{"id":2570,"date":"2015-05-16T07:36:46","date_gmt":"2015-05-16T11:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2570"},"modified":"2015-05-07T11:39:22","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T15:39:22","slug":"dungeon-magazine-42","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2570","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #42"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"d42\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Whistledown\u2019s Mantrap
\nby Bradley Schell
\nAD&D
\nLevels 3-4<\/p>\n

From the Oxford Unabridged:
\nDungeon Magazine Side-Treks – Using two pages to describe an encounter that should take 4 sentences. See also: Dungeon Magazine in general.<\/p>\n

A dryad with a mantrap plant has a charmed male companion. That\u2019s the entire content of the two pages. Nothing else interesting.<\/p>\n

The Lady of the Mists
\nby Peter Aberg
\nAD&D
\nLevels 6-8<\/p>\n

Most D&D backttory, especially in Dungeon, is crap. This one isn\u2019t. Oh, it\u2019s long and a pain in the ass and not relevent to running the adventure, but it DOES touch on some larger, weighty issues. I like the way this starts, with the party essentially in the middle of a city during a minor coup as the secret police are beaten and, I imagine, the citizens at the barricades are working with the rulers to dismantle the giant propaganda posters of the past. Images of the Arab Spring, with the people in the midst of the jubilance\u00a0that only the hope of change can bring. The read-aloud for the village the party journeys to is actually GOOD, and the various elements\/advice (buried in the surrounding verbosity) are good. \u201cThe sails are useless when you near the isle; the winds never blow there.\u201d and \u201cBeware the lake monster\u201d, which doesn\u2019t actually exist. The picture painted in the back story, and at the village, is one of melancholy, that is then juxtapositioned with the euphoria of the revolution. It\u2019s the vibe that Ravenloft tries for and so often fails at. There\u2019s also some bits & pieces of good imagery, such as the winds\/sailing thing, and a skeleton in armor with bits of rotting flesh poking out. I do a terrible job transcribing these vibes, but the adventure does a good job \u2026 when it does it. This is NOT a terrible adventure. A slow, melancholy feel, but not terrible. It IS verbose, which was the style at the time, but it does a lot right, like telegraphing that a flesh-to-stone monster is coming, and adding small flavorful details in fast bursts.<\/p>\n

In the end, there is a story going on in this adventure. The party get to witness parts of it. It\u2019s not a railroad though. There are not a sequence of events that MUST happen in order for something else to happen and the party just happens to bear witness. This is a major sin and is something that so many 90\u2019s, 00\u2019, and modern adventures are guilty of. \u201cWitness to history\u201d, so to speak. No, in this adventure the action is over. The party is chasing something else, tangential, and stumbles upon the story, discovering it as they go along. In this way I might compare it to something like Tegal\u00a0or Shadowbrook: a kind of house\/manor environment you wander through discovering weird things, except in this one you also looking for someone, driving your exploration, and you discover bits of what has happened.<\/p>\n

This is worth reading, and maybe worth salvaging.<\/p>\n

Izek\u2019s Slumber
\nby Gary Lai
\nAD&D
\nLevels 12-14<\/p>\n

Another 2 1\/2 pages to describe a single encounter. How the fuck they got away with this I know not, but evidentially it was one of their most features, according to the letter column. A MU14 and his 7 zombies are confused & disoriented, looking for someone who does not exist and reacting negatively to uncooperative witnesses. Fight or Negotiate?<\/p>\n

Ransom
\nby David Howrey
\nD&D
\nLevels 3-5<\/p>\n

Deliver some ransom money. This has a decent back story\/setup (and at one page is the sole of terseness, by Dungeon standards.) Border fief, questionable births, and an evil advisor all make for a decent set up \u2026 that will never see the light of day because the dude is just going to pay the party to deliver cash to the kidnappers. The kidnappers have decent flavor & personalities \u2026 which will never see the light of day and they exist to say about 4 sentences, total, and then get cut down. And of course, the ransom is in a chest that can\u2019t be opened, at all, by anyone but the target, otherwise the adventure twist would be ruined.<\/p>\n

IF you have this issue then you might read one for some inspiration i both the back story and kidnappers. You could build something decent using those two points as foundations. But I wouldn\u2019t go out of my way unless you have some morbid curiosity with things that only MOSTLY suck in Dungeon Magazine.<\/p>\n

Legacy of the Liosalfar
\nby Chris Hind
\nAD&D
\nLevel 1<\/p>\n

Fairy Tale Alert! The party are poor village bumpkins sent to find the miller, who has disappeared with the coinage needed to buy seed for the crops. What ensues is a series of faerie adventures, in the older sense of the word. Ravens that speak in a squakish common, mud-people taking exception to being trodden upon, sprites with sleep arrows, a talking spider, a riddler gnome, and the Feast \u2026 always a feast.This is a pretty straightforward adventure with not a lot of detail. The encounters are all classic faerie encounters and ould be plucked out and\/or used if you added s a bit more detail. Only one or two of the talking creatures you meet have any personality. This is a TRAVESTY; they should all have some pit of personality. The mystical element of the faeire could also be played up a bit more. Combined with the lack of personality for the players village \u2026 this is just a generic encounter-fest with a low-level faerie theme. And while I\u2019marracted to fairy tale stories I\u2019m not THAT attracted to them. Still \u2026 it does have faeries …<\/p>\n

The Price of Revenge
\nby Steve Kurtz
\nRavenloft
\nLevels 4-7<\/p>\n

A fairly normal Ravenloft adventure. Mists take you somewhere new, freaky little kid, small town investigation, curse, kill the vampires. The predictability here is the worst part. The freaky little girl is nice & freaky. The town portion is just a pretext to meet the vampires-in-disguise and get the gypsy mission. Then you kill the vampires. The basics of this are classic, and therefore not bad in and of itself, but the whole thing is so \u2026 telegraphed? Mists! Watch our for vampires & werewolves! White Death? Must be vampires. Look, the only two people who have any detail ar the mayor and his wife the doctor, that\u2019s weird, eh? The pseudo-slavic post-renaissance town vibe is done well, but the DREAD isn\u2019t very present. It all feels like an homage to the original Ravenloft adventure. If you were in to a straightforward-ish classic Ravenloft railroad with no particular interesting detail or dread, then this is the adventure for you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whistledown\u2019s Mantrap by Bradley Schell AD&D Levels 3-4 From the Oxford Unabridged: Dungeon Magazine Side-Treks – Using two pages to describe an encounter that should take 4 sentences. See also: Dungeon Magazine in general. A dryad with a mantrap plant … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2566,"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-2570","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\/d42.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570","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=2570"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2571,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2570\/revisions\/2571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}