What do you mean you're not the chick we're after? The party is then on their own to hatch some crazy scheme or schemes to grab her and deliver her to the meeting point. That's the kind of adventure type I like most: a setting the party gets to run rampant in, be it city, dungeon, or wilderness. There's some decent detail about the town: press gang action on the docks and the like. There's too much extraneous detail in the various rooms described in the villas the party may venture in to; the penchant for Doomsday Book recording in this era is unfortunate and obfuscates the real content.With prep and notes you could salvage this in to a fairly routine adventure.


Samurai Steel
by Daniel Salas
AD&D OA
Levels 3-5

Yet another open-ended adventure, but this time the party is trapped in a village, having been warned that they will almost certainly be killed in a few days when they are sure to be accused of treason. They are supposed to investigate to gather evidence that they are being framed and that a certain someone close to the local lord is plotting against him. This is supposed to be open-ended like The Matchmakers was, a couple of events, some locations details, some NPC's to interact with, etc. The Matchmakers was ok but this falls short. There's just not enough extra detail about the village and the people that live thee to help the DM turn it in to some place real. There are maybe four interesting people in he village and one of them dies 10 minutes in to the adventure after warning the party they are sure to be accused in a couple of days time. The only details of the village are the two or three spots that contain clues and the only other people to be detailed are the traitors that the party has to discover. The rest of the content about the village isn't even really generic; it just doesn't exist. You get killed in a couple of days AND you almost certainly get killed if you try t leave the village early AND you get killed if you start stabbing NPC's in the throat (though they are commoners AND you get killed if ... you get the picture. This pretends to be open-ended but is a railroad. Do what the designer wants you to do or have your characters killed. Uncool.


The Jungling Mordo Circus
by Vic Broquard
AD&D
Levels 10+

I love seasonal activities. I run a meetup for them. I subscribe to the Indian Festival Calendar and try to hit a lot of the local corn/beet/cucumber/etc festivals in the small towns around Indiana. The year has pattern to it with seasonal activities, seasonal fruit & veg, and festivals. I get that and I love that. This yearly routine & cycle has always been a staple of life and I get the importance that festivals played, and still play, in life. BUT JESES H FUCKING CHRIST WHY THE FUCK ARE PEOPLE OBSESSED WITH PUTTING EVIL CARNIVALS IN D&D? It doesn't work. It NEVER works. Unless you put festivals in routinely then the party will know something is up when the circus shows up. The smart thing to do is to just burn it down and kill everyone. Especially when you are level 10+, as in this adventure. Who is going to mess with your 10+ party? The local authorities? The party is probably the local law. The piece of shit adventure has a kidnapping ring run by a level 20 evil wizard. He's got the fucking Wish spell but he kidnaps people for money. And he DOES have the Wish spell. It's crazy .The place is thick with high-level assassins, wizards, ACs's in the -6 to -8 range, and the like. It's also on the up-and-up, generally, except for the kidnapping and has a hired security contingent made up of Lawful monks and good clerics. This thing is so forced as to be putrid. The ringmaster has AC -11 and is a level 15 illusionist. Why the fuck are these people here? Don't they have towers to build and experiments to conduct so the forces of good, led by a holy paladin, can invade and win the day only to have the paladin fall and be corrupted? There's no real adventure here, just an evil circus described so the DM can have someone kidnapped and the party can investigate. There's no hook or adventure at all other than what I just described, which is described to the reader in just about as many words.

Dungeon Magazine #8


It's weird; the OA entires in Dungeon seem much better than the normal content. Maybe the exotic environment appeals in a way that the mundane can not?

Mountain Sanctuary
By John Nephew
AD&D
Levels 1-3

The party trips over a dungeon entrance buried in rubble. Inside is a small thirteen room dungeon that's criss-crossed with small mite tunnels. The dungeon is full of giant rats, mites, and pesties, with the associated "big people fighting in small spaces" rules, etc. The non-standard treasure is ok, jeweled lamps, tapestries, etc. The entire point of the adventure seems to be getting the party surrounded by the beasties who attack the party in a coordinated manner. There's just nothing here ... 6 pages for what could have been a 1-page dungeon.

For a Lady's Honor
by Estes Hammons
AD&D
Levels 4-7

The party is sent to go get a blackmail item from a city councilor. There are ten or so city encounters for those that want to have some random fun, and then the councilors house is described. It's meant to be a sneak job so there's lots of "-15% to move silently this" and "-2% to hide in shadows that." The house is not that interesting and just has the usual enchanted armor, etc in it. But if you take the councilor, and his short write up and the villain, and the city encounters then you could have some content for a city game. The councilor would make a good recurring asshole and the city encounters are not terrible. Not all that original but decent enough for plain content. Laborers, pilgrims, city guards, merchant, unaffiliated street gangs ... just enough content to give you a great idea of what like if life in this city. It's better than most content.

In Defense of the Law
by Carl Sargent
AD&D
Levels 7-10

This is a three level dungeon with forty-three or so rooms. It tries to make itself interesting by introducing an NPC party of LE and LN NPC's who are also trying to accomplish the same goal as the (presumably) LG party. Thus the players get to see how a different sort of party operates and interact with them through the various encounters the groups may have together, if/when they meet and if/when they join up to. The chaotics are after the Lawful McGuffin and so it's off to the dungeon the party goes. The treasure is ok but the room entries get long and the creatures are stuffed in to the rooms in a somewhat haphazard manner. While many have names they don't really interact with others other than "Attack!" and there's no coordinated response by the occupants. There's a throw-away description or two but not enough to really matter in a response.

The Wounded Worm
by Thomas M. Kane
AD&D
Levels 4-8

This is a weird little adventure; a kind of cross between a wilderness area and an evil bad guy base. It reminds me of the older MERP supplements, and that's always a compliment. The whole idea os that there's an evil bad guy, a wounded dragon, that controls this region and he's got a whole host of creatures under his control, one way or another, to help hi towards his ends. There's a pretext adventure hook but I think the thing would be much better if you worked him in over the course of many adventures as the ringleader to a bunch of plots, maybe slowly introducing his minions and fleshing them out a bit more than what's given the adventure. This would give you a great build-up to a main villain and nice climax sort of adventure for a party. The dragons got some interesting minions, most of which have some sort of personality. It's the usual 'nightmare to sort out' descriptions but you'd have some nice story-arc material if you did.

The Flowers of Flame
by Jay Batista
AD&D OA
Levels 5-8

So, I apologize to everyone I silently maligned when they said "it takes me as long to absorb a prepared adventure as it does for me to make a new one!" I now understand what you mean. This adventure is THICK. The players are used as pawns in a political game, under the pretext of retrieving a a mythical burning flower. This is close to a OA hex crawl, but without as many encounters. You hire guides, meet other parties/government agents, climb the main mountain/glacier, etc. There's a good deal of improvisation available here for a decent DM as well as a good scattering of encounter type. The adventure is thick with ... adventure. More than that ... uh ... go on a journey to tibet and encounter weird stuff until you get the flowers at a monastery?

Dungeon Magazine #9

Dear Lord, why did I ever choose to do this?

The Lurkers in the Library
by Patricia Nead Elrod
AD&D Levels 1-3

Six pages that boil down to "a couple of orcs break in to a library." The library is exhaustively described to a degree where all of the words run together and you don't get a good picture of what it is. The party stumbles upon a scene In Media Res and are told a tentacle came through a wall and grabbed people. They are expected to look in to things and explore the library to eventually stumble upon the orcs. An effort is made to give the orcs and hostages personalities but its unclear if that's ever going to come up in play. I suspect that the orcs are just gonna be hacked down. In spite of the length this is, in reality, just the barest outline of an adventure.

The Crypt of Istaris
by Richard Fichera
AD&D
Levels 3-5

Oh boy, a full page of read-aloud! Soliloquy, HO! AND a page of useless background?!! And useless fresco's on the walls showing suffering?!?! Say it isn't so! A symmetrical star layout?!?! Hot diggity dirt! Ok, I'm being a bit unfair; it has some bad points but it is virtually chock full of interesting rooms. There's a nice statue trap/puzzle in room 3, a set piece with piercers in room 4, weird experimented on ogres ala Doc Frankenstein in room 6, weird nozzles and gas in room 7, and a strange ceiling in room 8 ... and so on. There's some bullshit "only 20% of the time" and the like nonsense. This is a tournament module, and so that explains a lot of the set piece type encounters, but it's also got some nice environments, descriptions, and the like, especially for the time in question. It's much closer to the positive aspects of C1-Hidden Shrine than it is the crapfests that usually appear in Dungeon.

The Djinni's Ring
by Vince Garcia
D&D Solo
3rd Level

This is a Choose Your Own Adventure solo adventure with an elf in an Arabian Nights type environment.

The Golden Bowl of Ashu H'san
by Rick Swan
AD&D-OA
Levels 2-4

This is a linear wilderness adventure. You're on a mission for a village, wander down a trail meeting people, and then end up at he adventure site where the thing finishes up. One of the things I like about the OA adventures in Dungeon, thus far, is how the spirits are much closer and integrated in to the life of the surrounding lands. This adventure is no different. A remote farming village is experiencing a drought and the old head man knows that someone has to go to their sacred site and see what's up with their protective spirit. As usual, no one in the village s brave enough to go. The party then has ten or so encounters in the wacky & wonderful world of Dungeon OA. There's a nice fairy tale feel here, with injured animals, old wells, haughty warriors blocking a shrine, and a forceful merchant. It's exactly the sort of content I like to see in an adventure: whimsical and fanciflul, appealing to some of the old historical tropes. There's a good mix of combat and role-playing. I approve.

The Ghostship Gambit
by Randy Maxwell
D&D
Levels 3-6

This isn't really an adventure but rather an encounter with a ghost ship. A port town is having trouble with many of the ships coming in being attacked by a ghost ship. The characters get hired to do something about it. That entails hiring a ship and sailing out, having no encounters, and meeting the ghost ship. Which is actually just some pirate aquatic elves. Eight of them. Adventure over. There's not really much here, in spite of the page count.

The Plight of Cirria
by Grant & David Boucher
AD&D
Levels 8-12

This is a tedious wilderness adventure followed by a tedious cloud castle adventure. A poly'd dragon hires you to find her mate and hands you a map. The map, a collection of symbols and directions, may be the best part of the adventure, although it's very simple. You then get to make 80 wandering monster checks over 20 days. This takes you past a number of mundane encounters that tend toward either the environmental or normal. You also pass two monster hideouts, which at least provide a speed bump. It never amazes me how something exotic and fantastic, like a cloud castle, can be made in to something boring. The descriptions are mundane and boring. In the end you kill a couple of demons and wizards. Joy. Boring. There's a convoluted trap room that you might be able to salvage, but not much else. It's just a flat and boring adventure with charm, depth, and very very little interesting and gameable material.

Dungeon Magazine #10


The Shrine of Ilsidahur
by John Nephew
AD&D
Levels 3-6

This is a short expedition to a forgotten shrine of twelve rooms. You’re looking at about 24 wandering monster checks to get to the shrine, with the wandering monsters being straight out of the book. The shrine proper is mostly nothing special; just one more of a large number of throw-away adventures. Almost. While it has its fair share of overwrought text, mundane descriptions, and “a xorn just happens to be swimming underneath the room and is attracted by tremors”, it also has at least two interesting things in it. The first is the protector of the tomb. Some poor native idiot keeps the temple up … or at least keeps up the exterior of the temple. He’s far enough away that the party may not suspect him and close enough that the party is sure to encounter him. He bides his time, clears away the jungle growth from the temple, and reset the first trap. I think that’s pretty nice and shows a decent way to integrate some realism and flavor in to an adventure without things bogging down. There’s also a platinum handled gold knife: a magic sacrificial knife with the whole ego/personality thing going on. That’s pretty cool and something I haven’t seen before. (IE: doing it to a sacrificial knife.) Otherwise … the adventure is nothing special. Boring magic items, boring rooms. Yawn. No flavor to speak of.

The Artisan’s Tomb
by Matthew Maaske
ADD-OA
Levels 3-5

Finally, an OA adventure in Dungeon that sucks! But even then it has a different flair. The party meets a ghost who wants you to break in to his tomb and smash a vase so his soul can pass on. He’d do it, but there’s a spirit guardian and he can’t get by it. The whole adventure is only three encounters, so it’s suckatude comes from its short nature and the lame hook of meeting him while camped out one night. It IS a nicely adventure pretext though.

 

They Also Serve
by Robert Kelk
AD&D
Levels 5-7

Ug! An All thief adventure! All signs point to SUCK, Captain! The party travel to a nearby town and raid a thieves guildhall, trying to recover the McGuffin. The wandering monster table for the wilderness isn’t bad; it includes little notes about what the wanderers are doing, which I always appreciate. There are a few too many “they rush by” sorts of descriptions, but overall the wandering table is a decent effort. The guildhall is just another building stuffed full of boring encounters. Mundane rooms, training rooms, quarters, etc. The whole thing is more than a little mundane and boring. There’s not many notes at all about routines, schedules, and the like, which would be better for a caper adventure. There are a decent magic item or two: a bookmark of continual light and a pair of “penetrate disguise” glasses, for example. The whole thing is just too normal and not enough gameable material.

Monsterquest
by Vince Garcia
AD&D
Levels 1-3

You get some pre-gens for monsters who need to sneak in to a fortress to recover the orc chiefs McGuffin. Sewers! Oh yeah! The party then travel to a temple to get the chiefs drinking horn. There’s a decent encounter or two in the temple: jumping biting skulls and the like. This may be good for a one-shot but not much more. The fortress needs to be much more overwhelming to encourage the monsters to not just kill everything, and that means guard schedules, etc, in order to pull off the caper. :(

Secrets of the Towers
by Larry Church
AD&D
Levels 1+

This is a large set of towers that are scattered all over the land and are all linked in a certain way. You could put this in the start of a campaign and drop some hints and have a good set of plot devices that reappear again and again in the game. As such this is much more of a campaign resource and because of that one of the most useful things in Dungeon. The towers have a bunch of teleporters in them that link to other towers, twelves in all, for adventure from first level all the way to “name level.” They each have something going on and s such provide a good baseline for sprinkling through a campaign, especially if you spice things up a bit, both in and around the towers that the party travel to.

Threshold of Evil
by Scott Bennie
AD&D
Levels 14-18

Ug, another high level adventure. You get the climb a mountain, using the absurd Wilderness Survival rules, and not use your magic items to get in to the wizards base. That’s because he’s cast about a zillion wishes to keep people out, so you have to slog on foot. Once there you get to fight clones of the wizard and his minions over and over again, as well as a few Slaad that are conveniently hanging about. There’s nothing fantastic or interesting here, just room after room stuffed full of people for you to kill.

