Dungeon Magazine #103

Glacial Inferno
By Kent Ertman
Level 7

This is full on crap-fest combat-as-sport mode. Pretext after pretext is given for combat. Made with rage. Mad with fury. Mad with pain. The end result of every encounter is that everything in the room attacks the party on sight. Encounters other than “it attacks!” are few and far between and essentially are “NPC feeds you information on what is going on.” Save someone? They attack. Don’t save someone? They attac. Save someone? They give you a bare minimum of information, that, frankly, is irrelevant to the adventure. “Karl is mad and releasing a cold demon!” Oh, joy. And? Let me guess: We need to stab it. If you want set piece after set piece and combat and combat then this adventure is for you! Paraelemental cold ½ dragon/½ harpy attacks you! Joy. It’s rules mastery, for DM & player, as far as the eye can see.

Forest of Blood
By Wil Upchurch
Level 5

This adventure is closer in style to the older Dungeon adventures. There’s a random combat to kick things off, which brings the party to the villages attention, and then an incident which causes the town to turn to the party. A little poking around leads to a small wilderness adventure and then a couple of lair sites to invade and kill things. A fair is underway and a trained killer wolf pack invades, killing 1 villager a round, each, if the party doesn’t engage them. Later in the inn the party sees a local lothario leave with a couple of women, with one stumbling back in, later, talking about an attack by bandits. Poking around turns up some rumors (nice rumor table included) and clues to lead the party to the river. Once there they encounter the two lairs, first of the bandis and then the evil mastermind. It’s a pretty typical adventure. The whole lothario thing, combined with the rumors, bumps this up a bit.

Sinkhole
By Phillip Larwood
Level 4

During the night the inn you are staying in slides down in to a sinkhole. You gather up the survivors (hopefully!) and try to find a way out. You can think of this as some kind of combination escort/exploration adventure with a plane of shadow theming, since there’s some nonsense offered to explain the presence of so many shadow creatures. There are three tunnels off the main cave where the inn lands. One tunnel has a room with an exit, and there’s actually nothing in between that room and the main room, so a lucky party could stumble on to the exit quickly. There are some monsters that wander by the inn, so holding up there is no a snooze-fest. This is terse, even by the standards of the mid-100’s, and the NPC survivors have enough of a personality, barely, to make them interesting to throw in to the fun. There’s a mix of asshats and helpful NPC’s also, so it’s not all a Fuck The Party NPCfest. I wouldn’t normally call something like this a standout, not by current reviewing standards anyway, but compared to the usual Dungeon fare, it’s great. Compared to the modern OSR it’s a more than serviceable adventure with, perhaps, it’s only fault being a lack of evocative imagery in the cavern rooms. There are exceptions, like a mural room with a gate to the plane of shadow, which offers classic “step through the portrait” gameplay. But generally, it’s just cave rooms with either a monster or something else in it. It’s the NPC/Party interaction that is going to bring this to life.