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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.

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.

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.