Dungeon Magazine #11


The Dark Conventicle
by Richard W. Emerich
AD&D
Levels 8-12

This is a raid on a major underground cult complex in order to save a kidnapped victim. If we ignore the do-gooder aspect and craptasic "save the merchants daughter" hook then you have a small infiltration/crawl that almost certainly ends in a very large scale mass combat, maybe similar to the mass combats that were possible in D2 & D3. In fact, the adventure might be summarized as a raid on the D2 temple while they were mostly gathered for a sacrifice ... and you want to save the sacrifice victim. The map here is nice, with cave tunnels, worked stone, elevation changes, multiple passages/loops, same-level stairs, portcullis, statues, chasms, and tunnels blocks off by rubble that can be dug through. It sprawls over three levels. This is combined with a wandering monster table, and rules/guidelines, for the entire underground temple complex going on alert because the noise the party makes in combat and/or escaped guards. The encounters make a decent attempt, with traps, levitation holes, and guard rooms sprinkled throughout, but in general they are an overwrought and boring affair. The end of the adventure culminates with a mass combat in an underground chapel with over 200 people. There are guidelines for human wave 0-level mass combat, as well as the bajillion evil clerics in attendance. The whole things takes place in a 2-level room with a balcony, a chasm, and a lot of pews. There are no great monster/treasure items here, just the standard stuff. There are references to sewers, and the crappy hook is crappy. The encounters are generally lame. With a little work though you could turn this in to a decent high-level adventure that tests the parties ability in a non-standard way ... through a HELL of a big fight at the end.

The Wooden Mouse
by Roger Smith
AD&D
Levels 5-8

This is a one-on-one thief adventure that involve ... SURPRISE! infiltrating a house. And it's actually a test! Woo Hoo! Let the suckatude begin! The problem with this type of adventure is that thief skills suck and once they flub a roll its hard to make the case that the entire house doesn't show up to kill your ass. This is supposed to be a caper, but many of the encounters involve forced combats, which defeat the purpose of the adventure. It's yet another piss poor attempt to force a certain play style. I'm sure someone could a decent one of these, but this is not the one.

The Black Heart of Ulom
by Mark Keavney
AD&D
Levels 5-8

There's an evil forest nearby and you're hired by an archdruid to go fix it. You need to pour a potion on the magic tree in the center to cure the corruption. The major differentiator in this adventure is the evil wood 'waking up.' The more the players screw with the forest then the more awake the forest is, eventually leading to a VERY bad outcome as all of the trees animate and annihilate the party. There's a pretty giant wandering list that's influenced by how awake the forest is, as well as a short series of programmed encounters if the party takes the direct route up the river to the heart of the place. The basic format is: you have to get out of the boat because of some obstacle, something in the forest attacks. A wise party avoids the combat and moves on. The final encounter is with a couple of treants, and then the adventure is over. The Awakening part is cute, but I'm not sure the forest is large enough to get full use out of it. There is a Monster Statistics table at the end that serves as a kind of reference for the adventure. I wish every adventure did this.

Wards of Witching Ways
by Christopher Perkins
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This is a tournament module, with scoring. It resolves around a four-level keep/castle with about fifty rooms in it. The party has to make their through it to the end. The two major occupants are betting on the parties outcome and if they'll make it, with the adventure eventually ending with the party fighting both of them. It's not terrible for a tournament adventure: it's self-contained and there's a decent amount of variety in the encounters as well as options available to the players in navigating the keep. There are some pre-planned/programmed/event encounters in addition to the usual location-based encounters. It's a tournament module so the forced 'bet' hook can be ignored. Otherwise, it's a decent tournament adventure. There's no railroad and the thing needs a serious edit to cut it down to size so groups of DM's can run it, but that's generally the case with ALL Dungeon adventures. If that kind of work were put in to this then you'd have a decent adventure for a con that you can score.

Dungeon Magazine#12

Spottle Parlor is a fun little adventure.

 

Light of Lost Souls
by Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is supposed to be a spooky adventure. The characters are stuck in a lighthouse while the dead assault it. While camping in a shallow cave on of them is possessed by a ghostly lighthouse keeper and runs to the top of a nearby lighthouse. The lighthouse is then assaulted by a bunch of dead sailors who died when the keeper neglected his duties. At three-ish pages this is REALLY short by Dungeon Magazine standards. It's too short. The whole thing is supposed to be a creepy assault with a kind of cramped and claustrophobic atmosphere. The designer says as much in one brief sentence. Unfortunately there's not enough here to enable the DM to do as much. Zombie assaults are about defending the building with what's at hand ... one of the few times victorian style lists of rooms contents are appropriate. In addition the nearby town, which is supposed to be creepy & abandoned, is not detailed at all. The problem here is that you can't just say "run it spooky", you need to provide resources to help the DM run it spooky. That's what we're paying for. Without that you haven't really provided anything of value to the DM. "Zombies attack while the group is in a lighthouse." There's no value in that. It's very important to remember when designing an adventure that it's your job to communicate the vibe.

Scepter of the Underworld
by James Jacobs
AD&D
Level 12

Solo adventure, for a fighter, in Choose Your Own Adventure style.

At the Spottle Parlor
by Rick Swan
D&D
Levels 2-4

This is a whimsical little adventure with some strong NPC's. As a result you get a very nice little evening of gaming driven by the interactions of the NPC's. It's really exactly the kind of whimsical feel with strong themes and strong classical archetypes that I groove on. A rich old crippled guy, a well known gambler, invites the group to gamble that evening. They arrive to find a fat cleric, a dumb kid, and a hissing lizard man all sitting around the table. What results is some prelude scene setting and then ten rounds of gaming. It's characterized by the priest begging for donations for his temple ... which he then generally gambles away. The dumb kid has to have EVERYTHING explained to him. The lizard man thinks someone is giving him the evil eye. And the gambler doesn't seem to care that he's loosing. Then the hobgoblins show for the slaves they pressured the gambler in to. It's got a long into but the vibe here is really great and the writing communicates the feel of the NPC's and the feel of the adventure VERY well. For example, the priest is very high strung and nervous, more so lately because he has only been able to solicit 9cp in a week of trying to raise funds, as charged by his superiors, for a new holy shrine. There's 11 or 12 'rounds' of conversation given, which I all found delightful. There's even a little section at the end on salvaging the adventure if the PC's knock it off the rails. The designer is one of the piece of shits responsible for one of, if not the, worst product of all time: WG7 Castle Greyhawk. With this adventure he slightly redeems himself: I will now NOT incoherently rant at him should I ever meet him. Il will, instead, coherently rant at him.

Intrigue in the Depths
by Michael Lach, Rocco Pisto
AD&D
Levels 4-7

In to the sea, you and me, to play some D&D! The group is hired by some mages to go check up on their undersea spell component delivery. Can't breathe water? The mages supply you some magic! Need some free action? The mages supply some! Can't speak sea elf? The mages supply some magic! But of course they can't be bothered to go do it themselves. It never fails to amaze me how people can set their adventure in an exotic locale and then fail to make it exotic. Instead of flavorful descriptions of amazing locations and encounters we instead get the boring ass descriptions that make up the mundanity of modern life. How undersea villagers farm, what the workload of the villages are, and so on. SO. MUCH. LAME. There is a single exception to the boring ass shit in this adventure and that's the description of a family of sea trolls. They each get names and brief personalities, and are outside wrestling sharks ... that's some great shit. It's going to be totally lost since the party is just going to hack them down, but the initial effect stirs up imagery of the troll encounter in The Hobbit. Otherwise it's just a boring adventure that's forced to be under the sea.

Huddle Farm
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-4

This is a mystery adventure in a halfling farming village. It didn't have to suck. It does. Two farms have a lightweight feud going on because someone built a hedge blocking someone else's blackberry right-of-way. That's GREAT. It shows the mundanity of halfling life. It's absurd and nice and flavorful. The feud escalates to crop destruction, barn burning, and painting one guys cows green. Again, not bad from a certain point of view. Especially if it were presented as something wholly out of place. There is, of course, a third party work that's stirring the shit. The problem with this adventure is that it's based around a typical Room Description format. We get exhaustive descriptions of each of the farms rooms, almost none of which is relevant at all. The adventure just needs some lightweight farm descriptions and some good lightweight NPC and village descriptions along with a brief outline or timeline. Instead we get a bunch of data buried in giant room text descriptions. There's really not much actual content here at all if the overblown room nonsense is ignored.

Dungeon Magazine #13


More than one thing to salvage from this issue! A decent adventure starts, an early Dungeon Dozen follows, and the then things go RAPIDLY downhill. Until a good, last, adventure appears.

The Ruins of Nol-Daer
by Howard L. McClesky
AD&D
Levels 5-8

This is that most rare of things: a good Dungeon Magazine adventure. It's a three level abandoned/ruined keep now inhabited by a motley assortment of creatures that ... and get this ... all make sense together. I don't mean they are fire giants with hell hounds or some such. There is a wide variety of creatures here and their reason for being here, working together or not, seems ... realistic? There's a page or so of bullshit introduction/background that is completely worthless but once past it you get a decently tight adventure, at least for the time it was written in. It's got some great hooks that are short and yet integrate well in to the adventure. In fact, that's a good summary. The adventure is full of things that are NOT throw away and fit in well. It has a certain internal logic. The ruined keep has impacted the countryside and there are a variety of places around it that have suffered. Missing livestock, a mining camp having trouble, bandits having trouble when making camp ... these backgrounds, rumors, and real events all fit in very naturally. The adventure proper has a great map of a ruined keep and the encounters are full of real gamble material. A tumble down courtyard has a description that centers round the impact of it being tumble down. A monster hides in a room astral projecting ... just go ahead and kill it. There's a NICE magic ring that talks to the party and tries to get them to take it with them. Each of the encounters center around not just some bullshit victorian cataloging of the room contents but in how the players can interact with it or in how he DM can use it to interact with the players. Arrow slits might have things behind them, etc. that the DM can use to increase the players paranoia. That kind of practical advice to use in =actually running the game is what sets this apart from the vast majority of dreck.

Going Once... Gointg Twice
by Patricia Nead Elrod
AD&D
Any Level

This isn't really an adventure, it's more of a seed. An old wizard is retiring and moving and he's auctioning off his stuff. The "adventure" consists of a couple of NPC descriptions and a list of 24 things being auctioned off. It's positioned as a way for the DM to relive the party of some cash. Lame. However, if you just take the items up for auction and sprinkle them in to your campaign as treasure, replacing he lame ass shit that published adventures usually give out, then you'd have some decent treasures. Kind of like an early version of the most excellent Dozen Dozen (the best current D&D blog.) The fact that this POS takes up five pages is a tragedy, but I guess they have to differentiate themselves from a simple Dragon magazine list.

The Moor-Tomb Map
by Jon Bailey
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a short overland journey to an island with an old wizards tomb on it that is currently inhabited by bandits. Five of the adventure pages are devoted to the starting town, so it's probably supposed to be a springboard to other adventures as well as a home base. From that standpoint it's not terrible; there are a decent number of NPC's running around although they don't really interact with each other. The organization here will require a lot of note taking and rereading to allow the DM to run the village well; a typical village flaw that isn't helped by the verbosity of this era. The overland adventure has only seven encounters. These are of varying quality. The first has a wolfwere and his six wolf buddies (concealed perfectly quietly in a crate) tricking the party and ambushing them. The lack of blood, six QUIET wolves fitting in a crate, and the absurdity of the set up ruin an otherwise classic "broken down wagon" trope. There's a bridge ambush where a couple of turn-coat hirelings attack the party. I like the general aspect but I don't like the way its done here. Even though there are bandits as a feature of the adventure this ambush has the hirelings in league with six lizard men. A little arbitrary ... it seems like making this a rival bandit gang, hoping to join up with the main one, or ANY replacement of the lizardmen with humans, would be better. The last overland bit has a giant obelisk to be climbed to get a clue by looking through prisms. That's a nice classic element. It's ruined by the wizard having sprinkled clues on top to help the party ... loot his tomb? Really? Ug. I hate that shit. THIS IS NOT A TEST! THE PART ARE GRAVE ROBBERS! The tomb is a tomb, and not bad by those standards. Traps, undead, etc. The bandit portion is a fake fishing village ... a little far-fetched, I think. Maybe much better if it WERE a fishing village, dominated by the bandits.

The Treasure Vault of Kasil
by Patrick Goshtigian & Nick Kopsinis
AD&D
Levels 5-7

There vault/ruins are well known in the area and there's a small village at the base of the mountain the ruins are on. I really like the idea of a small out of the way village, pretty peaceful, with a local tourist attraction nearby to go visit. There's A LOT of possibilities in that which, are, unfortunately, not taken advantage of.Hucksters, wary mothers, people with dreams, guides ... a lot of lost possibilities. The adventure proper is just five or death death traps straight out of Grimtooth ... but a LOT more complicated. Ah, for those halcyon years of Jr High D&D play ...

Of Nests & Nations
by Randy Maxwell
D&D
Levels 8-12

Uh .. I don't know how to describe this one. Arson, rioting, sabotage, murder ... and no suspects. That's the tagline and I guess it's a decent description. Specularum is having trouble Murdered guards, conjured monsters, etc, have the town in chaos. There are riots in the streets and every faction in the town is tossing about accusations and at each others throats. ALL HAIL DISCORDIA! "The duke and his advisors are very concerned over the growing unrest in the city." Yeah? No shit Sherlock. The bulk of the adventure is an investigation. Events will happen on certain days and the party will follow-up and meet people and do things until finally either figuring out who's behind it all and/or being targeted for elimination. There are A LOT of events. There's is a decent amount of ancillary data to help the DM runs things. A handy table for mob action, for example! There are a decent number of one-liner comments that can lead to more flavor ... the underworkld meets at Black Lilly's bar ... just a sentence or two is what we get but you immediately get the picture of a kind of no-man land, or neutral zone meeting ground so the underbelly can conduct business with hated rivals, if need be. The alien nature of the invader is nicely done and, while a little forced (of look, it has exactly the magic item it needs!) I think it comes across well enough. If you read this a couple of times and photocopy and cut out and make notes and expand on NPC's (a lot of Speak with Dead possibilities and thus a need for the dead to threaten, worry, and embellish and the DM to be prepared for that) then you'd have a decent adventure. So, basically, this is an adventure outline. A GOOD adventure outline. But like all outlines you need to do work to bring it to life.

Dungeon Magazine #14

I missed my update last weekend. My wife & her friends were cosplaying My Little Pony at a local con and I was Discord. I know no one gives a shit but I'm bored after blowing out my gutters.

Masqueraider
Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 2-5

This is a small wilderness adventure followed by a short cave. It's set up as a kind of mystery. Something weird is going on, and either a bear, owlbear, or giant spider is attacking locals. The party hunts it down to a cave system. The introduction and wilderness area has hints of nice things: a cute ranch theme, rival parties, soldiers and others to ump for rumors. These could use some more work but generally have a seed of something good, especially when taken as a whole. The wilderness encounters, while having too much text (which was the style at the time ... did I mention this one also wears an onion on its belt?) are not that bad either. Flies on dead ponies, a horde of newly hatched giant ticks, and some herders, for example. These offer some pretty good variety. The cave lair has a similar problem/feature: LOTS of text with some decent nuggets buried inside. There's a nice dead adventurer party scattered throughout, along with their banner. The banner is a good example of little bits that add substance and style. The adventure is not awesome but the extra little bits are nice. There may be enough to make this one worth checking out.

