{"id":3003,"date":"2016-04-30T07:14:01","date_gmt":"2016-04-30T11:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3003"},"modified":"2016-04-19T12:34:44","modified_gmt":"2016-04-19T16:34:44","slug":"dungeon-magazine-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3003","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #80"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"d80\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fortune Favors the Dead
\nBy Lance Hawvermale
\nAD&D
\nLevels 5-7<\/p>\n

A search for pirate treasure map (and the treasure!) in a spanish\/ren type setting. This reminds me a lot of Hoard of the Dragon Queen\/Rise, in terms of writing style. There\u2019s this aggressive \u201coverview\u201d and appeal to genericism. Lods and lods of text on history and backstory and little to help the DM run the actual game. Tons of bandits and \u00bd orc bandits and orc bandits, and a lot of \u201cPirate Ghost\u201d encounters for the big bads. Most of this is searching for the map and doing quests to get the pieces with the actual treasure locale being mostly glossed over. It\u2019s as if you took a long and rambling and not very good 18th century novel and added stats. Oh. In trying to see if Lance had an ties to Hoard\/Rise I see he\u2019s an english professor …<\/p>\n

The Frothing Miscreant
\nBy Robert A. Van Buskirk
\nAD&D
\nLevels 2-4<\/p>\n

Tinker gnomes. The core of this one isn\u2019t bad, but it suffers from the implementation. Evil gnome cleric animats bird skeletons, sticks some fire traps on them, and sends them off to attack ships from his pirate ship. The hook is a fisherman finding the body of one and figuring it out, then contacting the party for a cut of the loot. The investigation is handled in bullet points, which is fairly terse \u2026 and nice. What follows is an assault on the gnomes estate. It\u2019s mostly in standard room\/key format, which is not the best for something like this. There\u2019s the potential for a large pitched battle, which could be nice, but it\u2019s quite disorganized in how it presents things in and around the estate.<\/p>\n

Challenge of Champions III
\nBy Johnathan M. Richards
\nAD&D
\nAny Level<\/p>\n

This popular series presents a series of puzzle challenges. It\u2019s very theater of the mind: no magic items or spells for your casters, everything is provided for you in scrolls, etc. Each room is more puzzle than anything else, as you try to figure out how to get past it; that\u2019s how it can be for any level. I\u2019m not a fan of these. I like the concept of open-ended rooms and rooms without traditional encounters\/fights\/etc, but I prefer a more natural set up instead of the general \u201croom built for one solution\u201d format that the Challenge of Champions series has. I know the series was very popular though, and was one of the few times, I think, that creative thinking was actvly encouraged. <\/p>\n

Sarfion\u2019s Collection
\nBy Felix Douglas
\nAD&D
\nLevels 7-10<\/p>\n

Side-trek \u2026 with a maggot golem! Not much to this, a MU in a magic store is helping a brain collector collect brains. A couple of NPC\u2019s to interact with, nice \u2026 horror? Set up, I guess. The core concept is worth stealing, but I suspect most of us have already stolen a \u201cbackroom of evil\u201d for many shops. <\/p>\n

A Head for Business
\nBy J.D. Walker
\nAlternity Dark*Matter
\nLevel 3<\/p>\n

Scene based planes train and automobiles, with sandmen showing up and killing folk and the PC\u2019s investigating \u201ctracking them down\u201d on the figurative and literal railroad. Lots of forced combats, which is never a good sign. <\/p>\n

The Trouble with Trillochs
\nBy Peter R. Hopkins
\nAD&D
\nLevels 6-9<\/p>\n

Side-Trek. This packs three encounter areas, several hooks, and an eleven room necromancer lair in to a few pages. The hooks are solid, and one is generally unrelated to the adventure except as a pretext to get the party into the area. It\u2019s got some decent detail, like a stuffed basilisk and a instructions to turn yourself into a shadow demon! That there\u2019s some nice looking loot! I wouldn\u2019t call this a Go To adventure, but it\u2019s better than the usual stuff in Dungeon.
\n The lair and environs feel a bit more alien than most, thanks to pech, galeb-dur, and a xag-yi. Not great, but better than the usual fare.<\/p>\n

The Scar
\nBy Ray Winninger
\nAD&D
\nLevel 1<\/p>\n

This adventure was built from the Dungeoncraft articles in Dragon magazine. The results are mixed. It\u2019s meant as a beginning campaign adventure. The characters start as prisoners of orcs who force them to dig in a temple. The temple has 45 or so rooms. The map is excellent, showing rubble, light sources, and where there are orc guards (and how many) during the day and night. Combined with this is both a daily timeline of how the orcs gaul the slaves around to dig, and then a longer timeline showing what happens, event wise, over eleven days. There\u2019s also a nice little table of random events that can happen each day. The overall design here is pretty good, and open ended, but it has the usual issues with lengthy text clogging up what the DM needs to run the adventure. Beyond this (and the usual genericism of AD&D) I could also quibble with some important \u201cescape\u201d details being mixed into the adventure text. The orcs with a gambling problem, for example. It probably would have been better to summarize the escape means built in, briefly, in a paragraph around the same place the timelines are enumerated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fortune Favors the Dead By Lance Hawvermale AD&D Levels 5-7 A search for pirate treasure map (and the treasure!) in a spanish\/ren type setting. This reminds me a lot of Hoard of the Dragon Queen\/Rise, in terms of writing style. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2997,"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-3003","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\/2016\/04\/d80.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003","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=3003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3004,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003\/revisions\/3004"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}