{"id":2556,"date":"2015-05-09T06:58:08","date_gmt":"2015-05-09T10:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2556"},"modified":"2015-05-03T11:04:11","modified_gmt":"2015-05-03T15:04:11","slug":"dungeon-magazine-41","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2556","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #41"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"d41\"<\/a>
\nRemember folks: I\u2019m partial to fairy tales, so read the last review with that in mind.<\/p>\n

Deadly Treasure
\nCody Hedberg
\nAD&D
\nLevels 10+<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elaborate Funhouse. A wizard has built himself a tomb, buried himself in it, died, and then invited you to explore\/plunder it. This contains one of my favorite design elements ever: the tomb builder cast multiple wishes so detection spells and teleport-ish spells would not work. Maybe \u2026 youdidn\u2019t mean to write a level 10+ adventure? Maybe you meant to write a level 5 adventure, before adventurers get those abilities in quantity? Maybe? No? You\u2019re just a sucky DM who imposes rules arbitrarily on the players in order to force them to suffer through your \u2018adventure?\u2019 Ok, just clearing that up. Longtime readers may recall my frequent references to the Technocracy in the Mage rpg, or also my use of the lyric \u201cI touch roses.\u201d An attempt to explain a mystery, by definition, destroys the mystery. Imagination & wonder resist definition by their very nature. But that didn\u2019t stop Cody. He\u2019s desgined a tomb under the assumption that the only valid way to do something in D&D is what is published in the rules. The first room is an elaborate trap that sprinkles some beans, from a bag of beans, with water. This include soil in the room, the buried beans, and a giant cauldron with holes in it to act as a watering can, and the adventurers dumping water i to it when they open the manhole cover at the bottom of a well. That\u2019s some serious Rube Goldberging just to get some magical shit to happen in the room. I\u2019m gonna confess: this\u00a0is\u00a0the first dungeon EVER that I could not get through. I could only read about half of it before I just couldn\u2019t take it anymore.<\/p>\n

The Well of Lord Barcus
\nRoger Baker
\nAD&D
\nLevels 2-5<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t usually review side-treks, but this one has a decent idea. There\u2019s a wishing well that grants ill-luck to those who loot it. A thief did, and died nearby after a comedic accident. His ghost wants you to return the stolen loot to the well so his soul can be freed. That\u2019s it. Nice premise, but there\u2019s no climax\/payoff. \u201cUh, ok. *plop plop plop*. Done!\u201d I REALLY like the idea of the setup but it needs some kind of zany complication, or any complication for that matter.<\/p>\n

A Way With Words
\nTim Beach & Teeuwynn Woodruff
\nD&D
\nLevels 1-3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Uh, fight some kobolds for a book? I actually went back to look at the cover and editors introduction to make sure tat this issue wasn\u2019t the April 1st edition. Meet a gnome who\u2019s writing a book about the divergence of dwarfish & gnomish poetry. He\u2019s gnome-like (IE: odious) Meet the bard\/woman who stole the book the gnome needs to complete his own book. She\u2019s weepy. Get fucked over by vampire moss and cross in a river, then fight some kobolds who shout love poetry from the book, thinking they are magic spells, and throw sand packets at the party ala LARPing. \u201cLightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!\u201d except it\u2019s \u201cFeel my wrath like a scalding bath!\u201d or Homicide?! Foul brutish beast!.\u201d IE: it\u2019s a comedy adventure. Those are hard to pull off. I find the gnome shit odious, in general, and surprisingly enough I find it odious in this adventure. The weepy bard girl is kind could be fun, just like the Romantic tavern-wench in issue #40 was. Kobolds shouting love poetry seems like something for a level-5 party encountering a kobold band. I hold a special loathing in my heart for the crocodile encounter. They look like logs and the party is encouraged to cross the river by jumping on them. If they party is not morons and look at the logs the DM\u2019s instrctions imply that he should say \u201cits really a log\u201d, because\u00a0the first of the three \u201clogs\u201d IS , actually, a log, with the other two being crocs. That BS. That\u2019s killer asshole DM shit. If the party asks you tell them. You don\u2019t play 20 questions. You don\u2019t make them guess the EXACTLY correct words to use to get the right answer. That sends a bad message, not only about play style but about the dickishness and adversarial nature of the DM. Bullshit I Say! Bullshit.<\/p>\n

