Cry Wolf
By Nicholas Logue
Level 2
The core concept here is good, but it’s lacking quite a bit to push it over the top. A wolf is near and the village organizes an attempt to stop it, including a rumored poacher and a hunter who hates wolves. Nice hooks, including “curry favor” and “rivalry with the poacher/hunter”, both of which are more personal and appeal to the meta-game of the players running their characters. “Fuck no we’re not going to let that tool hunter get the goods!” One of the big scenes is in a bazaar and there’s a nice table of chaos that can happen in the bazaar, from an alchemist’s tent to a bbq vendor with coals and skewers. What it’s lacking is a few more scenes with the poacher and hunter to build up the rivalry more. It also suffers from “random humanoid syndrome”, where hobgoblins are hired by the poacher instead of just using human thugs. FInally, the last part of the adventure hinges on the party NOT killing the wolf. That may be too much. This reminds me a bit of a REALLY watered down version of “Gone FIshin”
Zenith Trajectory
By David Noonan
Level 6
Looks like the adventure path again. Except this time it’s a stupid and shittfy adventure. Forced combat with an umber hulk. DInner invite to pick up the quest. Forced combat with a red dragon. Forced combat with a cyrohydra. Then a hack-fest in a kua-toa temple … that has no real solid plan on how to respond to intruders. It’s just some window dressing for set-piece battles. Fucking piece of shit.
Again only two adventures? And I remember Cry Wolf being fairly short.
I once ran an adventure based on it as an introduction to a campaign and it went quite well, but I can’t really remember anything specific from it.
Now I know the secret of making my tendency for overly verbose description less irksome – write 3E or later adventures… Seriously a wolf hunt sidetrek and a monster zoo take up a whole mag?
I think this is the era when dungeon had polyhydron mag combined upside down on the back. So the page count of dungeon would shrink some months.se
Some issues had a third subscriber only adventure which bumped the page count a bit. Big fonts and large maps per room made each adventure feel very short. Polyhedron was the main reason to buy the magazine. WotC’s designers seemed more excited to make lots of one off mini-RPGs.
has “This entry was posted in Reviews” not “Dungeon Magazine” like the others
Fixed! 2 weeks in a row; I picked the wrong month to stop sniffing glue.