{"id":2377,"date":"2014-02-22T01:57:44","date_gmt":"2014-02-22T06:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2377"},"modified":"2014-02-14T16:59:03","modified_gmt":"2014-02-14T21:59:03","slug":"dungeon-magazine-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2377","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #25"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Standing Stones of Sundown
\nBy Paul May
\nAD&D
\nLevels 3 OR 9<\/p>\n

This is a brief village investigation followed by a set-piece combat in the village. The village has some standing stones in the middle and a chalk design on the hill. Two of the stones have gone missing and the village mage has turned up dead. Weird, eh? The party pokes around the village, finds the mages journal that reveals he turned the stones back to flesh, then find the mages ring that he did it with. A holy day comes around and a vrock attacks to get at the sacred chalice from the church. So \u2026 nothing you do makes any difference because the vrock will attack, out of nowhere, on the holy day. Oh, you can go dig around in some journals (oh boy! Story exposition via journal!), and you can kill a zombie and bring the rest of the stone circle back to life. But you won\u2019t learn what\u2019s going on and none of it will help or predict what it coming. Thirteen pages for that seems a bit much. And there\u2019s virtually no detail for the village or the people in it. The whole \u201cstanding stone are actually flesh-to-stone shamans from a FAR earlier age\u201d thing is nice. And when you bring them back they die in interesting way because of the erosion the stones saw. Most of what you need to know about this adventure comes from the following, near the beginning of the adventure: if good-aligned PC\u2019s decline to go to the church then the DM should give each a diety-sent affliction, like a boil on the nose, as a warning. The adventure is further burdened with a terrific need to explain everything and there is a great deal of effort put in to keeping the party in the dark. Speak with dead requiring tongues, farm boys who have not seen their employers, dead mages who never saw their attackers \u2026 it\u2019s all a set up to no purpose.<\/p>\n

Hellfire Hostages
\nBy Allen Varney
\nMarvel Super Heroes<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not really qualified to review a MSH adventure; I loathe the superhero genre. I think this has terrorists taking over a club for rich people, who are actually all evil super villains. Uh \u2026 that is all. [Insert amusing story about The Great Man Alive, a Champions character with the disadvantage \u201cDead\u201d.]<\/p>\n

Of Kings Unknown
\nBy Randy Maxwell
\nAD&D
\nLevels 2-4<\/p>\n

This is a ten-room lair\/tomb full of moon orcs. Those are normal orcs who eat moon melons and have some random benefits. So. Orcs. It literally takes a column of text to tell you five entries on a table for random INT. -4. -2. Normal. +2. +4. So \u2026 padded to hell and back. I know, right? Padding in Dungeon Magazine! The lair\/tomb is pretty small, at ten rooms, and the layout is a simple branching one. The first five rooms fit on one page, along with the map. The mutant orcs are a nice concept but poorly implemented; clumsy with too much text that looses the A W E S O M E they could be. Hell, mutant anything is cool. [Uh \u2026 Everyone knows that Gamma World is my One True Love, right?] The dungeon sucks. The first room is nice trapped door\/murder hole guardroom set up thing. The adventure notes a few reinforcements when the shit hits the fan, but not much beyond that and nothing about the leadership jointing the frat. The leadership is disappointing as well. They get names, and individual lair rooms, and have some semblance of personality. There will, however, be no chance to interact with them and so all that they ever were or will be is lost in an instant. It\u2019s a hell of a thing, killing an ma^h^h orc. Oh yeah, and it\u2019s more fun to talk to someone and THEN kill them then it is to just hack them down.<\/p>\n

One of the greatest examples in all Christendom of bad room writing is contained herein. It\u2019s not platonic, but pretty damn close. I leave you with it, as an example of the joy you can find herein: \u201c4. Trophy Room. This room once contained trophies of war. Swords, spears, and armor of all kinds were dedicated here to the everlasting glory of the fallen orc leaders. Centuries ago, the walls were draped with elven banners, dwarves sigils, gnome heraldry, and the flags and standards of men, goblins, and various orc tribes. The moonorc leaders have stripped the room of anything useful in order to outfit the tribe. The weapons and armor were quickly divided among the warriors, while the flags and banners were torn down and used for blankets or ripped apart and resewn into bags, sacks, and clothing. The room now contains only refuse and rusty, unusable equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hrothgar\u2019s Resing Place
\nBy Stephen J. Smith
\nD&D
\nLevels 4-7<\/p>\n