Mammoth Problems
\nLawrence M. Kapture
\nSpelljammer
\nLevels 8-10<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exploring a derelict Spelljammer ship. (Are ALL Spelljammer adventures exploring a derelict ship?) This adventure is only 9 pages long for 21-ish encounter descriptions, which makes it one of the tersest Dungeon adventures ever published, especially after the endless backstory is ignored. You explore the derelict ship, get some hit & run undead tactics from some spectre-like undead, and fight some skeletons they\u2019ve animated. It\u2019s not a particularly good adventure, but then again it\u2019s not particularly poorly written either. I\u2019d give it a solid C-, with little to recommend it \u2026 which will in turn place it on the short list of \u201cBest Dungeon Adventures Ever.\u201d Seriously, it\u2019s not AWESOME, and my standard is AWESOME, but if you just wanted a nice little thing to insert in a Spelljammer game then I\u2019d reccomend this to you. It doesn\u2019t activly offend, it\u2019s just not very interesting.<\/p>\n

Hopeful Dawn
\nGary Lai
\nAD&D
\nLevels 3-6<\/strong><\/p>\n

A good idea poorly executed. The local temple has folks in town stirred up and on Halloween the local thieves guild takes advantage by dressing up as demons and openly ransacking people’s homes. The party track them back to their headquarters and deals with them. I\u2019ve been partial to the Raiders in Town trope for awhile now, and it picked up during Hoard\u00a0of the Dragon Queen. This one is done OK, but its pretty clear that the raiders are NOT demons, almost immediately. The clues are also pretty blatant as to what is going on and where the headquarters are. Finally, there\u2019s a group of paladins running around chasing them. Pompous, of course, and they don\u2019t seem to realize that they are thieves and not actually demons. This thing also comes in at 20-ish pages long, FAR longer than it needs to be. The thieves all have multi-paragraphdescriptions, almost none of which will never come up in play. You now know enough about their adventure to run your own better than the one written in the magazine.<\/p>\n

Old Man Katan and the Mushroom Band
\nTed James & Thomas Zuvich
\nAD&D
\nLevels 1-6<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is presented as a joke adventure, but I would instead say that it\u2019s charming \u2026 or portions of it are anyway. An old swamp hermit is being annoyed by singing mushrooms. They are actually saving his life from giant mosquitoes but he doesn\u2019t know that. The mosquitoes are being controlled by a child-like\u00a0bog monster deep in the swamps. The hermit offers the use of his boat to explore\/figure out whats going on \u2026 but the boat is actually a tame mimic, unknown to everyone. The singing mushrooms and the boat\/mimic (which essentially just means the boat can act a bit on its own to liven things up and freak the\u00a0players out) are the jokey parts. I guess the hermit falls in to this category also, as he talks about assassins\/hitmen, etc. Anyway, most of the adventure is straightforward. The problem with this is that it did\u2019t go far enough. The WIll o\u2019 Wisp should have been written as a very spooky encounter, and the other encounters tending toward the kind of charming fairy tale feel. They tend to be a bit mundane, unfortunately. There\u2019s certainly some room for run & interesting play with the mushrooms, the hermit, his giant cat, and the boat \u2026 but the rest of the adventure feels much more mundane and of a different tone than these first four elements. That\u2019s unfortunate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember folks: I\u2019m partial to fairy tales, so read the last review with that in mind. Deadly Treasure Cody Hedberg AD&D Levels 10+ Elaborate Funhouse. A wizard has built himself a tomb, buried himself in it, died, and then invited … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2557,"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-2556","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\/2015\/05\/d41.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556","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=2556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2558,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions\/2558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}