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".

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.