{"id":3056,"date":"2016-05-28T07:16:15","date_gmt":"2016-05-28T11:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3056"},"modified":"2016-05-22T10:27:04","modified_gmt":"2016-05-22T14:27:04","slug":"dungeon-magazine-84","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3056","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #84"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"d84\"<\/a>
\nThe Harrowing
\nBy Monte Cook
\nD&D
\nLevel 15<\/p>\n

While wandering in the forest you see some dead birds. Following them leads to a cave complex, and then a gate to the demonweb. This is quite a long adventure, taking up 44 of this issues 120 pages. It is, essentially, one long hack-fest. Enter room. Fight monster. Go to next room. The maps for the two areas (the caves and demonweb) have some interesting features, with ceiling and floor entrances and exits, but probably not enough to recommend them. Fight some drow. Fight some Slaad. Fight some drow who are fighting some slaad. A special prize for Monte: I believe this is the first example, in Dungeon anyway, of the shitty linear 3e adventure. Some people really like this one. You should not play D&D with those people. <\/p>\n

Demonclaw
\nBy Peter R. Hopkins
\nD&D
\nLevel 5<\/p>\n

This may be the dictionary definition of Wall of Text. It goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph, with little to save the poor DM from misery. It features such classics as: <\/p>\n

\u201c2. Closets. These rooms are identical. Each has several hooks affixed to interior walls. Just inside the doorway sits a low shelf designed to hold boots and shoes. An everburning torch is mounted to the wall opposite the door. Both chambers are empty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is a fine description of a boring closet. It adds nothing and nor do many of the room descriptions. Fourteen rooms of a wizard’s tower. It provides stats for a dead body on the floor, that will not come back to life in any way during this boring snoozefest. There\u2019s nothing in this wizard\u2019s tower that feels remotely wizard like. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

The Dying of the Light
\nBy Chris Doyle
\nD&D
\nLevel 10<\/p>\n

Nice flavor to the complication\/premise in this. Seven vampires live in a castle. You have from Sunup to Sundown to kill them all. At Sundown they awake and exact their revenge, for the parties raid, on the small town nearby. The parties hook arrives by a winged cat with an arrow in its ass \u2026 a nice addition. It\u2019s got good general DM advice, a nice order of battle for how the castle reacts to incursions as well as nice overview sections to get oriented to things. A good map supports the adventure, giving the party non-linear opportunities. Good \u201cclassics\u201d like the well having a trap door at the bottom, and so on. Also, winged owlbears and a giant undead dinosaur in the lake in front of the castle. This is a great example of an otherwise good adventure being ruined by form. The ideas are wonderful, but marred by the slavish devotion to rigor in description. Boring read-aloud unrelated to the interesting things in the room. Wordy DM text. Full creature stats and longish references to where in the DMG to find data \u2026 repeated. I like this adventure a lot, but it needs a good photocopy and highlight, or a strong rewrite to focus the DM on the important stuff. Fun.<\/p>\n

Dungeon of the Fire Opal
\nBy Jonathan Tweet
\nD&D
\nLevel 10<\/p>\n

Tweet is probably an ok DM. He\u2019s not a good writer. This is the 3e example dungeon, which is also the 1e example dungeon. You know, the one with the scroll in the water skeleton and the platform secret door? Tweet is prolific with advice in this. Some advice is good. It\u2019s general theme might be \u201cdon\u2019t let the rules constrain you.\u201d Being generous with clues, how to let the party find the choke point secret door, warning that a dangerous encounter is up ahead, and so on. He also gives this sort of advice in some of the rooms, and it’s here that things go a bit south; it gets tedious. It turns it into almost a n00b dungeon, for a DM that\u2019s never played D&D before. In that respect it MIGHT be fine, but it also falls in the old trap of tedious text. Some of the rooms are QUITE long while most contain boring read-aloud and more boring DM text, especially of the \u201cwhat this room used to be that now no longer has relation to the adventure\u201d kind of description. Trivia not useful for the DM running the adventure. It\u2019s also pretty boring. \u201cOnce this room was a well stocked larder \u2026\u201d Ok hooks and a pretext of rumors are appreciated, but in the end it’s just a boring dungeon with not much interesting going on. <\/p>\n

Armistice
\nBy Peter Vinogradov
\nD&D
\nLevel 7<\/p>\n

More of a sandbox adventure. A valley is presented along with the various enemy commanders who make up the small companies present. They are at war with each other. There are a couple of (generic) villages in the valley, non-aligned. There are some werewolves running amok, freed by a rogue commander on one side. The party comes into this mess after being hired, outside the valley, but the two lords the troops report to. They have made peace and need someone to go tell their troops. Thus the adventure involves wandering the valley to find the various troops\/commanders and convincing them the war is over. And dealing with the werewolf threat making things harder. It\u2019s got some good high-level window dressing, like the daughter of one lord being married to another to seal the peace, and women talking about looking forward to their husbands return, and so on. After a read-through to get an overview then most of the adventure boils down to just the DM\u2019s map and a couple of reference pages, kindly provided for the DM. The adventure could have used a few more \u2026 specifics? Ideas? about werewolf tactics\/flavor and maybe even soldier flavor. That would have pushed this one over the top into Strong Recommend territory. Decent premise, good reference material, some bits of flavor. An ok adventure setup that will unfold as the party wills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Harrowing By Monte Cook D&D Level 15 While wandering in the forest you see some dead birds. Following them leads to a cave complex, and then a gate to the demonweb. This is quite a long adventure, taking up … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3055,"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-3056","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\/05\/d84.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056","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=3056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3057,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056\/revisions\/3057"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}