A Question of Balance
by Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 8-12

One Encounter Wonder. The party sees an earth insurance salesman getting burned at the stake and has to free him from the villagers and then go kill The Other Thing that came through the time vortex with him. Which is one fight. That's not interesting. There's some pretty lame expository text to communicate The Balance to the party.

 

Stranded on the Baron's Island
by Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 4-6

Country House Murder, except its a theft and the party is shipwrecked. (No Murder Hobo would be caught dead sailing; the ships are always wrecking.) Lots of people with things to hide and quirky behavior, so lots of red herrings. Nice use of a mimic & doppleganger which is mostly wasted in this thing. The NPC's are strong, but the formatting suffers: its arranged like a location based adventure instead of a social adventure. A HEAVY edit could save this. Which would be a lot of work.

Master of Puppets
by Carl Sargent
AD&D
Levels 6-8

Uh ... dungeon crawl with a duel-class 11Monk/14MU running ahead of you launching set pieces. It's hard to see this as a level 6-8 adventure, there are A LOT of tough encounters here for that level and the entire thing is mostly linear. Room 1 then room 2 then room 3 and so on. The bad guy starts running around in front of you, dumping attacks at you while jumping through the door to the next room. It's got a cute spot where animals get dropped from a great height and go splat on the party, but that kind of fun is not representative of the adventure. it's just a set up full of set pieces.

Phantasm Chasm
by Erik Kjerland
AD&D
Levels 5-7

Another one encounter wonder. Except one hit wonders were good. The party gets ambushed by bugbears and illusionists in a dead-end gully. Ooooo! They are disguised! By illusions! *BLEEEECH*

 

The Wererats of Relfren
by Grant Boucher & Kurt Wenz
D&D
Levels 3-6

A weird little village/town adventure that is mostly event based. The party wanders around, stuff happens, and hopefully the party investigates. It can end with a giant wererat attack during a village festival. There's a very weird section where the party is arrested and jailed. Resisting turns the entire peasant population against the party and turns then in to outlaws. And then the party is rescued. All of this is done so the party can dress up in costumes for The Big Reveal: the big costume party in the village where the wererats rip off their masks to reveal themselves and attack! All that railroading. I hate that shit.

Quote from: bryce0lynch;754362Dungeon Magazine #14

I missed my update last weekend. My wife & her friends were cosplaying My Little Pony at a local con

That's kind of hot.

Dungeon Magazine #15


Elephant Graveyard is a much beloved adventure, it seems, but I didn't really get it.

The Wreck of the Shining Star
Richard W Emerich
AD&D
Levels 4-8

This is an empty little adventure on a ship wreck. Over three levels and about thirty rooms you encounter an octopus and an undead. The Rooms are devoid of anything interesting to play with and there's hardly any interesting descriptive text. The adventure mostly consists of a list of what each room contains. Perhaps an adventure that actuaries might find interesting? There is one interesting thing in the adventure, a unique magic item, and it takes half a page to describe. Perhaps someone is trying too hard ... and in the wrong ways?

In Pursuit of the Slayer
Carl Sargent
D&D
Levels 6-9

This is a case mystery. The party encounters the remains of a massacre and an obviously evil person. As they follow and chase him to bring him to justice they get information that the evil dude has been known as a good dude for a long time. It's got a time based element so the longer the party dallies the harder the final fight is. It has some decent monsters from the Creature Catalog which mixes things up a bit ... for a moment I thought there was some originality here. Bits of this are ok but it seems to telegraph its intentions well ahead of time.

The Dragon's Gift
Thomas M. Kane
AD&D OA
Levels 2-7

I like a lot of the OA adventures in Dungeon, mostly because they have a strong fairy-tale like element. The Celestial Bureaucracy, talking animals and spirits that do more than just "Roll for init as they attack!" add the whimsical element that I am usually looking for. This is a bit of linear railroad, but a mostly enjoyable one with some great encounters. What do you do when you mean a giant along a narrow path, with no room for either to pass by? The "paperwork" trope which always seems so tiresome in most adventures with monster bureaucrats doesn't seem out of place or forced. I suspect that you could mine Dungeon Magazine for OA encounters and sprinkle them throughout your own games and get a lot of the whimsical element that I look for. There's a kind of enforced politeness in these because of the OA character classes/honor nonsense, but if you instead just see it as "you can talk to all the monsters" and VERY few things immediately attack, then you can see the attraction to adventures like this one. Maybe that's because, even though it's linear, the addition of the social elements provide the Choice critical to a good adventure. Oh, yeah, in this one you travel up a river to meet a water spirit who wants to give you some treasure. And he means it!

The Glass House
Wolfgang Baur
AD&D
Levels 4-6

I'm not sure what's up with this one. It's just a simple raid on a house that a giant inhabits. There's a huge backstory with love, selkies, undead, and tragedy. None of which matters because the hacking is going to be short and sweet as the party cuts down the giant and his wolves. There's are elements of the norse in this, with a frost man named Sigurd and a magic cauldron. With some good theming you might be able to salvage something here. MAYBE. If you set the guy up as some place the party had to go, complete with his lazy troll servants, and then added the tragic element to it later then the party would have a nice little quandary on their hands.

Roarwater Caves
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-4

A decent adventure! In Dungeon! Woo Hoo! It all starts with a good name: Roarwater Caves. It's a dungeon crawl/raid. I swear I like things are NOT dungeon crawls, but not in this issue. There this guy in town that's buying fish from Xvarts nearby for a fraction of their value and undercutting the local fishermen. Lately his shipments have stopped because the Xvarts have been taken over by bugbears. The xvarts want him to find someone to come kill the bugbears. That's a pretty decent set up. Monsters that are not psychotically evil, some good human natures stuff in there as well. There's also a good end-game chaos play where a large band of kobolds raid the Xvarts as the players enter The Big Fight. Then a bunch more Xvarts from another faction show up, creating even more chaos! AND there's a bunch of shit in the dungeon that the players can use to make things even more Chaotic. Sweet little set up. It's supplemented by a GREAT rumor table that applies to the adventure and is not overly simplistic, some good rooms in the dungeon that are not straightforward, a great map with lots of elevation changes and pallisades/barricades, and the dungeon getting cut off by high tide ... and ALL of this has some clues dropped around to let the players know what's going on ahead of time. It's got some good flavor as well, like a container of pitch dyed yellow (which explains the old xvart adage "as yellow as pitch." It's that sort of thing I get really excited about. Nice job. Worth grabbing. Oh, there's a bunch of crappy shit I left out, like the Xvarts double-crossing the players. That's lame. The players need to learn to love again and reinforcing the Kill Em All attitude because of a double-cross is uncool. There is a cute section that has the xvarts detaining the players 'for medical reasons.' which is a nice jab.

The Elephants Graveyard
David Howery
AD&D
Levels 5-7

This is an isle of Dread clone, maybe mashed up with the old Source of Nile bookkeeping game. Go on a jungle adventure with pack animals, encounter hostile cannibals and natives, find the lost valley and collect loot, then explore the ruined temple with some Indian Jones traps thrown in. It seems mostly like an exercise in tedious bookkeeping as you manage your pack animals load, supplies for your porters, and the bullshit disease and heat rules from WSG which do NOTHING to add fun to the game.You might be able to lift the hook. Imagine lots of copies of a fake treasure map going around town, being sold to suckers. Except one sage KNOWS its not fake, or part of it isn't anyway, and hires a group of Tomb Raiders. I like the hidden knowledge aspect of that as well as the 'wagon train of idiots' that could happen because of it, ala Gone Fishin'!

Dungeon Magazine #16


This issue is interesting because it has several location-based places to visit with strong social elements: a castle, and three different towns. The first has the strongest possibilities, I think, due to the limited scope of the castle, but the pirate town tries hard and the Dwarves have some good NPCs floating around. This is one of Dungeons stronger issues, thus far, if you are looking for things to lift and rework.

It's interesting to see the designers struggle with the format. Everyone is clearly used to using the room key format from the many published adventures. It's pretty clear though that the format fails in many of these. These are not rooms to be explored but rather NPC personalities with motivations and goals, factions and large expanses in towns that need general flavor, not room descriptions.

Palace in the Sky
John Szinger/Martin Szinger
AD&D
Levels 7-10

This is an adventure on a floating castle full of cloud giants. With only 400-ish review under my belt I can't speak definitively of the genre, but it IS the best Floating Castle adventure I've seen yet. The usual cloud adventure elements are in here: some parts of the cloud can be sunk through, lots of flying creatures, raids on lands the cloud floats over, and so on. What IS interesting is that this isn't a straight up hack. The giants have names and personalities and even a sentence or two about goals. There are several factions running around on the cloud island/castle, from several giant factions to humans to dragons. If you go in with a "the characters are foreign ambassadors trying to stop the raids on their homelands" then the adventure will make a lot more sense. Talk with people, get involved in the politics, maybe take care of a problem or two for one of the factions ... you get the idea. Think of all those adventures where some monster is visiting another one (the cloud giants in G1 stand out, but there are many examples) and you get the idea. The characters could be here for awhile in that scenario, providing a nice change of pace without a plot being forced down their throats, although it could use a bit more in the 'suggestions for further play' category to give the players something to do while on their embassy. It suffers from the wordiness and lack of the fantastic, both of which seem to be style at the time. It doesn't feel particularly like you are in a fantastic location and there's a lot of text wrapped around the rooms in order to provide the uninteresting detail that does exist. A modern version might have less emphasis on the room key and more n the flavor of the place, while keeping the factions & NPC's that are the key takeaway from this. They are not particularly clever factions or politics involved, but .... any port in a 1989 storm.

The Dwarves of Warka
Fran Hart
AD&D
Levels 3-6

This is a 14 page adventure describing a dwarf village/town and The Unexplored Caverns that are vexing them. The caves are only two pages long, and have very little going for them. The rest of the adventure details the dwarf village. The map seems a little small for all the activity implied. And there IS a lot of activity implied. There are random street encounters for day and night but they are all of the Flavor Text variety, describing everyday life, rather than the Murder-Hobo-Fun-on-D&D-Game-Night-Monday's variety. The NPC's have a couple of paragraphs each but they don't really have any interactions with each other. This is a critical missing element. In the Cloud Giant adventure the way the various inhabitants of the castle interacted with each other is what made the adventure interesting. The NPCs here are more like static mannequins, stuck in their home/places of business, with no thoughts or motivations with anyone else. There's a cute dwarf tavern encounter table, but then entire adventure, including the table, lacks anything new or interesting about dwarves. We get the usual Dwarf stoic/home/family/craft values and the tavern encounters are just things like "Someone shouts out "By my beard" and so on ... not exactly an alien culture. The Darkness Beneath in Fight On! magazine has spoiled me on cave adventures. In comparison to those excellent ones, or even Stonesky Delve or Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom, this one is VERY mundane. There's not much weird or interesting or even realistic, as in Stonesky.

Necropolis
Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is quite a short adventure for Dungeon, only five pages. A thief is extorting a village by pretending to be an undead guy at the local barrow. The real undead guy shows up. The characters explore a village (not detailed) for clues, then go to the barrow and discover not the thief but the undead. The core of the adventure seems decent enough, with some good extortion efforts on the thief's part and some decent clues for the party to follow up on (signs painted in blood, and a classic: mutilated livestock) to figure out its not really the famous general back from the dead suddenly demanding cash. The dead general actually has a modicum of a personality as well. This could be salvaged in to some decent background noise near the players home base, with the general maybe being a resource, or thorn, for the players for many a session. The village needs work and the entire adventure could fit on 1 page easily, so you have to dig through padding, but worth taking a look at.

Vesicant
Randal S. Doering
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This is a pirate town, with associated politics, and a dragon adventure at the end. Pirates are raiding shipping with the aid of a dragon. The characters are there to bring the place down ... although the whole hook/mission part is really not dealt with at all. That's fine in this adventure; the main attraction is the pirate town. The town has four sections: the leaders quarters and the quarter belonging to each of the three captains, roughly differentiated by race. Each section of town has its own encounter key and wandering table with enough variety to keep things interesting for a short while. There's the usual "looking for a fight" gangs, as well as at least one organized street gang and several notable personalities from a 1/2 orc prostitute/assassin to a grumpy jailor, and spies of ever sort. Each section of town generally has a bar or two detailed as well as a notable or two, and then a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter like the orc barracks and ships stores and so on. There's a lot of factions mentioned and more implied and that come to mind. At the end of the entire thing is the dragon in a decent lair. With work you take this one and turn it in to a little mini-campaign within your campaign by adding some subplots and beefing up the personalities of the various spies in town.

Thanks. This seems like one I will go look at.

My group is about to starting playing Vesicant next week in my 2E game.  I've run it two or three times over the years and it always goes well.  There's a nice amount of tension snooping around in the pirate city and going after a dragon at such low level.

Dungeon Magazine #17

The Pit
Randel S. Doering
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This is a short 18-room 'complex' at the bottom of a pit. It's inhabited by the remains of some evil cultists. The map has some interesting elements but it is essentially linear. Were it arranged differently it would probably serve much better. The entrance to the dungeon complex is through a pit and reminds me of the entrances of old. Rappan Athuk, Lich Dungeon, and many other older dungeons seemed to have some gimmick to get in to the dungeon or something similar around its entrance. This one has a nice pit with a hangman tree lurking about and some machinations at the bottom that belong in Grimtooth. After the entrance rooms (four or so) the things turns in to your typical Dungeon Magazine suckfest. The rooms are not very interesting and have A LOT of backstory embedded in to each one. The backstory is unneeded and detracts from the ability to run the room. There's a temple room that, if edited down, might provide an interesting room in some other dungeon. The end boss fight is with a monster that gets progressively tougher to fight and can be defeated by a weapon found inside the complex. An entire page is given over to the description of an evil book that the party can't use. The amount of useless detail provided is staggering, especially when compared to the amount of generic descriptions given the treasure, magic items (straight from the book) and in the descriptions of places and objects. Instead it fills us in on what the high priests second in commands assistant boot washer had for a snack two decades before any relevant events.

 

The Hunt in Great Allindel
Richard W. Emerich
AD&D
Levels 4-7

This is a wilderness adventure in an elf forest that's been taken over. The party goes in only to find the magicks of the forest working against them and they find themselves being the hunted ... by goblins. The wandering table has a nice little description for several of the monsters which I find adds a lot to the adventure. Ogres coming down from the mountains because the forest isn't guarded, or ghouls sitting fat in the middle of clearing full of dead elf bodies. Some nice little details in those entries which help me build up an encounter around them. The same goes for some random agic items that can found. While the items are out of the book they to tend to be 'better' miscellaneous items, with some details about how they are found. That helps me build up an image of the scene in my mind which in turn helps me communicate that to the players. The attached 23 room dungeon is nicely laid out with lots of rubble piles and since its a monster lair there's an order of battle presented that details who comes to reinforce when. I think thats a critical element thats usually missing from most adventures in intelligent lairs. The monsters seem a little under-powered .... until you reach the dungeon and then the forec of the place falls down upon you. The 'hunting' or 'chasing' aspect isn't too well done, and its hard to believe given the small size of the goblin patrols. If you beef up that element and inserted a little more intelligence (the whole thing is being run by a mind flayer) then you'd have a nice little adventure. And it's probably too much work to salvage.

