Dungeon Magazine #76

Guess who doesn’t like enforced morality and railroads! That’s right! Me! I usually try to separate bad ideas and/or bad work from the people who created them. A person isn’t bad, they just did something ill-advised. I’m also a hypocrite.

It occurs to me that much was lost in OD&D between the resource-management of the early game and the plot from the later games. The “Detect Being Fucked With by the DM” spells made sense when you couldn’t refresh any spell at any time, didn’t have your books with you, couldn’t learn any spell at will, and had to manage your wizard slots more. As those limitations were houseruled away, or officially ruled away, the “Detect DM Bullshit” spells became adventure breakers when the entire adventure revolved around them. WOTC should have removed them from the modern era game, or at least publish “genre packs” of appropriateness.

The House on the Edge of Midnight
By Raymond E. Dyer
Ravenloft
Levels 4-6

The party washes ashore on a misty isle (Ravenloft!) and sees a mansion on the island. (I burn it down.) They are greeted by a distracted doctor. (I stab him in the face.) who offers you each a room for the night. (Uh, fuck you. No. We all sleep in the same room. Also, I kill the doctor.) Weird things happen. (Uh, I burned the house down, remember? I do it again.) Turns out the doctor is evil and salvaging body parts to repair his maimed daughter in the basement. Oh, and he killed the rest of the family and burned them in the wood stove that won’t open up and always billows out extremely stinky smoke. This is an event based adventure that is, essentially, a railroad from start to finish. You can’t open the stove until X happens. One must happen before two can happen. The doctor appears with the thing you need at a certain time. He regens completely until his appointed time to die. I get the tone the adventure is going after but it’s so ham-handed that it’s hard to see past that.

A Day at the Market
By Kevin Carter
AD&D
Levels 2-4

A side-trek. A grey ooze in the sewers eats a wand of wonder and summons a rhino before it wanders into the crowded marketplace. I like chaos. I wish there was more examples of chaos in the marketplace from the rhino and the ooze. There aren’t really any.

Mertymane’s Road
By Jason Poole, Craig Zipse
AD&D
Levels 5-7

This is a little wilderness jaunt through some snowy mountains and then an assault on an abandoned dwarf hall occupied by evil giants, humanoids, and humans from a neighboring kingdom. As usual, a big effect is made of the environment impacts of the snow & cold. I loathe these DM torture porn things. I’d rather the environment was used to make things awesome rather than to pedantically punish the players. The wilderness encounters are an ok ambush or to, and a nicely little “weird place” to rest at, along with slushmen (mudmen) who attack from residual magical runoff ponds. These are a very nice little place with the kind of mythic feel that I think we all yearn for from an ancient dwarf hall. The dwarf hall, proper, is small and cramped and feels like it’s just combat after combat.

Crusader
By Peter Lloyd-Lee
AD&D
Levels 3-6

Fuck. You. Peter. An old man has a heart attack in the street and if the party doesn’t respond then the adventure is over and DM forces an alignment check? You sound like a real fun guy to game with. He spends a long paragraph on punishing the party and then goes on to say that if the party do a RES on him he automatically fails it. Railroad much? Please forgive us lowly players of D&D who thought our characters had some semblance of free will. Please, Peter, allow us to play the game exactly the way you insist it played! There’s a dickish paladin involved, who can’t be bothered to walk across town to pick up his holy avenger. This then has the party going into the wizards home. IE: this is a puzzle adventure in a wizards house to complete a fetch quest. The reward is to get arrested by the town for entering the wizards home without permission. It’s just a wizards tower with a couple of puzzle rooms.

Earth Tones
By Craig Shackleton
AD&D
Levels 7-9

This is a combination of an event based adventure and a dungeon to explore, centered around an abandoned dwarf hold and the burrowing monsters attacking a nearby town. It is organized quite well: there’s a description of the key people in town and what they know/how they react, a list of events that can take place, and then a location list. The locations are very briefly described, except for the main abandoned dwarven hold. In short: it’s organized exactly the way it needs to be to support the type of play it wants to be … a quite rare event in the annals of adventure writing. The events are a bit … railroady. Nondetection spells and amulets to justify the choices made in the design, and it’s not until the sixth or eighth event that from free will emerges. Forced combat abound, with a lot of the events being “these things burrow up from underground and attack.” The NPC descriptions are about the right length for a DM to use, maybe just being a sentence or two longer than need be. The event text are a little longer still, but still probably manageable. The dwarf stronghold tends to the “at least two paragraphs per room” standard, which is overkill. I don’t know, hordes of invisible enemies (duergar) are always kind of a turnoff for me, although I do the visuals of duergar appearing as they fall from the ceiling and enlarging at the same time. The full-length paragraph monster stats as also a turnoff for me. All of the “interesting” bits seem to be set-piece combats … which I don’t find interesting when they make up the preponderance of encounters. “If the players are having an easy time ofit then make a third purple worm come up from underground.” Ug.

Fruit of the Vine
By Charles C. Reed
AD&D
Levels 2-4

This interesting little adventure takes place, mostly, in a little house with a mutant yellow vine creeper in it. Each room seems to have some little bit of interest in it, which is quite unusual for these sorts of things. The map is nicely three dimensional, at least more than others, and even has a old ladder outside for people to take advantage of. An open courtyard inside the building, a creeper vine under a table … Just a little bit of special in each room. It’s fairly short, at only six pages, and at least three of those is a bloated backstory and hook. If you could edit the hell out of ALL the extraneous text then you could get this down to 2 or three pages, easily, and have nice little compact adventure in a house in town with more than a little in it to interest a party of adventurers. An inkwell made out of a griffon hoof? Sign me up! I’m hesitant, but would say this is worth looking up even in it’s present condition.