{"id":2438,"date":"2014-05-31T01:48:59","date_gmt":"2014-05-31T05:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2438"},"modified":"2014-05-30T11:49:43","modified_gmt":"2014-05-30T15:49:43","slug":"dungeon-magazine-31","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2438","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #31"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"d31\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHey Bryce, your review today seems shorter than usual.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yeah. After reading the first adventure, and on the heels of the last issue, I was going to title this \u201cDungeon Magazine: We\u2019re no longer picking submissions for inclusion at random.\u201d Then I read the others. A cold mess and a railroad. Oh boy.<\/p>\n

Beyond the Glittering Veil
\nBy Steve Kurtz
\nAD&D (Psionics)
\nLevels 3-6<\/p>\n

This is a nice little adventure in an abandoned city full of undead. As was the style at the time, it\u2019s got WAY too much text and backstory and it goes over the psionics rules in detail, all of which detracts from the adventure. It\u2019s got a nice little \u2018village in trouble\u2019 introduction with some good NPC\u2019s to interact with and a realistic set up. It then launches in to the core of the adventure. The party goes through a teleported to a weird alien-like city. Therein they meet some of the intelligent undead inhabitants and a wizard. Some of them are friendly, some could be friendly, and, of course, there\u2019s a big bad guy. This thing has two components that make it worth checking out and maybe running. First, it\u2019s got great NPC\u2019s. Some of them have a little too much text describing them, but they all seem to be real people (even the monster NPC\u2019s) and a purpose behind them. They respond intelligently, and not just in a \u201cthey attack!\u201d manner. It\u2019s got a great locale, in a pyramid that houses a city, and the entire thing feels like a real place. While the hook is a little hokey, with a wizard going missing and a friend looking for him and hidden psionic powers (that have almost no impact on the adventure) there\u2019s also a nice bit about how the village reacts. Not the usual sheep! The description of an undead attack on the village, and the realistic way in which the undead react to Turn, struck me as very nice also. Nice, solid advice with some good imagery associated with it. A kind of mix of realism and fantasy and flavor that makes you want to run ALL of your undead that way. These sorts of bits are scattered throughout the adventure and they contribute a great deal towards the positive feelings I have. The MASSIVE amounts of text makes this hard to recommend very highly, but if you treat this kind of a short story, to take inspiration from while jotting down notes, you\u2019d have a great adventure.<\/p>\n

Telar in Norbia
\nBy Willie Walsh
\nAD&D
\nLevels 6-8<\/p>\n

This is a desert adventure in some ruins. Someone has gone missing from one tribe and you\u2019re sent to find them. Turns out they\u2019ve been abducted by some Set cultists and an evil efretti. This thing is dense and doesn\u2019t have enough summary. There\u2019s not a really great way to tell how everything works together in the abandoned city and the cultists don\u2019t have any notes on how they respond. This thing is just a mess, with monsters, cultists, intelligent, beasts, many many sub-areas\u2026 there might be something here but I can\u2019t figure out what is going on. The ruined city is just a mass of encounters that don\u2019t seem to fit together in any way other than \u201cwe\u2019re in a desert!\u201d The compound of the ruined city has a bunch of buildings and each building gets it\u2019s own little mini-encounters\/dungeon set up \u2026 but they don\u2019t really work together or fit together \u2026 or at least it\u2019s not obvious how they do so to me after three readings. I know there\u2019s this amulet, and guardian who used to be someone important, and an efretti \u2026 but that\u2019s about all I can make out.<\/p>\n

A Local Legend
\nBy Greg Rick & Bradley Schell
\nAD&D
\nLevels 1-2<\/p>\n

This is a slow little adventure about a village with a local legend. Every nine years a spirit takes 3 young men. There\u2019s a village with a great map, but only a VERY small number of the villagers are described. This turns the adventure in to a kind of railroad. Where NPC1 leads you to #2 and then #3 and then to the monster. The lair is only three rooms and while it has a great entrance mechanism (boulders shoved aside give the creature warning) there\u2019s not really enough in it past that to sustain play. The hook here is pretty good, or perhaps I mean the introduction. There\u2019s an inn, fully booked, a farmer takes you home to stay with him, and his neighbors son gets killed that night. It\u2019s a nice kind of bonding sort of thing to get the players involved with the guy and interested in him when his neighbor starts having trouble. It\u2019s handled much better than most adventures, and doesn\u2019t SEEM forced, even though it\u2019s obviously contrived by the designer. The inclusion of a wise woman with local knowledge of the legends and lans is a nice touch, but could have perhaps used a bit more flavor; the wise woman eventually tells you where the lair is. REALLY not much to this one, but still very nice. It reminds me a bit of the troll home in 100 Bushels of Rye, one of my favorites.<\/p>\n

Bane of the Shadowborn
\nBy William W. Conners
\nAD&D-Ravenloft
\nLevels 6-9<\/p>\n

Do you like gladiator movies? Err \u2026 I mean railroads? This is a stupid fucking railroad. Worse than that, it\u2019s ALMOSt like you\u2019re watching a movie. Not quite as bad as some of the 3e\/4e movies, but pretty damn close. The party gets teleported to Ravenloft, to a manor home. Instead os exploring and having fun, a good spirit and bad spirit lead you around and fuck with you and drop hints in your lap and railroad you to a finale. It\u2019s about 80 bajillion pages long and you can\u2019t do anything but \u201cenjoy\u201d the scenery. It might as well be scene based for all the \u201cexploration\u201d and \u201cchoices\u201d you get to make. \u201cYou have done well my chosen ones\u201d and \u201cLady Shadowborn, in an attempt to warn the party of the dangers ahead\u201d and \u201cEbonbane has decided to put on a show here for the explorers\u201d and \u201cEbonbane then beings to taunt the party\u201d and \u2026. You get the idea. The rooms are an excuse for the NPC\u2019s to screw with the party, for good or ill. And of course it\u2019s all combined with that dripping melodrama that is Ravenloft Boxed Text from this era. I get what they are trying to do here: two spirits duking it out, but it\u2019s done in such a heavy handed style, which is then combined with enough WALL OF TEXT to rival anything in China, that all it ends up being is a mass of text that doesn\u2019t work together and random shit being inflicted on the party. And not in a good way. Not in a \u2018neutral\u2019 way that OD&D works with, but in Deus Ex kind of way that repulses me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHey Bryce, your review today seems shorter than usual.\u201d Yeah. After reading the first adventure, and on the heels of the last issue, I was going to title this \u201cDungeon Magazine: We\u2019re no longer picking submissions for inclusion at random.\u201d … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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-2438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dungeon-magazine","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2438","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=2438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2439,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2438\/revisions\/2439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}