 

 

The Waiting Room of Yen-Wang-Yeh
Greg Kramer
AD&D OA
Levels 5-6

Woo Hoo! OA! The OA adventures in Dungeon have generally been very good, delivering on the fairy tale vibe that I like so much. I think a lot of that comes from the talking animals, demons, and monsters who are all involved in some sort of bureaucracy or some such. They come off as much more real and the encounters are more interesting to run because of it. This one has the party traveling to a cave complex of an existential nihilistic cult. Not really evil, but more 'were doomed to die, lets just wait for it' sort of thing. Too much Cure and Sisters of Mercy, I guess. There's a nice NPC monster group who want the party ot find one of their missing dudes, a brother, and another subplot about the last group to go on the quest. The NPC monster-brother who guides the party (potentially) also has some great parts. Once the tombs/caves proper are reached the thing falls apart a bit, with some predictably boring monster encounters and not enough 'sample encounters' to provide the detail/gentle idea push that I'm looking for in adventures. Oh, and it seems like every OA group adventures eventually involves some ancestors bones. If someone does an OSR version that should totally be worked in to it.

 

 

Out of the Ashes
Grant Boucher
AD&D
Levels 8-12

Flame is the red dragon from the first cover and major adventure in the first Dungeon Magazine, #1. This convoluted piece of shit adventure pulls out every dirty trick in the book to gimp the players, all to push its major conceit on them. The big Ah Ha! moment is at the end of the adventure, after everything is over, the red dragon shows up, the one the party killed in Dungeon #1, and does a surprise attack on the party. The contortions used to justify this are incredibly screwed up. The dragon, of course, had a ring of three wishes that just only had one wish left and it wished to be never die or be brought back to life or some such nonsense. Oh, and he's set up some kind of stupid adventurer trap to get access to a giant diamond in a door he can't open so he goes through all these contortions to summon adventurers to open it but he also wants to hide who he is so, of course, he has one of those fucking amulets of non-detection bullshit that, along with the "super evil area, -2 to turn attempts" should have NEVER made it in to any written product EVER. Yeah Gary, I'm calling you out! Oh, don't forget that the giant fortress is actually some kind of testing grounds, etc, and that the walls can't be passwall'd, etc, so the party HAS to do the adventure. This is all just stupid. The designer wants to run a low-level dungeon crawl for high level parties so he has to put in all this gimp shit to force things to happen the way he wants them to. Hey, here's an idea ... how about you earn the fucking money they paid you for this piece of shit and instead write a level-appropriate set of challenges? What? No? Instead you want to just have a room with a vampire, beholder, and Medusa in it? Ok, whatever. At times it tries hard, like with the Boris the Phase Spider encounter, and several of the traps are involved affairs, but the entire thing just seems like some kind of in-joke adventure, slightly less absurd than WG9. Oh, and did I mention that the kobold tribe is all suicidal, as another way to gimp the party? L A M E.

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

(http://dailyoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/grumpy-cat-03.jpg)

One can NEVER have enough "grumpy cat" pictures. Bravo Tristram.:)

Dungeon Magazine #18

These early Dungeons seem rife with the Wall of Text issue. Far, far too many times the wall of text doesn't add anything useful to help the DM run the adventure and is simply useless background and history. This ends up being distracting and makes it harder to find the important bits during the game. There seems to be this mania to describe ancient history and provide explanations as to WHY something is going on. LONG explanations. Explaining something kills the mystery & wonder.

Irongard
Ed Greenwood
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This is a short five room exploration of a wizards lair. It starts by doing everything wrong that I loathe in an adventure hook: a railroad hook. While walking through a marketplace the group sees a wizard sitting on a backpack. Then he just disappears, leaving his pack behind. If the characters mess with the pack then the wizard reappears, accuses them of looting his pack, and curses them. If the party doesn't mess with the pack then the wizards reappears and curses them. If the characters attack him ... well ... he has 80 bajillion protection spells cast. and if brought to 6hp or less he instantly teleports away, and, if the DM wants, all attacks against him have no effect. It seems like this goes on and on and on. What's the point of this? Why all of the justification for protecting the wizard when, in fact, you just end up saying "nah, you can't kill him." It's a lame railroad hook and it's a lame "DM fiat" wizard.

The adventure, proper, isn't bad. It does have the usual "WAYYYYYY too much text to describe something simple" problem. What it does have is a lot of unique little items and decent little scenarios. I am a big big fan of the vibe that OD&D brings. There's a certain mystery and wonder that I associate with (a good) OD&D adventure. It's almost like you travel back in time to the first time you've ever played D&D .What's that?!! A secret door behind a staircase?! A monster!!!! What's it doing! EEEK! Things that are NOT from the books, magic items and monsters mostly, help deliver that vibe. This adventure does that. There are, to be sure, monsters and magic items from the books but also more than few that are not. Healing potions that make you glow blue. A staff with feather fall and light powers, and a 1 helm that face plate that phases in. These are good items, at least compared to the normal book items that infect these early Dungeon Magazines. Magic items should communicate wonder and mystery, not be a victorian-era listing of predictably catalogued powers. This adventure tries. There's also some decent imagery in the adventure. A great statue marks the entrance, with a stone slab to be shoved aside. There's a skeleton on a throne ... there's flying daggers and stirge in a box. I know! I know! It sounds hackneyed! They are, instead, classics, and I love the classics. The difference is that Greenwood provides enough visual imagery in his writing that the scene comes alive in your mind. The descriptions appeal to all of that deep down buried memory in your mind and dredges it up. The scene comes alive in your mind and you start to fill in detail yourself. THAT'S what an adventure description should do. It's taken a little description and made it possible for you, the DM, to expand on it and riff off of it and, in turn, communicate the awesome to the players. This does that.

This is a short adventure with too much text to do what it tries to do, as was the style at the time. Greenwood does a good job on the rooms and most of the treasures.

Whitelake Mine
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a hunting expedition in a lake to kill a giant pike that ends with an attack on a marrow lair. The gnomes are mining gemstones on the lake floor with a diving bell, the pike recently showed up and the group is hired to get rid of it. In spite of a large amount of text the gnomes and their village are not really described in any meaningful way. There's no magic, no mystery, no alien culture, no cute little customs. Just a couple of names and some throw-away text. It doesn't help that there's a gnomish inventor involved and I LOATHE LOATHE LOATHE that trope. There's just not enough interesting detail about the gnomes to help a DM bring them alive. The lake has a similar problem. While it's supposed to be the central focus of the adventure, with the characters given a full week to explore and solve the problem of the pike, there's just no detail about the lake at all. There's a throw-away wandering monster table that adds nothing to the adventure at all. The lake portion, along with the map provided, is completely useless, it adds noting beyond the central pretext for the adventure. The marrow lair isn't too terrible, with livestock grazing and mushroom rooms, and dung buckets ... but it feels like a lair for a group of LAND ogres, not aquatic ogres. There's a couple of pools of water in the cave, but that's really the only aquatic call out. The ogres are given names, and personalities, but their personalities are just 'kill everyone' and they are given no pretext to interact with the party. That's a sad waste.

There's nothing here to help the DM run a gnome adventure. Or a lake adventure. Or a marrow adventure. Or any monsters or treasures that are not just straight out of the book. For all its size its bland and lacks detail ... which seems to the the style of the time.

Tallow's Deep
Steve Gilbert & Bill Slavicek
AD&D
Levels 4-7

This is a 35 room adventure through a goblin lair. Miners broke through to the goblin caves, got slaughtered, and a guard party has disappeared. The party is sent in to deal with the puny goblins. The twist is that these goblins are played intelligently, in both tactics and in lair defense/traps. This turns in to a Tucker's Kobolds type of adventure, with a scattering of Grimtooth and a finale battle with 85 goblins in the common room. A decent amount of the page text is given over to goblin hit-and-run tactics and several of the rooms have a third dimension to them. Both of these are fine additions and something I wish more designers would do. The goblins have a reaction matrix, with who responds where under what conditions and how the lair changes when it's on alert. The third dimension, through ledges, two story rooms, sme-level stairs, and the like, offers both tactical options to the characters and the goblins as well as providing the confusion, or, perhaps, lack of certainty, that I find is critical for keeping players in the dark. Players want to stamp out all uncertainty and weird mapping works against that, thus contributing to the apprehension that is so critical to setting mood. This is a tactical adventure, and little else. There's not much to investigate, and not much unusual of different about the lair (except for the traps) except for an encounter or two at the beginning with some random monsters that have been thrown in. This is much more of a 'realistic' goblin lair, and will be extremely deadly if the party is not prepared for that. Some of the traps seem a little forced, aka: The Grimtooth Factor, but are not beyond the realm of possibility for creatures defending their home. Dropping giant centipedes on the characters heads through holes in the ceiling, for example, and similar use of dungeon pests, appeals to me, as does the use of the goblins breaking a dam to flood the party out. This should have a very claustrophobic feel, just as Balin's Tomb does in Fellowship, and even goes so far as to include rhythmic drumming. This one is all about that feel of a slog through vietnam war claustrophobia.

 

Crocodile Tears
Marcus L. Rowland
AD&D OA
Levels 4-6

I like OA adventures. I can't stand the game but I love the adventures; the talking animals and demons and celestial bureaucracy stuff has such a fairy tale feel to it ... and I LOVE a fairy tale feel. It works directly against the typical BE A HERO/BOOK-STANDARD D&D vibe from the time period. This adventure has the party venturing in to a cursed village to win a bet. Along the way they run in to a variety of situations right out folklore, all with the usual (WONDERFUL) OA vibe. I even like the hooks and I almost NEVER like the hooks in adventures. In this one there's a great two-fer offered in which the characters are tasked by their lord to keep their eyes & ears open for unusual things in the province since there are rumors of rebellion afoot. OR the party could be from a neighboring province and keeping their eyes & ears open for THAT lord, looking for signs of weakness to he can invade. For some reason these just strike me as excellent hooks. It's a decent pretext for the party being together, being in the area, and investigating things, all without the entire set up being too forced. Anyway, the group meets a couple of asshole in a inn, neer-do-weels pretending to be travelers. But, rather than just being of your usual D&D-adventure murderous types, they are just jerks to the party, and after introducing the concept of a cursed village nearby, bet the characters they won't go. Honor and cold hard ch'ien are at stake AND the party is supposed to be looking in to freaky shit in the province. Multiple pretexts! Not the best of hooks, those appeal directly to the players rather than the characters, but still very good. There's a little sub-plot about everyone finding someone to hold the stakes while the party goes off to bring back the signboard of the inn in the cursed village. (I LOVE the bit about the signpost. It's so simple and just feels right as the way to prove you've been somewhere.)

There are five or so encounters on the way to the cursed village, but only two are really meaningful. They do pack a punch though. One is a peasant woman who warns the party to danger ahead ... who is actually a ghost ... but not a malicious one ... unless the party are jerkfaces. That's a very fairy tale thing to do. Similarly, there's a gorge with a cut rope bridge, forcing the party to go over a ford at the base, where a kappa lives. A kappa that loves cucumber. This is one of those great talking animal encounters straight out of folklore. Be nice, put up with it and flatter it and offer it gifts and get off free. Be a jerkface and face the monsters wrath. This is how almost EVERY intelligent creature encounter should be in D&D. The cursed village has more good encounters, from a trapped baby tako caught in a bear trap to old mud-covered buildings and dead samurai with warnings, and, of course, the giant crocodiles of the adventure title. The final battle with the crocs could use a little more detail and a little more set-piece build up. The village is decently described but not generally in a way that assist in running a "the party is fighting a giant croc that is crashing through and demolishing buildings" kind of way.

The OA adventures in Dungeon have been a high-point for me, generally successfully delivering that folklore/fairy tale/non-standard feel that I prefer in my D&D.

 

Chadrather's Bane
AD&D
Paul Hancock
Levels 4-6

This is a wilderness/area adventure while the party is shrunk down to 1/50th their normal size. Unlike most Dungeon fair this is not a plat based or linear-ish dungeon crawl but rather a far more open sandboxy style location that can be dropped in ... in spite of the central concept of "shrunken party." While its certainly possible to drop in almost any adventure to any game, this adventure, and the subgenre it belongs to, do it much much better. It's closer to having a small region described, with lots going on in it, than a single location. It's this concept of "lots of things going on around this place" that gives the place the air of realism and open-ended play that I so very much enjoy. I believe the old word, since co-opted, is "module."

The adventure revolves around an out of the way wayhouse and its surrounding plot of land. Everyone who stays n the area more than 30 minutes get shrunken down. There's a massively long and convoluted (five or six pages) backstory and explanation of the shrinking effect, which really just boils down to "the group is short now. So is a lot of their stuff." The absurdly long introduction, background, history, and shrinking details can scare you off but you should stick with it, the adventure get good. This mania for describing things and making them make sense is something I don't understand. I get the suspension of disbelief thing; too much and or breaking the rules you've laid down make the players roll their eyes. This is something else though that seems very common from the 80′s onward: some manic desire to explain WHY. You don't need to explain why. You're the DM. It works that way because of magic. Elves walk around and fart fireballs. You don't need to explain, as this adventure does, that a living force surrounds everyone and rubs off on their gear and that all that stuff gets shrunk down but not other living stuff because blah blah blah ... just let it go man. You're not being arbitrary by saying "a magic item in the fountain shrink people and their stuff." That's all you need.

Anyway, there are 20 or so locations described in various degrees of details, some with a dozen or so more rooms/places described in them. IE: The giant rat tunnels is one of the 20 and the tunnels might consists of a dozen or so more chambers The net effect is the building up of a kind of miniature world (get it! get it! MINIATURE! I MADE A FUNNY) of locations to visit, each with something going on. Faction. Play. Or, rather, something that could be faction play with a little work. Essentially there's a big boss man running a little kingdom and then there are a bunch of other groups kind of hanging around the edges of the kingdom, and then several other locations to visit. You end up getting this kind of Flash Gordon/Mongo vibe, with a bunch of little kingdoms either ignored or loosely allied with Ming, but no one really happy but Ming ... and Ming has his own plans. All of these groups provides a possibility for a depth of play rarely seen in Dungeon. Little of this is explicitly called out in the adventure, nor is the drone of that old favorite "they attack immediately" appealed to ... too much anyway. Instead you have goblin tribes, wild elves, halfling villages, the big bads Bartertown-lite, and several other groups and NPC about in the area of the inn & gardens. I would have preferred it if a little more emphasis had been given to the social aspects/possibilities, but for the time period I think this is a home run in the "social adventure that is not some lame forced masquerade ball" genre.

I could go on at length. Goblin rapelling down form the rafters on ropes. Giants cracks in the floor under which live huge rats. A hidden staircase carved in to a table leg. A 200 foot tall fountain ... jerkface gnomes, a grape press for making wine ... the miniature world element is not lost nor is it overplayed. If you were looking for some inspiration and maybe a little project, I would suggest this one.