This is a small eleven room two-level cave complex. It feels more realistic than a lot of caves, probably because of the nooks, crannies, and major ledge. It\u2019s a little bizarre. There\u2019s about a page of introductory background text\/journal for the players to find. There\u2019s a regional map that doesn\u2019t come in to play at all except to locate the adventure in The Known World \u2026 but there\u2019s nothing special about the location and no wilderness adventure. The adventure is launched in to almost immediately (at least by Dungeon Magazine standards) and ends up being a tight little affair. The Wanderers table is nothing special (\u201cthey attack immediately!\u201d) but the caveman, proper, is interesting. It\u2019s got a couple of loops and seems more like a realistic cave. The way from the upper level to the lower is a huge chasm. There are ledges, nooks, and crannies. I really like cave adventurers that feel like caves and this one, while not Stonesky, gets close enough to satisfy. Inside is a motley assortment of creatures, from trolls to harpies, to giant worms. A spider attacks, lowering itself on silk, while climbing down a ledge. Harpies and trolls don\u2019t like each other (more could have been done with that.) The adventure is nice little one, and includes a non-standard magic sword and some treasure that you can repair to make it worth even more! Reviewing Dungeon Magazine is not a pleasant affair, but this is a little ray of hope in the darkness. So much so that I went back to rpggeek to see what else the author had written. This isn\u2019t OD&D, but more like some kind of \u2026 Harn-like environment. Quiet, primitive, tight. I wouldn\u2019t have a problem running it. It even has some cave toads with paralyzing eyes!<\/p>\n

A Rose for Talakara
\nBy Wolgang Baur & Steve Kurtz
\nAD&D
\nLevels 8-12<\/p>\n

Danger! Poser Alert! Danger! Poser Alert! Hmmm,ok, maybe not poser. See that cover, with the black knight holding the black rose? Yeah, you know what means: Someone read Ravenloft. In this case it\u2019s Wolfgang Bauer. Checking his publishing history, we can see these early Dungeon adventures appear to be his first published items. This adventure is some kind of mash-up of Ravenloft and LOTR. Bob, Witch-Kingof Angmar, is under the control of Sue, Dark Lord of Evil. She\u2019s got his magic circlet and he\u2019s tired of being alive. He lures some adventurers to her evil volcano-land Dol Gulder and hopes they pop her ass so he can finally be free. And he\u2019s a gardener because it brings some respite to his tired soul. [As a totally coincidental aside: does anyone know what the official emoticon is for \u201cpuking ones guts up?\u201d] Oh, wait, wait! I gets better! The tagline for this adventure is \u201cRed for Love, white for purity, black for death.\u201d I wanted to blame Vampire for this, but it looks like it came out a year later. This is a hack-fest in a monster-filled fortress of Sue.<\/p>\n

The first two or three pages are the setup. Lot\u2019s of tortured souls, murdered high priests, black roses left as calling card, mysterious notes \u201cMy master bids you join him at his home\u201d blah blah blah. Evil bad guy taunts players. Hang on, let me quote \u2026 \u201cHis imprisoned soul known only restlessness and torment.\u201d The whole backstory hook involves a complicated timeline and special magical items and blah blah blah blah. The usual set up nonsense. The group is paid $10k each to go find the killer of the high priest. Lots of clues are left for the party, since the poor poor tortured soul wants the party to find him. There\u2019s four or five wilderness encounters on the way to Mordor, at least two of which are totally bizarre, but not in a good way. The first is with a band of fire giants. Each has a name and a personality that goes on for quite some word count. They attack immediately and no doubt die ignominious deaths at the hands of 8th-12th level PC\u2019s. Why pay all this detail to creatures which die immediately in 10 minutes of pure combat? And yes, later on in the fortress, the party encounter 8 elf prisoners who get NO detail at all, in spite of the fact they are eager to join the party and wipe out the evil menace. WTF?! The party also meets Radagast in the wilderness. This encounter takes a full page. The druid tells the party \u2026 well, nothing at all. The designer has spent a full page on a meaningless encounter. There\u2019s also a decent, and deadly, encounter with Salamanders in a lava river. They grab people and dive under the lava. Ouch! But nice!<\/p>\n

Dol Guldur gets a pretty extensive write up, with about 70 encounters. Gatehouse, courtyard, keep, it\u2019s all there. It\u2019s also some kind of monster circus. There\u2019s a medusa in the garden, harpies in the towers, skeletons at the gates, shambling mound gardeners, fire elementals for hot & cold running water (ug!) The place has a decently interesting castle layout that reminds me of MERP products and the monster circus isn\u2019t any worse than I6. There is the usual nonsense with room descriptions, like the paragraph that describes the history of a pool of dried blood. Yes, an entire paragraph to tell us that a pool of loos on the battlements is from where some skeletons shot an escaping priest. No body. Not fresh. Just some dried blood. The Witch King \u201ctests\u201d the pc\u2019s, of course, by sending bad guys against them, and arranges to lead them to Sue. There\u2019s also a whole complicated \u201cwizard locked doors and gem keys\u201d thing, which smacks of magical economy. Oh, and of course Sue has cast a bunch of wishes so passwall, teleport, etc don\u2019t work inside her fortress. IE: the designer was too lazy to come up with an adequate adventure and\/or scale the adventure to a level appropriate to passwall\/teleport.<\/p>\n

The place isn\u2019t terrible, but it\u2019s not all that interesting either. Kind of like a Ravenloft-light. An attempt at Realism that gets mired in some kind of jr. high Vampire the Masquerade nonsense. Sad face is Sad. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The Standing Stones of Sundown By Paul May AD&D Levels 3 OR 9 This is a brief village investigation followed by a set-piece combat in the village. The village has some standing stones in the middle and a chalk … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dungeon-magazine","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/d25.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2378,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377\/revisions\/2378"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}