{"id":2833,"date":"2015-11-07T07:26:55","date_gmt":"2015-11-07T12:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2833"},"modified":"2015-10-22T09:27:38","modified_gmt":"2015-10-22T13:27:38","slug":"dungeon-magazine-64","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2833","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #64"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"d64\"<\/a>
\nGrotto of the Queen
\nby Paul F Culotta & Shari Culotta
\nAD&D
\nLevels 6-9<\/p>\n

This is an overly-verbose attack on a sea temple. Seriously, it goes on for at least two page, three if you count some sidebars, in order to justify the premise of the adventure. Evil Bad Guy hints to a third party that the adventurers are the right people for a certain job, then listens invisibly to the plan, and then teleports to the evil temple to warn them. This is yet another example of an adventure Trying To Explain Things. The byzantine efforts gone through are crazy, and very off-putting. Getting past that you get to a pretty decent wandering monster table, that are excellent little set ups for adventure. A little long, at a paragraph each instead of a sentence, but still good. There\u2019s an evil village with a nice evil tavern full of Potential Energy \u2026 and they don\u2019t attack on sight, giving the party a great opportunity for roleplaying and fun. The temple proper is \u2026 verbose. It\u2019s trying to explain the room, what the plans for the room were, what happened in the room, and then sometimes what people in the room tell the party they know. I don\u2019t know how many tenses of verb that is. The idea is that the temple set up an ambush, but another group of murder-hobo\u2019s stumbled in to it, and now the party is coming in a couple of hours later to find the aftermath of a battle. There\u2019s a nice timeline that goes along with it, with the temple finally figuring out what\u2019s what. The whole \u201cSurprise, it\u2019s the REAL us!\u201d thing is sure to bring joy to your PC\u2019s. The treasure and scenes are not that evocative, but it\u2019s a decent setup that plays to a group power fantasies.<\/p>\n

Bzallin\u2019s Blacksphere
\nby Christopher Perkins
\nAD&D
\nLevels 12-15<\/p>\n

The longest adventure in this issue is a big ol monster zoo battle with just about every evil high HD monster in the book. Primarily a wizard’s castle, with interdimensional protections and wrap-around corridors, it\u2019s chock full of evil wizards, devils, and a shit-ton of other extraplanar evil creatures. There\u2019s a sphere of annihilation growing in a town, and the local mage thinks that the old local mage, Bzallin, has a talisman that will stop it. Then some yugoloths break in and try to kill everyone, name dropping that Bzallin is now a lich. You go to Bzallin\u2019s old ruined fortress, fight some undead and wizards, then teleport to this new extra-dimensional fortress. Kill all of the mages, devils, slaadi, etc in sight, then go home. This isn\u2019t a very interesting adventure, although it foreshadows some of the design elements to come in 3E and 4E, especially the combined arms monster approach to planning rooms. Pick some monsters that could work well together and construct some pretext for them working together. This strains credibility, in my opinion. You have to work within the rules you lay out for your world and this world-view just doesn\u2019t fit mine. It\u2019s just room after room of combat. Nothing too interesting.<\/p>\n

Last Dance
\nby Jeff Crook
\nAD&D
\nLevels 4-6<\/p>\n

I can only hope that there is a special hell for the designers of these one-trick pony adventures. The party is lured to a house to be killed It\u2019s full of traps, the most notable are in the form of bodies controlled like puppets. The woman who hires you won\u2019t get out of her carriage (her eyes are hurt by bright light \u2026) and has pallid skin. How many parties, do you think, killed her right then and there? Notably, if killed she comes back more powerful as an evil spirit that possesses the house. Go into a room, get impacted by a trap\/effect, repeat. I hate these gimpy\/DM torture-porn adventures.<\/p>\n

The Mad Chefs of Lac Anchois
\nby Jennifer Stack
\nAD&D
\nLevels 6-9<\/p>\n

A farce of an adventure featuring two cloud giants chefs\/brothers running a restaurant in a famous culinary region of the land. Three giants food critics are on their way soon, and the brothers are serving frog legs. But they captured grippli instead of frogs. They kobold waitresses and ogre mage sommelier run interference for the giants, and they are belligerent if interrupted in the kitchen. Frauds, they have stolen their recipes from a Julia Childs cookbook. It\u2019s clearly meant to be farcical, but I think you could fit into a fey-land adventure, or a nice dungeon-town environment. It IS badly organized though, in room\/key\/description format. Ihe important bits of timeline & interaction should be moved out of the keys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grotto of the Queen by Paul F Culotta & Shari Culotta AD&D Levels 6-9 This is an overly-verbose attack on a sea temple. Seriously, it goes on for at least two page, three if you count some sidebars, in order … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2832,"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-2833","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\/10\/d64.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833","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=2833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2834,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2833\/revisions\/2834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}