Dungeon Magazine #19

An interesting observation: a lot of adventures try to force square pegs in to round holes. They want to do something other than a location based adventure but all they know how to do is emulate the location-based adventures they've seen in other published adventures. Hence we get social adventures ... built around a location-based keyed room description. Or mystery adventures ... built around a location-based keyed room description. Even then the keyed room descriptions tend to fit a standard format that has some kind of OCD need to mention everything thats in the room "4 daggers and 3 cloaks" when they have no bearing on the adventure. Words are precious. Every one should be used for maximum impact. If you're running a stealth based infiltration adventure then provide me with the details pertaining to that. If you are running a scavenger hunt adventure then provide me descriptions based around that. Don't just list footlocker contents because the last adventure did it that way.

 

By the Wayside
Tim Villademoros
AD&D
Levels 6-10

This is a weird little adventure. It's a little village in a swamp with a monster leaving nearby. That's it. The idea is that the party comes to the village looking for [something] and while there gets messed with by a hag. They eventually go in to the swamp and kill the hag and her buddy. I _think_ that's the goal the designer was going for anyway. There's some description of the village, some description of the a couple of people in the village, and a lot of detail given to how the hag can fuck with the party without the party getting wind of it. There's a relatively good scummy bar/inn in the town, with a couple of decent NPC's running around in it. In particular, there are a couple that are there just for the PC's to hire. That's a decent addition and something that few town & village adventure do. They both have a decent little bio and some motivations, which is exactly what they should have, and need, in order to run be run effectively. There's a small garrison well described, as well as an alligator farm, and the home of an old wise woman. That's not exactly a wealth of information to run a town adventure, but what is provided IS good. Well described and very flavorful. The hag runs around, invisible, changing self, passing without trace, undetectable, etc, etc, etc, messing with the party. The old wise woman, who the village hates, is also a target that the hag uses in order to foment trouble with the party and distract them. The swamp adventure is really just a little throw-away wandering monster table that ends in the hag lair. There's a little tactical challenge in defeating the hag and her monster ally. What IS really interesting is a lot of the treasure. Tim does a great job putting in wonderful descriptions for many of the magic items. It's not a helm of underwater action, it's a helm of highly polished steel, with a crest in the shape of a kraken throwing its tentacles down in coils to form the eye and nose guards, with green crystal lenses over the eye guards. That's a pretty sweet magic item. Likewise, the crystal ball and bowl of commanding water elementals get great descriptions. That's exactly the sort of detail that I'm looking for and expect. THAT"S what the designers job is: communicating their imagination to the DM. This is a rough adventure; its going to take a lot of extra work for the DM to run the village appropriately and add the flavor that the swamp deserves. And if you can do that then you don't need the adventure and probably resent having to wade through all the text.

 
The Vanishing Village
Marcus Rowland
AD&D
Levels 3-5

This isn't really an adventure; it's a single encounter. There's a bunch of mimics the size of houses that pretend to be a village. How is that an adventure? And how does it take three pages to describe it? But, hey, at least there's no treasure! There is nothing to this. Yes, the pretext is nice. No, it doesn't justify being in here. It's just an idea that someone had that deserves to be expanded in to a full adventure and instead gets a single encounter setup.

 

The Serpent's Tooth
Nigel D. Findley
AD&D
Levels 3-6

A seedy little dive bar in a seedy part of of a seedy town. The group is hired to case the joint for the town guard. Over five days they hang out, watch the place, and report in. At the end they get paid. A couple of days later the assassin that was impersonating the town guard kills the bar owner. Yeah! There are a dozen or so NPC's that are well described, to the point of being overly described, and there are a decent number of events that take place over the five days. It takes six pages to get through the background and NPC's before the meat of the adventure is arrived at: the events! which take up one third of a page. Hmmm ... misplaced priorities anyone? The inn gets a pretty exhaustive room listing, the vast majority of which is completely useless. The purpose of the second floor description is for the party to sneak up and map it out. The emphasis should be on aspects of the rooms which enable that, or provide red herrings or other things for the party to report on. But not here, oh no, just line after line of useless descriptions of how many toothpicks are in a jar in a forgotten locker in a useless closet. The core concept here is good but there is not enough emphasis on the events and the NPC's have too much description. You need a brief summary of the various actors to make it easy to refer to them during play.

 
Encounter in the Wildwood
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is another non-adventure. Five pages to describe an ambush by a set of monsters in a glade. It's a bunch of weird mish-mash monsters, like cyclopskin, a boggle, needle-men, and the like, all thrown together in order to provide a tactical challenge to the group. That's an encounter, not an adventure. It's also a SHORT encounter in any form other than a Dungeon magazine article. It IS interesting to see a kind of early lead-in to the 4E mixed monster encounters/tactical setups with artillery, controller, and basher monsters.

House of Cards
Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 9-12

This is an adventure in the hideout of a criminal gang. The hideout if half mundane hideout and half weird tomb place. Sometimes you have a good idea and you try REALLY hard to build an adventure around it ... but it just doesn't work. This is an example of that. Or maybe it isn't and DOES work. But I doubt it. There's a gang war in town with the old guard criminal gang, a VERY loosely organized of crime buddies/groups. The new gang, the Night Masks, is coming in and running a kind of gang war. The group is charged to go fix it. And then there's the bullshit. There must be a PAGE of text that describes how the party is NOT supposed to fix it. No baseless accusations. No mercenary hiring. No militia. No fun. This sort of stuff is repeated later on in the adventure when it takes a page or so to describe how the doors open and the 99 ways that the group CAN'T use to open the door. No magic. No passwall. No teleportation. No Bibgy's hands. No polymorph. No fun. No creativity. The doors (some of them anyway) DO have an interesting mechanic with a Deck of Many Things card set in to the door. That's the "bright idea"/gimmick of the designer, and it's a decent little idea. It takes forever to gi through the 99 permutations of how the party can't bypass the doors, which is lame. The adventure should encourage player creativity, not limit it. The headquarters is divided in to two halves, the first half of which is just mundane and consist of long and boring descriptions of various guardrooms and barracks. It's not really interesting or special and just consists of boring and uninteresting room description after boring and uninteresting room description. The second half, the old tomb portion, is more interesting. Of course all of the wall are lined with lead, etc, in order to gimp the party. There IS a cool encounter or two inside this section, including a charnel pit packed FULL of undead. Skeletons, wraiths, a shadow, a yellow mustard, all down in the pit and clawing to get out. That's pretty sweet and the picture that accompanies it adds a lot to the flavor. The idea of a gang war with a couple of competing groups, and each group having a bunch of of little sub-groups, is also cool. The Shadow Society, the Sultans of Sunset, and the Midnight Maharaja's are all gangs that are referenced, through throw-away monster encounters in the dungeon, but the entire surface/city portion of the adventure is pretty much glossed over. That's too bad. I'd have really liked to have a seen a good social adventure up in the town that is then combined with the dungeon/fortress portion, maybe with an infiltration aspect. Instead we get the little tacked on "gang war" sentences and an idea forced upon us that, while cool, is hammered to death in the details.

You know, this thread has turned out to be way more useful/interesting than I expected it to be.

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.

Dungeon Magazine #30


Good shit in this one ... if you want to put in the work to salvage it.

... And a Dozen Eggs
By Randy Maxwell
AD&D
Levels 1-3

Fucking. Sewers. I LOATHE sewers. Actually, I just recently reviewed a 1-pager in sewers that was good. This ain't that. This is the sort of the adventure that makes you think: Fucking. Sewers. Dinosaurs eggs fell in to the sewers from a magic shop and hatched. They ate some sewer workers. There's a bounty for bringing them back, dead or alive. it's not much; I'd recommend you go find something fun to do instead that pays better, like interviewing to be an assistant crack whore trainee. This has a big map of the sewers, done in line style with no detail, and three pre-set encounters. The idea is that you wander around down here FOR MONTHS until you find all the dinos. Doesn't that sound like fun? Wandering around for months? Yes? No. The 20-entry wandering table is just a list of monsters with stats. Nothing more. Rot Grubs. Common Rats. Giant Rats. Razors so you can slit your own throats to make it end. No, sorry, just kidding about that last one. There's once good mechanic here and that's that the dinos grow and the longer it takes the bigger they get. Other than that .... MONTHS in the sewers, drawn as a line map, with 20 boring old book-standard monsters listed as wanderers, and 3 pre-sets? No Thank You.

Elminster's Back Door
By Ed Greenwood
AD&D
Any Level

This is an Ed Greenwood adventure. Ed, and sometime Jim Ward, like adventures where you can be of any level. That means PLAYER skill, not character skill, determines the outcomes. That's very nice, in theory. In practice though Ed has created one of the most boring adventures ever. Your best best is ... not do anything. Seriously, just stand there, walk around, search without touching anything. You Win! This is, as the title suggests, the backdoor to Eliminsters Tower. If you are a nice guy and mean him well you make it through ok. If you are a greedy dick you die. That makes sense. It's also BORING. GO in a room. See something creepy/cool/interesting. Ignore it and go in the next room. It's like you're stuck in a cab touring London all day on the highway. "Look kids! Big Ben! Parliament!" and then on to the next sight. The interesting shit is VERY nice. A bunch of eyes floating on the ceiling, or blue hands reaching out of walls holding magic items and supplies. Very cool. Now, ignore it and move on. It's like its the ultimate temptation. Is temptation good? Absolutely! I LOVE to put friendly/neutral monsters in my adventure, who are more than willing to talk to the players. And then I let them wear a 10,000 go platinum crown and make then turn their backs a lot. Temptation is great! But it has to be spread around. Room after room after room of the same thing is BORING. All you're allowed to do is look at it and not touch. If you touch then Something Bad Happens. Iron golem kills you. Stone Golem kills you. Whatever. The effects are cooler than Tower of the Stargazer, but the interactivity is just not present at all.

Ghazal
By David Howery
AD&D
Levels 6-8

A trip to free a prisoner help in a wasteland fortress by some nomads. "Some of the role-playing in this adventure hinges on the character' views on sex roles. If the character group is largely male, this could be fairly entertaining." Uh ... As far I can tell, this refers to the country you are in, for about 5 minutes, being ruled by a Queen instead of a King. Once you get the mission from her this strong warning doesn't seem to apply anymore. I know nostalgia is rosy but I have a hard time believing this was thing back in 1991. Anyway, too much backstory revels that nomads have captured a diplomat and you need to do a prison break. You make it past an ambush, break in, free the prisoner and run. It's more than a little bland. There are things here that I like, a lot. Most of the guards are F1's and there's not a lot of bullshit "they always" this or "permanent anti-magic" that. It's just a place, with guards, that you break in to. A Caper! Except ... it's not written that way. We need schedules! Patrol routes! How the dudes inside react when the alarm is raised! An order of battle! When do they release the Death Dogs to roam the halls? None of that is here. Instead, it's boring room after boring room with too much description tell us what the room was once used for, or how its not being used right now, or yet another explanation of how the jailer is not a nice guy. That. Doesn't. Support. Play. I'm also more than a little tired of seeing "the guards fight to the death." This time the lame ass excuse is that its a cultural thing, and how they show their manliness. Take a cue from Ramses 2 boys: march back in town and say you won. There might be one more interesting thing here, and the adventure calls it out explicitly. There are a lot of prisoners/slaves in this fortress. You're after one. You can escape with one (the place is hard to sneak in/out of, which is cool.) What about everyone else? Leave them chained? Free them, knowing they will probably be torn apart by the guards and their guard dogs? Quick note: Spartacus didn't turn out too well for that slave army.

A Wrastle with Bertrum
By Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 2+

This is a little bar brawl, that complete complete with an insert for floor plans and cardboard stand figures. It's also ALMOST too good to use the way the designer intends. There's this seedy bar. It hosts wrestling matches. The champion is the bouncer, who's also a half-troll. The prize is something like 2k in gold. You've got the bar owner, the bouncer, normal peasant scum, other wrestlers, and then three groups who want to STEAL the prize. Dwarven bandits infiltrating the crowd. A group of halfling bandits who raid the place, CLAIMING to be the feared dwarves bandits. (Nice on!) And finally, a wizard who needs to cash. All hell then breaks loose. This is written as a bar room brawl, a one shot. And I guess it works for that. There's just SO much more you do with this place. A little extra detail on the NPC's and you would have had a legendary tavern location! But that's not what the designer was setting out to do. But if he'd done it ... but he didn't, and didn't want to ... but if he did! So, this works, although there's WAY too much text for the content.

Thiondar's Legacy
By Steven Kurtz
AD&D
Levels 8-12

Uh .... This is an adventure. I mean ... Uh ... Wow! Dungeon Magazine actually published an adventure! This thing could almost be a completely stand-along product. Look, I'm about to talk smack about this, because it deserves it, but at the core of this is Something Good. You need to decide if its worth salvaging. I think it is. In fact, I don't even think the salvage job is that severe. I would suggest, however, that you work this adventure n. You need to start dropping hints LONG before the players hit this thing. The College, the legends, etc. This is going to work best when it's NOT dropped in out of the blue.

The backstory here is LONG. I mean REALLY long. You know the Unseen University, in Discworld? There's a magi college with that kind of vibe. There's a kind of power struggle and one of the magi, to be a dick, exercises his Right of Inventory. One every hundred years he can force an Grand Inventrory to be done, which everyone hates because it's a pain in the ass. In it, they find a magic shield with something unusual about it, which leads then to hire adventurers. That's backstory one. Backstory two is about the guy who owned the shield. Backstory three is about the guy who the guy that owned the shield was trying to find. Way WAY too much backstory ... but ... more than enough also for you to slip in to your campaign, and, overtime, build these three places/people up. It would be like Obama, Putin, and Thatcher showed up one day, told you the illuminate were real, they were in it, King Arthur was real (like, not some pict/roman dude, but like really real, all the legends are real!), as was excalibur, and, oh yeah, we think we know where he's buried. Could you go check it out? Yeah, you can keep the sword. Holy Shit!

There's a valley adventure that's ... Good! Giant sheep on the hillsides! A misty steamy valley with a river in it! Stone Giants ... who are not dicks! They talk to you! Hey have a captured bard playing music for them! You move on, to the dungeon, on a raft. And then something really cool happens. There's this concept in the OSR of the dungeon as the Mythic Underworld. An important part of this is that the entrance MUST be significant. Or, maybe, that it has to feel like crossing the threshold is significant. This does that. You're poling your raft down this river, across a lake and discover ... a large stone arch that the water flows through. This is it. This is the place you're looking for. As is so often the case, my own words can't describe the brilliant SIMPLE imagery that is conveyed. But it works. You are not in the realm of THE OTHER. You pole around, find some signs that others are here, and then get TOTALLY fucked over by the king of the mushrooms. Who isn't. I usually don't care about spoilers, but this time I'll be nice. There's a hole intelligent set up here when you meet the mushroom king that leads to some great roleplaying. It's social, or can be. And I LOVE it. You move on to find an eternal warrior you can put to rest. And then on to a HIGE steamy jungle cavern. And then on to a tower. It's like it never stops! And there's are NPC's hanging around! REAL people with real problems and real emotions and they are wonderful and they are dicks and are complex but you can grasp them easily and run them well.

