Dungeon Magazine #135

I have a headache and I twisted my neck last night. This issue isn’t helping.

Funeral Procession
By Mark A. Hart
Level 1

This is one of the stooopidiest things I’ve ever seen. You’r guarding a funeral procession. There’s a diversion. The hearse is diverted. The body in the hearse is replaced. The original is shrunk. A raven familiar flies away with it. The town is in an uproar because of it toso the watch can’t search for the famous escaped serial killer. How much fucking crap are you going to engage in to push forward your crappy plotline ‘story’? It gets better. The hearse drive is paid off and there’s a thug in the back of the hearse. In spite of all of the dire warnings the party gets i the hooks, about worries of the body being stolen, etc, I guess the party didn’t ride the hearse, burn the body in advance, drive the hearse, or anything else. I guess that don’t jive with the ‘story.’ At there are columns of read-aloud, long NPC motivations and backstories, and and it’s event based … For some reason the party cares and gets lead by the nose to a slaughterhouse stuffed full of baddies. The … passivity that a party would have to engage in in to not derail the adventure … I can‘t imagine.

That gives me a good idea. I should start a ‘DERAIL” events at the gaming cons. Take a linear adventure and the META rule is to derail it, while the DM tries to keep it on track. Or the DM rolls with it. “On track” makes it a fun contest but, of course, the DM always wins.

Chains of Blackmaw
By Nicolas Logue
Level 10

A mess of a prison break adventure. You’re hired t go to jail and watch the back of a new prisoner. Event-based, with long room/key and even longer NPC stat blocks and motivations. It needs a table summarizing the NPC’s, about 60% less text with the room keys, a table showing events and timelines. I can’t imagine the tenth level party who says “Yes! Let’s get rid of all our gear and go to jail for little to no reward!” Ok, fess, up, who has waded through all the text in this adventure to run it? What do you have to do to? How many pages of notes?

Dawn of a New Age
By Tito Leati
Level 20
Oh god … Age of Worms adventure path. At least it’s the last one: Kyuss shows up. You’ve got the Hand of Vecna. You’ve got two parts of the Rod of Seven Parts. You’re given a Sphere of Annihilation. You’re given three opportunities to undertake quests to weaken Kyuss before he shows up. He’s AC 59 and has 660 HP … a 3e Level 20 creature in all it’s unwieldy glory. Note that nothing you’ve done thus far will prevent Kyuss from arriving. That’s impossible. All you can do is kill him. As an exercise for the reader: Rewrite the entire Age of Worms adventure path to be a sandbox/regional thing using only 20% of the words. Your reward is a Cease & Desist.