You know Dungeon published a couple of adventures with that stupid red dragon, Scorch of whatever he was called. They were supposed to be EPIC and Might and Majestic. They tried too hard and they sucked. This one though, this one FEELS epic. You feel immersed in it and you feel like something awesome is going on and that you're a part of it and most importantly that you are DOING things and making a difference. I can't recall, just now, another adventure that has given me this EPIC level feel. Ever.

You're gonna need to take a read-though this before you run it, but I don't think you'll need to do much more to run it. For all of it's text and wordiness, as was the style at the time, the ideas cement themselves in to your head. Dave Bowman write a wordy encounter with an old hill giant who likes to eat crab legs. Old Bae. It was quite long, for Bowman. The core of what it is is still fresh in my mind as if I had just read it. This adventure is like that one encounter: it stays with you. I think that's pretty much the definition of Well Written.

Dungeon Magazine #31


"Hey Bryce, your review today seems shorter than usual."

Yeah. After reading the first adventure, and on the heels of the last issue, I was going to title this "Dungeon Magazine: We're no longer picking submissions for inclusion at random." Then I read the others. A cold mess and a railroad. Oh boy.

Beyond the Glittering Veil
By Steve Kurtz
AD&D (Psionics)
Levels 3-6

This is a nice little adventure in an abandoned city full of undead. As was the style at the time, it's got WAY too much text and backstory and it goes over the psionics rules in detail, all of which detracts from the adventure. It's got a nice little 'village in trouble' introduction with some good NPC's to interact with and a realistic set up. It then launches in to the core of the adventure. The party goes through a teleported to a weird alien-like city. Therein they meet some of the intelligent undead inhabitants and a wizard. Some of them are friendly, some could be friendly, and, of course, there's a big bad guy. This thing has two components that make it worth checking out and maybe running. First, it's got great NPC's. Some of them have a little too much text describing them, but they all seem to be real people (even the monster NPC's) and a purpose behind them. They respond intelligently, and not just in a "they attack!" manner. It's got a great locale, in a pyramid that houses a city, and the entire thing feels like a real place. While the hook is a little hokey, with a wizard going missing and a friend looking for him and hidden psionic powers (that have almost no impact on the adventure) there's also a nice bit about how the village reacts. Not the usual sheep! The description of an undead attack on the village, and the realistic way in which the undead react to Turn, struck me as very nice also. Nice, solid advice with some good imagery associated with it. A kind of mix of realism and fantasy and flavor that makes you want to run ALL of your undead that way. These sorts of bits are scattered throughout the adventure and they contribute a great deal towards the positive feelings I have. The MASSIVE amounts of text makes this hard to recommend very highly, but if you treat this kind of a short story, to take inspiration from while jotting down notes, you'd have a great adventure.

Telar in Norbia
By Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 6-8

This is a desert adventure in some ruins. Someone has gone missing from one tribe and you're sent to find them. Turns out they've been abducted by some Set cultists and an evil efretti. This thing is dense and doesn't have enough summary. There's not a really great way to tell how everything works together in the abandoned city and the cultists don't have any notes on how they respond. This thing is just a mess, with monsters, cultists, intelligent, beasts, many many sub-areas... there might be something here but I can't figure out what is going on. The ruined city is just a mass of encounters that don't seem to fit together in any way other than "we're in a desert!" The compound of the ruined city has a bunch of buildings and each building gets it's own little mini-encounters/dungeon set up ... but they don't really work together or fit together ... or at least it's not obvious how they do so to me after three readings. I know there's this amulet, and guardian who used to be someone important, and an efretti ... but that's about all I can make out.

A Local Legend
By Greg Rick & Bradley Schell
AD&D
Levels 1-2

This is a slow little adventure about a village with a local legend. Every nine years a spirit takes 3 young men. There's a village with a great map, but only a VERY small number of the villagers are described. This turns the adventure in to a kind of railroad. Where NPC1 leads you to #2 and then #3 and then to the monster. The lair is only three rooms and while it has a great entrance mechanism (boulders shoved aside give the creature warning) there's not really enough in it past that to sustain play. The hook here is pretty good, or perhaps I mean the introduction. There's an inn, fully booked, a farmer takes you home to stay with him, and his neighbors son gets killed that night. It's a nice kind of bonding sort of thing to get the players involved with the guy and interested in him when his neighbor starts having trouble. It's handled much better than most adventures, and doesn't SEEM forced, even though it's obviously contrived by the designer. The inclusion of a wise woman with local knowledge of the legends and lans is a nice touch, but could have perhaps used a bit more flavor; the wise woman eventually tells you where the lair is. REALLY not much to this one, but still very nice. It reminds me a bit of the troll home in 100 Bushels of Rye, one of my favorites.

Bane of the Shadowborn
By William W. Conners
AD&D-Ravenloft
Levels 6-9

Do you like gladiator movies? Err ... I mean railroads? This is a stupid fucking railroad. Worse than that, it's ALMOSt like you're watching a movie. Not quite as bad as some of the 3e/4e movies, but pretty damn close. The party gets teleported to Ravenloft, to a manor home. Instead os exploring and having fun, a good spirit and bad spirit lead you around and fuck with you and drop hints in your lap and railroad you to a finale. It's about 80 bajillion pages long and you can't do anything but "enjoy" the scenery. It might as well be scene based for all the "exploration" and "choices" you get to make. "You have done well my chosen ones" and "Lady Shadowborn, in an attempt to warn the party of the dangers ahead" and "Ebonbane has decided to put on a show here for the explorers" and "Ebonbane then beings to taunt the party" and .... You get the idea. The rooms are an excuse for the NPC's to screw with the party, for good or ill. And of course it's all combined with that dripping melodrama that is Ravenloft Boxed Text from this era. I get what they are trying to do here: two spirits duking it out, but it's done in such a heavy handed style, which is then combined with enough WALL OF TEXT to rival anything in China, that all it ends up being is a mass of text that doesn't work together and random shit being inflicted on the party. And not in a good way. Not in a 'neutral' way that OD&D works with, but in Deus Ex kind of way that repulses me.

Dungeon Magazine #32

My in-laws are downsizing their home and my wife had a yard sale to help them sell their excess. At the end of setup I was (passive-aggressivly) throwing stuff in to a wheelbarrow to take down to the from of the driveway where I dumped it out in a large "$1" pile. I was struck by this. All their life, all they held on to and saved, treated like crap and sold for a $1 each. Most of which didn't sell. Visions of vast quantities of consumer goods, pristine, going straight from the assembly line to the landfill. I can't help but draw comparisons to how I feel about the RPG market. Free to not, is this the BEST thing that could be put out? If not, then why do it? Or why keep it if you already have it?

Enough pontificating, time to return to my hypocrisy. I've been out of new product to review for awhile. I'll be hitting Origins this weekend to grab some new review material and buy A LOT of old 4e product to celebrate, in my own special way, the wonderful return of Dungeons & Dragons

The Wayward Wood
By Leonard Wilson
AD&D
Levels 6-9

This is an adventure in a forest with three (four? Five?) waring groups. And the forest is walking. It tries REALLY hard and has some great elements but could have used a really good edit. A couple of jr. druids contact the party in order to solve the problem with their forest. You see, it's gotten up and is now walking away. Right at the village the party is in. It will be there in 3 days. It seems the head druid is way for a few weeks and some trolls have wandered in. A group of firbolg have been fighting them, and using fire to kill them. A group of truants don't like fire and so are having the woods walk away to get away from it. The idea is that the party meets the truants or firbolg, gets them to ally, and then everyone goes and massacres the trolls. The adventure has set encounters, timed encounters, which is nice to see, and I REALLY like the Walking Wood idea. It brings THE FANTASTIC and WONDER to the adventure, something sorely missing in the vast majority of product. It's also nice to see LARGE numbers of enemies. The trolls number in the 30's, all in 1 group essentially, and the firbolg and treats have large numbers also. That pretty much forces the creative players play that I enjoy so much. This is a very nice idea and is right on the edge of being recommended. There's a nice climactic battle at the inn that the DM is encouraged to force in to play, but the rest of the encounters, well, there just are not very many of them. The walking wood is actually a very boring place. Trolls, treants, and the firbolg are about it. Essentially you wander around all day until you have a timed encounter at night, when you get to actually start the adventure. There's nothing here NOT related to main plot ... and very little related to the main plot, and that's disappointing. So while the set up might be a nice one, it's far too long with not nearly enough variety to make it on to my list.

Hermes' Bridge
By Timothy Leech
AD&D
Levels 7-10

This is a small 10-room 'dungeon' on a bridge over a river. It starts strong, but ends boring. And by 'starts strong' I mean 'has one good encounter.' There's this troll standing on the bridge (Yeah! Classic troll bridge!), but he keeps running over deeper on to the bridge and sticking his hand in an urn. When he does so a statue comes to life and whomps him, at which time the troll runs back and heals, with the statue not following. EXCELLENT! I love it! And then the troll sees the party and immediately attacks. L A M E! This was SUCH a great opportunity for some role-play between the troll and party! The mindlessness by which most encounters are written in adventures is BORING. The most boring thing a monster can do is attack. The best thing a monster can do if be friendly ... while carrying a big and obvious bag of loot ... and turning its back to the party a lot. I like combat, but its the easy solution and the one that can be universally appealed to at a later date. Start things off with the troll making an ally and then see how long the party will work with it, or tolerate it. The adventure tries to bring a few other elements, like a healing pool, athena owl, and the like, but it ends up just being room after boring room of monsters. Giant spiders here. Garygoyles there. Nothing interesting to play with. :(

Changeling
By R. Nathaniel Waldbauer
AD&D
Levels 8-10

A side-trek, so essentially a 2-pager. This time the party hears about a white dragon that has just shown up. Turns out it's an albino red dragon. With no treasure. Lame screw job. I'll never understand why this sort of thing became popular. All it does it encourage the party to be paranoid, which slows things down. This is different than a mimic or trapper. Those are one-shot 'gotchas.', almost traps. This is just an intentional screw-job. LAME.

Pearlman's Curiosity
By Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 1-4

A mystery in a small village with almost/no combat. The party is hired to deliver a crate to wizard in a nearby town, but then the crate goes missing. The group gets to investigate several locations, with one leading to the next leading to the next. There are extensive rumors, clues, and the like presented throughout. Complicating everything is the presence of a nibolg, with the chaos that entails. The village could really use more life to it, things going on other than the adventure and more NPC's in the village to interact with and get rumors from. There are a lot of rumors ... but not a lot of colorful characters to get them from. Further, the amount of text and lack of an overview makes deciphering the entire adventure a chore for the DM. These things are supposed to be play aids but instead generally are a lot of word to prep to run. There might be something to this to you photocopied it and took a pair of scissors and highlighter to it. Do you want to put that much work in to a first level adventure with no combat?

Is there an Elf in the House?
By Rafael Fay & Dan DeFazio
AD&D
Levels 3-5

A murder mystery in a country mansion. And, of course, there's a Ring of Impersonation and a Ring of Silence involved. When you have to gimp the party through the use of shit like this, that's a sign you've not created a good adventure. There's a lot of things going on in the mansion: the main murder plot, a secondary murder plot, a group of NPC's adventurers staying as guests, the host is ill, there's a ghost, a bricked up room, hidden skeletons and, of course, the servants. All set in a 50-ish room mansion which is overly described. The amount of weird stuff/subplots is a really good thing; I love a complex inter-personal environment. The format used here, which is the traditional keyed room format, really does not fit this sort of adventure. You get a massive wall of text and need to try and hunt down things which makes running this sort of thing a prep nightmare. Better would be a list of NPC personalities/goals, a timeline, and a minimal room key. IE: reference material. This is one of those adventures that I wish I had the time to rewrite in an updated format. Maybe one day I will.

Ghost Dance
By David Howery
AD&D
Levels 4-7

This is centered around an American Indian/plains culture with the party coming in to save the poor natives. There's A LOT of background information on the natives and there's a LONG section at the end which is almost devoid of player interaction. Neither of those are good things. The middle is filled with a relatively simple straight-line adventure, so this seems to be mostly an exercise in exploding the players to plains Indian culture. Kill some marauders. Visit a friendly village. Kill the chief and a small handful of warriors at an evil village. Then you get to watch the movie. Seriously, that's just about the extent of the adventure. The ELEVEN page adventure. There's a lot of cultural baggage here, from the Ghost Dance to war shirts and holy lances, from the AmerIn culture. There's not a lot of noble savage; the only hint is them giving you a box of shiny round disks that outsiders treasure and they do not. There just isn't anything decent about this adventure to justify the page count. I think you kill something like 14 dudes in 2 encounters and then the adventure is over. I'm not looking for a high body count, but I am looking for some type of content past the 2-3 encounters presented in this.

Dungeon Magazine #33

Origins didn't have shit in the way of adventures, so I bought a bunch on DriveThru this morning. New content soon!

Warning: the first adventure has a village of clueless morons. I LOVE villages of clueless morons, so the review may be biased. I also like sandbox things like sieges, from the second adventure, and fairy-tale like things, from the last adventure. Those reviews may be a bit more biased than usual.

That Island Charm
By MS Rooney, Patrick Carpenter, Greg Gliedman
AD&D
Levels 7-12

This is an adventure on a deserted island full of castaways who need some help solving an ogre problem. The party ends up wrecked here and the other castaways, from pervious wrecks, attempt to convince the party to go take care of some ogres who are preventing their ship construction efforts. When the party goes to do that, they get charmed by a morkoth and his marid buddy. Oh my god, I love this adventure. The hook is complete BS. From the seedy tavern with the confused barkeep to the railroad to get the ship to crash to the isle, the beginning is BAD. So bad I wonder if it's intentional. I LOVE the crazy barkeep and bar, only briefly described, even though its a total set up. The journey to the island is lame as it ends in a shipwreck, but, shit, whatever, it gets the party to the isle. Once there they meet a CRAZY band of castaways, whose rough village is plagued by nearby ogres. Their story holds us to no examination. Their ogre defense barrier is a falling down bamboo affair with a gate that takes a STR 15 to push down. Their water source literally springs from out of nowhere. One guys been on the island for years, living in the same hut, only the hut is less than a month old. More and more of hat sort of thing, with the castaways giving the stupidest answers known to man. It's a complete telegraph that something else is going on AND I LOVE IT. Screaming THIS IS a SET UP at the players and then watching them walk in to it anyway is one of my greatest joys as a DM. There are a couple of potential allies on the island, from an ogre (!) to a rebel elf. Everything kind of centers on a cave with a spiral entrance ... a morkoth lair. The marid is a little inexplicable addition. It's used to do weird stuff and be an agent for the morkoth on the outside but it seems out of place. Something has to keep up appearances, so the designer stuck in a marid. The writing seems tighter than usual for a Dungeon Magazine adventure and it's good to see something unusual like a morkoth show up. It's all book treasure, and the adventure is on the short side, but I liked it. In fact, the Moonday Murder Hobos are just setting off to take a sea journey tonight. I might have an island offshore have some smoke coming from it ... This is a stupid silly little adventure, and I inexplicably love it. Wasn't there some crappy bar from a Forgotten Realms document, the Swill & Swipe, or something like that? It served bar rag drinks or something like that. That bar would be perfect. Obviously, I'm excited, and that rarely happens.

The Siege of Kratys Frehold
Ted James, Thomas Zuvich
AD&D
Levels 1-4

This is a sandbox siege, with the PC's defending a fort. It really quite different than the usual affair in Dungeon. The party ends up in a fort/manor and a large group of orcs attack and lay siege to it. The party gets to control all of the locals, from lord to peasant, and has access top all of the general supplies in the fort in order to fight off the attackers. There's a timeline presented, some rough orc battle plans, and general plans of the fort and the surrounding lands. There are some battle system rules attached, but they are entirely optional. I like these sorts of "heres a location and heres a goal. Make it happen" kinds of adventures. The players are given a very free hand, controlling all of the NPC's. Success probably depends on making raids out of the fort and destroying the orcs siege equipment, etc. The general overview map could be more useful for play if it had more features. It is basically a fort on a hill surrounded by trees. Given the (probable) frequency of sally raids a more detailed environment would have been better. Every party should have an opportunity for one of these once in their careers and this one may be nearly as good as the Dogs of War/I series from C&C. A little prep work in maps, character stat cards, etc, could turn this in a VERY memorable game for your party.

Dark Days in Welldale
J Mark Bickering
AD&D
Levels 3-5

A miserable adventure in an annoying cutesy halfling village with no reward to speak of. An invisible dragon has been granting them wishes while pretending to be a well spirit. While he's away some men locks move in to the well and there are disappearances. All of the halflings are incompetent, grossly cute, and as far as I can tell there is absolutely no reason for a party to do anything other than burn the place down. No, that's too harsh. Parts of this are interesting. The local lore about the well spirit liking apple pies, and the menlock lair is full of belly-crawling tunnels that force you to fight with a dagger ... while they circle around behind you. That makes the lair sounds more awesome than it is. I really do enjoy the non-standard environment of the dirt-floor tunnel belly crawl, but it's really just a side-view map showing some tunnels with one big dug out area. It' unclear why I like the stupid villages in the first adventure and loathe the stupid/cute ones in this one. In any event, this could make a nice one-shot with a deceptively hard finish to it. Kick around the village for a bit, putting up with the cute halflings, experience a raid at night and/or search the well, then belly-crawl to the enemy. 13 pages is WAYYYY too much for the adventure though. That, however, seems to be a fact of life if you want to use one of these older adventures.

Alicorn
David Howrey
AD&D
Levels 1-2

This must be a side-trek, since it's only four pages long. A unicorn has been poisoned and some goblins are hunting it. The wilderness/glade has five encounters, the first being the hook combat and the last being the poisoned unicorn. There's a camped out gnoll and a couple of flying kobolds. That's it. It's clearly a Legend rip, with goblins, unicorns, horns, and poisoned arrows. There's just not enough to this. Nothing interesting happens in it AT ALL. Even the gnoll just attacks on sight.

Mad Gyoji
Colin Sullivan
AD&D OA
Levels 7-10

The Dungeon Magazine Oriental Adventures have been some of the strongest in the magazine, but this is one of the weaker ones. An evil spirit is killing the village elders, one after another. You have one day before the current one dies to go to an island where a villager was banished years ago and get the curse removed. There are a couple of OA style encounters in the wilderness and then on to the small island, home to many small shrines and a temple with a major treasure in it. This is a major adventure, clocking in at about 20 pages. It's strongest when playing to the OA/fairy tale vibe and weakest when being a traditional D&D adventure. For example, on the wilderness trail you see a hanged man and his spirit next to the body. If you let him possess you and complete his task (which is quite minor) the spirit is put to rest. Great! Nicely done with a sweet fairy tale vibe in the flavor text used! But then there's a tasloi village. That takes up a couple of encounters and several pages and feels more like a traditional hack & slash D&D adventure than an OA adventure. It's out of place. The lengthy description of the village implies a hack fest, but the best option Is probably just to run/sneak through it. That's followed by a straight-up fight with an Oni on a bridge (from the cover) but that also feels out of place. Most OA Dungeon adventures have treated the creatures like real NPCs, with goals and motivations of their own. In fact, the OA adventures have tended to do that FAR more often and FAR better than the 'regular' adventures. But, again, in this encounter the Oni is just there to be killed. The shrine/temple island has a couple of good OA encounters, from a collapsing cliffside to an area infested with leeches and some shrines to be cleaned up. But those are mixed in with a couple of straight-up fights that detract from the ... ethereal? Nature of the isle could have otherwise had. The main temple extends this clash. While a couple of the encounters COULD be good, with an opportunity for interaction and choices by the PC's, instead they all end with "and it attacks." This gives the party no options beyond hacking things, which may be the most boring option in D&D. Given the emphasis on honor and so on in OA I find the lack of non-violent options strange and out of place. I guess there's a puzzle or two on the island, or an opportunity for smart play here and there, but they are far outnumbered by the raw combats. In the end I found this to not have a strong OA feel, in spite of the trappings.

Dungeon Magazine #34

This is a pretty crappy issue. The single exception drags the ret of the issue out of the gutter ... but not THAT far out of the gutter.

Euphoria Horrors
Alan Grimes
AD&D
Levels 1-2

This is an eight-room cave with a couple dozen drug-addled tasloi. It is also once of the worst examples of adventure design I've seen. A kid comes out of the forest crying. Questioning turns up his friend Drake is missing. The kid runs away. That's it. That's your hook. And this adventure is recommended as the Premier Adventure for your new campaign. Sigh If you follow the kid you get to his parents house. They are complete dicks and won't talk to party or allow them to talk to the kid, other than shouting "Go Away!" This is your premier adventure. Why would anyone go on this? Because that's what the DM is running that night? That's the reality of the situation, but, fuck, you have to make the adventure at least A LITTLE appealing to the players and characters to go on. A vague statement and then denying the party anything else is not a great start. The group is then supposed to wander around the forest looking for clues. Except they will probably fail and/or give up. There's a 10% chance per party member of finding a clue. What if they don't find a clue? I guess they don't get to go on the adventure then. Yeah! Let's Oh, wait, I don't think that's the reaction you are supposed to have. I've never understood this shit. If you HAVE to find the clue to go on the adventure then why are you making people roll for it? "Roll 1d6. On a '1' you get to play D&D tonight." Ug! Further, the clues are bullshit! There are three. The first two provide NO insight on where to go. The third, it is stated repeatedly, should only be used if the party is getting frustrated and don't know where to go. Seriously? YOU HAVENT PROVIDED ANY DATA ON WHERE TO GO UP TO THIS POINT!!!!!! Eventually you find a cave. The first encounter in the cave takes a page to describe. It's a fucking pit blocking the entrance with a fire behind it. That's should tell you a lot about this adventure. It's not the only example either. Many of the encounters take a page to describe and subjects are not just beaten to death but to a pulp. When you find the fairy dragon (euphoria gas) captured by the tasloi it breathes on you up to a dozen times. Hey! Dick! Know how many XP you're worth? I'll answer that: more than the bullshit excuse for treasure this adventure provides! There's almost none at all. The concept of drug-addeled humanoids is a good one, and there's a great non-standard undead, but that's not enough to save this adventure. Garbage.

Rogue
David Howery
AD&D
Levels 4-5

A two-page side-trek that describes the clearing in which a rogue elephant lairs. There's nothing remarkable about this. Two pages to describe what should be a couple of sentences or a (short) paragraph. Was Dungeon that desperate for material?

Isle of the Abbey
Randy Maxwell
D&D
Levels 1-3

This is a small little locale adventure on an island. Some mariners (a guild, perhaps?) hire you to clear the place out so they can build a new lighthouse. After getting on to the island, through a horde of undead, there's a little adventure in the cellar of a ruined abbey where you meet the remains of the evil clerics from the abbey. This adventure has a different vibe than most and it's something I can get in to. The party is presented more as a group of mercenaries. A lot of hooks essentially imply as much: "you're hired to ..." but there's also some implied morality in most. This one doesn't really have that implied morality, although it's still essentially a fight against evil. The mariners want to build a lighthouse and they need someone to check the isle out before they do so and get rid of any threats. There's a small lighthouse nearby that can serve as a base of operations, and it has a tactical resource in an old fighter who tends it. He can offer advice to situations the party can't overcome. That, alone, is unusual for Dungeon. Not the resource, but the way the adventure is presented. The island is presented more as a ... location? Than a set of railroad encounters. The beach is full of undead that crawl out of the dunes, so just getting off the beach will be a puzzle. The ruined abbey has some (evil) survivors in it who, generally, want off the island. They are presented as having motivations of their own and you can talk to some of them. More could have been done with that, with some better faction play, but at least a nod is given to a couple of people who just want out and damn their evil god. Hell, I even liked the little backstory of the pirates and clerics being in league, the clerics always shorting the pirates, the pirates always grumbling, and then the pirates showing up one day to burn down the abbey ... only to get mostly wiped out by the undead ... leaving an opening for the mariners guild. The treasures here're not stellar, and more could be done with the NPC personalities in the ruined abbey, like sticking them in specific locations or putting a little more faction work in to play, but it's defiantly above average for Dungeon.

The "Lady Rose"
Steve Kurtz
AD&D
Levels 8-11

Are there good nazi's? What's your position on orc babies? This adventure, either intentionally or unintentionally, asks those questions. A warship from a thus-far unknown empire shows up and raids a city, kidnapping all of the adolescent elves. Because their empire uses young elves as slaves. And keeps them drugged. And breed them. But they are not evil, the adventure says so. Seriously. "Slavery in the Dkdwfkd empire is not good or evil. It just is." And their alignment isn't evil, it's almost all LN. It then paints the crew of the ship as just a set of sailor dudes. They hang out in bars, spend money lawfully, arm wrestle, gossip, all the things sailors do. Well, and slave adolescent elves. The depiction of a foreign power suddenly showing up and raiding a town, only to pull in to another and act lawfully, that's an interesting depiction. Probably realistic. Depicting the crew as just a bunch of sailors, a bunch of working stiffs, and the offers who are just loyal military officers. All great. You get a couple of combats with a well organized military group painted in a realistic, and yet tactically fun, manner. And then you toss in the orc babies ... the slavery. DM's you throw that shit in are not good DM's. They are dicks. The game is supposed to be fun not make you think about the meaning of life, hopelessness of existence, and put you in to existential crisis. The big battle at the end is supposed to be on the warship but it described in a boring way, with no thought as to how the crew react to an incursion. This is in marked contrast to the earlier 'ambush' encounter in which the tactics of a small subset of the crew, on land, are spelled out. The ship, in contrast, is boring, with no tactics and nothing very interesting to explore. This then is the most glaring mistake in the adventure, the abrupt turn away from the realism of the military response to Just Another Keyed Room format. Oh. And the adolescent elf slavery. Like I said, only a dick puts that shit in an adventure. The TSR standards were something like "evil must never be portrayed in a good light." I guess this one slipped through because they were LN? I look forward to the next issues letters column to see if this comes up. Ultimately this is a sucky adventure because of the main encounter, the ship, is described as just a series of keyed entires instead of living, breathing place with a crew schedule, etc. The orc baby issue is what pushes from "the usual dreck" to "total piece of shit."

On Wings of Darkness
Craig Barrett
AD&D
Levels 4-8

Dungeon adventures tend to be wordy. This one is both wordy AND confusing, a rare talent. The party is hired by a manor lord to go kill a predator killing livestock. Uh ... then the party is attacked at night by "Darkenbeasts" under the control of Vedthor. Then they go kill a small campsite of enemies in the pay of Vedthor. Then they go to an estate and kill some more people in the employ of Vedthor . Yeah, I know it's a mess. That's because it's a mess! So look, what's going on here is the designer made up a cool dude, Vedthor, and put him in an adventure in Dungeon Magazine. Vedthor, the CE human male wizard, keeps a +3 dagger in his boot and a knife in his left forearm sheath. Boner much Craig? Vedthor has some evil plot and its his Darkenbeasts that are causing trouble. The idea is, I guess, that the party is pissed at being attacked during the night ambush by Vedthor and takes the fight to Vedthor. You see all that name dropping I did of "Vedthor"? That's NOTHING compared to the number of times he's fucking mentioned in this adventure. "Why Bryce", you ask, "how does the party know where Vedthor is?" Well, first, let me thank you for name dropping "Vedthor." Second, there are a bunch of fucking owls in the adventure. Why are tere owls in the adventure? I have no idea. But there are a bunch of giant owls at the enemy campsite and one talking owl in a cage at the campsite. And the talking owl has a page long monologue that fills the party in on all the details. And then every encounter from then on is written from the owls point of view. If some DM tried this shit on me I'd eat the fucking owl. There's a couple of nice things in this adventure, in spite of the confusing mess it is. First, at he campsite, there are some hill giants chasing around some giant owls, trying to club them, while the owls flutter about from area to area. I like these sorts of vignettes during an adventure encounter. It's much nice to see some semblance of realism then it is to just have a boring description of "3 hill giants in the clearing." It doesn't have to be long but just an extra sentence or so can make all the difference. Second, the estate at the end, while written from the owls point of view and a total confusing mess, tries to be an open-ended location. More than a standard keyed encounter locale, it tries to tell you that there are some guard at a lookout on the hill, and these guys on a boat, and these people in the house and so on. It fails because of the owl POV shit and the TOTAL lack of a plan and/or tactics on the part of the enemy. Oh! Oh! I just remembered! At the end of the adventure there's an entire list of consequences based on the PC's actions. Guess What! Nothing you do matters! No matter what the party does the outcomes are the same! Yeah you! You wasted your time!

Dungeon Magazine #35

Seeing the pro's names ad Dungeon authors reminds me of the strippers who show up at spring break wet t-shirt contests.

Twilight's Last Gleaming
James Jacobs
AD&D
Levels 8-10

Adventures like this one are part of that great soul-sucking morass that drags down the hobby. The party is hired to go through a gate to a fortress on the shadow plane and bring back a staff, in order to close the gate because shadow monsters are coming through it. Turn out the guy that hired them is a rakshasa and that will free him from his prison. The hackneyed plot (lure adventurers to free me while I impersonate someone!) isn't so much the issue as the MASSIVE amount of text that accomplishes NOTHING. This runs 12-14 pages and has maybe three or four encounters. The inn the guy lives in is described completely and realistically in the most boring fashion possible. So s the two levels of the shadow fortress and the two or three encounters in it. Page after page of backstory. Page after page of boring descriptions of featureless wilderness. Page after page of trivial detail and explanation that does NOTHING to enhance play. Three is so little content that I think you could easily do this as a one-page dungeon. The rakshassa part is lame also. Need a bad guy to launch a plot that can't be foiled by Detect Evil or ESP? Rakshasa! puke

The Year of Priest's Defiance
Rick Swan & Allen Varney
Dark Sun
Levels 3-5

Uh ... this is an adventure? The party stumbles on a ruin in the desert with fresh grass. Inside the small 6 room ruin they find a magic cistern of water. A friendly NPC shows up and wants to break up the cistern. An evil NPC group shows up. The cistern gets broken, the water elemental it contained gets free and kills the evil NPC party. End of adventure. This is an encounter, not an adventure. A side-trek at BEST and more likely a one-pager. But I guess it fulfills the requirement to publish a Dark Sun adventure in Dungeon. This is just devoid of anything. It's more like watching a movie than doing something. Kill the friendly NPC? He survives so the showdown can take place. LAME. Why not just roll a d6? On a 1-5 you win, and 6 you roll again.

The Whale
Wolfgang Baur
AD&D
Levels 1-2

This is a nice little short viking-themed encounter. A whale has washed up on the beach and a group of fishermen and a grow from the local lord are arguing for ownership rights. As the party approaches one of the land-men shoots an arrow at a women in the fishermans boat. Everyone stops talking and stares coldly at each other. That's the perfect little moment to introduce the party to the scene, at the point things could change dramatically one way or another. The two groups have several personalities and some generic men, with the personalities having some good motivations and character to drive the action forward. The fishermen WILL starve if they don't get the whale. The land-men DO have a real claim, but it is from an unreliable person. Baur understands that these sorts of scenes are driving by the NPC personalities and describes each in a paragraph or so and provides enough little background bits THAT ARE RELEVANT to drive the action forward. This is a great tangled mess where there are lots of possible answers. Nicely done.

Green Lady's Sorrow
Joseph O'Neil
AD&D
Levels 5-8

Middle class morality. That's the problem with this adventure. A green dragon contacts the party in order to get five of her eggs rescued. They fell in a hole in a volcano and she needs you to go in and get them back. Inside is an assortment of vermin (who attack), magmen (who attack), grue (who attack) and an efretti (who eventually attacks.) Then you get out and the dragon attacks. Wouldn't it be so much more interesting if you could get an ally from green dragon, or from the eftreeti? You are doing a major boon to both, and both are highly intelligent. But they attack. Lame. There's a nice little maze on the map, some of the eggs are fakes, some are hard boiled already, and ALMOST everything in the adventure is intelligent. And attack. There's an interesting set up or two with the eggs, traps and the like. Giving the true, magmen, efretti, orcs (who are all dead, having been sent in before you) some personality would have really made this adventure something. You could do it yourself, but then ... why did you buy this magazine? There was a great opportunity for faction play, since they all hate each other anyway, and lots of opportunities to make some fire & lava themed rooms. Instead you get a lava pool or two and nothing else. The end result is Just Another Stinking Dungeon, but with a couple of fire creatures in it this time. :(

The Ghost of Mistmoor
Leonard Wilson
AD&D
Levels 3-6

This is a haunted house adventure. An heir hires you to go in and help him get his ancestral treasure. There are a couple of rogues inside who are pretending to haunt the house ... and some real ghosts as well. Some of the ghosts are neutral-ish (and not really 'ghosts' by D&D standards) and one is evil. You tool around the house getting 'haunted' and looking in to things and then probably meet the good-natured rogues. They, in turn, probably help you find the treasure vault, along with the goodish ghosts. Inside the vault you fight the evil ghosts. (which are really just shadows.) This is a pretty long adventure and most of the haunting things are done fairly well. There's good advice present on how to run a spooky adventure, including he one dream sequence. I normally hate dream sequences, but this one is done ok and emphasizes the need to not do another one after it since they get old real quick. (True That.) This has a slow, investigatory quality to it. There are some vermin to kill prior to the showdown, but it's otherwise an adventure which builds to several spooky moments. It does this better than most spooky adventures. It's helped by the two rogues, scaring people off, who build things to a climax ... and then they are probably caught, dispelling the tension. Until you find out they didn't do everything ... and then tension builds more, this time with your new helpers. Tension builds again until its dispelled by the finally meeting the real ghosts. Then there is the ominous battle of the treasure vault, that the party probably knows is coming. That sort of cycle works well. I would note that there MAY be a single problem. There are a decent number of bodies in the adventure from the olden-days. There is one high-level speak with dead spell. Completing the adventure relies on the spell being cast one ONE body in particular. I may have missed the thing that singles this body out. Anyway, good hauntings based on both room and time/event. The personalities of the ghosts and NPC's are spread out a bit. Most detail is in one place but important other details are spread though the text, which makes running them a pain. All in all though, not a bad haunted house. Better than U1 anyway.

Quote from: bryce0lynch;774342Adventures like this one are part of that great soul-sucking morass that drags down the hobby.

:rotfl:

Dungeon Magazine #36

Asflag's Unintentional Emporium
By Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 3-7

Time to clean out the rats in the old woman's cellar, except this time the old woman is a dead wizard and the cellar is his tower in the middle of the city. I'm not a fan of 'joke' adventures, although I do like humor in adventures and I LOVE the absurd, especially when it comes to wizards. Willie Walsh gets close on this one to delivering a fine adventure. His descriptions of the wizards tower and environs and history get REALLY close to that kind of OD&D non-standard wizard archetype that I adore. It's got a nice Discworld Unseen University vibe; this kind of mix of the academic and the absurd. He's got a decent environment but it comes off as very one note. Only one or two of the creatures in the tower will talk to you, and there are A LOT of creatures, so it devolves in to a monster hunt where you open a door, kill the monster, and move on. Further, while several of the monsters are nicely located (water weirds in fountains, cifal's in beehives, the brass snakes that make up the chandelier animate, the tools in the garden shed animate, etc) there's not a lot of THE FANTASTIC apart from this. The ability to explore and play with weird things and, for the most part, detect the garden tools early, is missing. I like Willie's background, and the NPC wizards, and many of the monster encounters ... but it's just a monster hack-fest. In the Ed Greenwood adventure I reviewers awhile back (Eliminsters backdoor?) you got to go in to rooms and look at weird things but could not interact with anything, turning you in to a tourist. In this adventure you go in to rooms and a monster appropriate to the locale appears for you to kill. Neither capitalize on the wonder of a wizards tower and deliver it to the party. In this regard, S3 was a better Wizards's Tower adventure than these two.

Troll Bridge
By William S. Dean
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This is a short little encounter. There's a bridge. It's got a troll under it. The troll is actually a renegade gnome thief/illusionist. He makes the spectral forces troll retreat to a hidey hole and ambushes the party there. It's decent, I guess, but I can't help thinking that an actual troll under the bridge would have presented more interesting opportunities. Oh, look, a monster isn't actually a monster but something else ... geee, haven't seen that in a D&D adventure before ...

Granite Mountain Prison
By Roger Baker
AD&D
Levels 4-6

This is a rescue caper. A fantasy prison is described and the party is given the mission to rescue one person. You come across some supposedly beautiful city, only to fine burnt out buildings and broken street barricades. The local government is totalitarian and the rebel leader just got tossed in jail. You get to go rescue him, because GOOD. The prison has 36 or so locations, and then the 365 cell blocks. It's well described for the type of adventure it is. Guard schedules, where major NPC's hang out, the routine of the prison, the response to attack, and so on. It's also a little boring. There's just not much to some featureless granite rooms. It's also got that Magic Ren Faire vibe that I dislike. Decanters of Endless Water as a water source, permanent heat and chill metal spells, a captured air elemental to provide air flow, and so on. It's need some extra zing to liven up its step. Some personalities for the dick guards, or maybe some random contents for the prisoners personal items, and/or a quick list of the other prisoners (instead of the random prisoner generator, which IS provided.) There was a one-page dungeon in 2013 that also dealt with a totalitarian state. These might pair up well together, maybe in a Midnight game? Anyway, it does a decent job at describing a PLACE for the party to invade/sneak through. I just wish Ir were more colorful. Yes, grey is a color, but cerulean is more interesting.

The Sea of Sorrow
By Steve Kurtz
!!SPELLJAMMER!!
Levels 7-9

I don't know if I can review this well, so it may turn out to be a description rather than a review. It's a dragon hunt, in space. While in a spaceport the party see a damaged hammership return to port. It had been in a part of space rumored to be cursed. The crew, however, discovered the truth: there's an OLD radiant dragon preying on ships. You're sent after it. There's a cutoff system full of places to explore, lots of derelict ships to explore, a ghost ship, dragon flybys ... it seems jam packed. It seems ... large? Expansive? And seems to fit a Spelljammer vibe well. Places to explore, NPC races to interact with, and a nice ... I don't know, pirate vibe? Not pirate. But a kind of Wagon Train to the Stars vibe. It FEELS like you're doing a kind of fantasy exploration to a strange place. Travelling from point to point and exploring and interacting. Spelljammer catches this vibe better than any other genre I know. Combined with the weird monster races and their penchant for trade and talking I think it provides a solid base for a D&D game. This one could use a bit of gonzo'ing up; it tries to provide some interesting situations but they come off as a bit mundane. The various locales could also use a few more hooks. You get some short little descriptions of various places but many of them could use a little more interactivity. This would be the difference between, say, Isle of the Unknown and Wilderlands. While Isle, and this adventure, provide just simple descriptive facts (there is a village here), Wilderlands would provide a hook (which is desperate for white buffalo hides.) This could use a little more Wilderlands hooks. Still, a great supplement if you're running a Spelljammer game.

Dungeon Magazine #37

I've been sick, work has picked way up, I've had a super busy personal life. But those are all excuses. The reality of the situation is that reviewing Dungeon Magazine sucks the soul out of you. Even when they don't totally suck, like with with issue.

Serpents of the Sands
By John DiCocco
AD&D
Levels 6-10

This is a decent little dungeon crawl with a little wilderness table surrounded by one of the most god-aweful and implausible rube goldberg setups that alone drain any enthusiasm for it. It amounts to: somebody stole/killed some thing/one, go get it. And the "somebody" turn out to be yuan-ti. After the soul sucking BULLSHIT os over the actual adventure is better than Ok. The wandering monster table is a nice one, with things like "you step on a sandling" and "dervishes looking for a ruin" and "nomads who trade with you." There are a few "attack on sight" encounters and many more that have just a bit more to them. That extra bit, usually just a single short sentence, adds a wonderful variety to what otherwise could have been yet another generic desert dreck-fest. The dungeon entrance (which is really the first couple of levels) is mostly linear with A LOT of secret doors that you to find to keep playing. I've never quite liked that; secrets should lead to a reward and not be work required to be done in order to go have fun. Anyway, the real level has decent amount of looping corridor variety, especially for a level with only 15 or so rooms. It works and fits together well and provides some decent variety. There's some decent descriptive text that serves to inspire: manacles turned left to open a secret door and poison needles shooting out of skull eye sockets. It goes off the deep-end in places with history & ecology and could use a good pruning down, but it's much better than it's introduction would lead one to believe.

A Wizard's Fate
Cristopher Perkins
AD&D
Levels 1-3

This feels more like a D&D adventure than an AD&D adventure ... and that's a compliment. An evil wizard has disappeared ... and so has the local girl he was courting. Inside the tower you'll find a small 11 room dungeon that pairs with the three or so outside encounters around the tower. Inside is the usual assortment: skeletons, spiders, a "guardian" or two, and an imp ... who is behind all the trouble. You wander around a non-complicated dungeon layout and find clues/key to get through a special door. This has a decent little vibe to it, although it seems a bit simplistic. The treasure, for example, is help in magical floating spheres, and a skeleton has a key lodged in its ribcage. It's not a strong adventure, but it is strongER than many of the others in Dungeon. You could dump this in almost anywhere in a hex campaign and just up the monster HD to make it fit as a kind of mini-encounter in a hex crawl.

The White Boar of Kilfay
Willie Walsh
AD&D
Levels 3-7

This has a mild Celtic vibe to it. It's a hunt for a mysterious killer white boar that both the kings of men and elves want dead. It ends up as a kind of mini-dungeon crawl trough a forest and then a wizards tower/keep before the board shows up, turns out to be good, and kills the bad guy it was looking for. The white boar runs out of the forest, chased y wild elves, and in to the hunting party of the kings son. The son dies as does one of the important elves. The king sends the party to kill the boar, and the elves stop them and ask them to do the same, escorting them to the evil part of the wood. There the party follows the path, has a some adventures, and finds a ruined evil keep. Turns out the boar was there also, killing goblins, henchmen, and the evil mage. There's a mild mythic/fairy tale vibe going on here that I generally like, although it is quite mild in this adventure. The goblins and wilderness encounters are handled nicely, with the goblins having only one man let, a coward, and a bossy chiefs wife and they are all holed up in one room. As with the previous two adventures, the quality level here is much higher in terms of evocative test and interesting things going on that a DM can work with. The adventure, especially the end, is more than a little slow once you get out of the forest. The ruined keep needs more to keep the suspense going or else the players attention is likely to wander.

Their Master's Voice
Roger Baker
AD&D
Levels 2-4

A side-trek featuring two trained leucrotta. They lure you out an attack. I guess dungeon needed filler and couldn't afford comics?

The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb
Mike Shel
AD&D
Levels 10-14

Widely regarded as one of the best Dungeon published. This is a Tomb of Horrors style adventure without some of the arbitrary nature of ToH and with some of the "hidden depth" that makes exploration worthwhile. There's something like three pages of introduction and background before the 36 room dungeon is launched in to. Linear doesn't quite describe it, but perhaps "linear with some dead ends" does ... just as ToH did but on a slightly larger scale. The actual encounters though meet or far exceed throne in ToH. Many of them smack of the classics. The very first encounter is illustrative: three words in ruins carved in the door: Errukiz, Ezdrubal, Elomcwe. Dwarven for the Three Sins of Ruin "Treachery, Sloth, Foolishness." Except the last one is actually buttons and you can press them in order to spell "Welcome." THIS. A thousand times THIS. That's what I'm looking for. It's simple, it fits in, it's short-ish (for Dungeon anyway) and it appeals to classic elements of play. Walls covered in eyes cry acid tears. Hill giant mummies lay DORMANT until their sarcophagi are looted. How great is that? They don't attack on sight! There's a green devil face you can shrink yourself to get past by crawling through a nostril ... it goes on and on like this. It makes sense. I'm not a big fan of things making sense, generally, but in this case it's all different. This is going to sound crazy, but ... it's like the designer thought up a dungeon AND THEN went back and filled in some mechanics. Oh joy! The vibe here is not "how can I force my mechanics to fit the situation" but rather one of "here's a cool thing, and here's the mechanics I added." This has good thumbing and nice tricks & traps with some decent imagery at times. Everything you need to have a good time. Another good example are some of the monsters. In one room there's a section of clay floor. If you pour water on it a figure struggles to get out ... an emaciated human with the head of a fanged pig. It's a clay golem! ... But the party has to figure that out for themselves! This is PERFECT. It evokes the EXACT vibe that I want out of a monster. It's integrated in, it isn't given away to the players but the clues are there. That's great stuff! The monster integrates perfectly in to the room, in much the way that some of the creatures in Many Gates of the Gann did, or the devils in the Her Dark Majesty series. This adventure is well worth checking out.