{"id":3389,"date":"2016-12-30T07:21:03","date_gmt":"2016-12-30T12:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3389"},"modified":"2016-12-27T11:21:49","modified_gmt":"2016-12-27T16:21:49","slug":"dungeon-magazine-115","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3389","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #115"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nRaiders of the Black Ice
\nBlackmoor
\nBy Wolfgang Baur
\nLevel 1<\/p>\n

Journey through the Black ice to a fortress to rescue from captured villagers. This is done over eighteen pages, with enough content to fill about five or six \u2026 maybe. It\u2019s got a decent winter vibe, much more so than most winter adventures. From a village fight to worgs attacking a mastadon to a field of frozen corpses, it does a decent job of bringing in a variety of encounters and options for resolution that don\u2019t just involve combat. Sneaking, talking, etc, all are involved. The wordiness though really detracts. When the content is expanded to three of four times \u2026 it makes one pull out the highlighter \u2026 and that\u2019s NEVER a good thing. It\u2019s not necessarily a special adventure, but if it were redone it would be a decent little thing.<\/p>\n

Steel Shadows
\nEberron
\nBy Keith Baker
\nLevel 6<\/p>\n

Creating a setting doesn\u2019t mean you can write a good adventure. This is a pretty classi (IE: shitty) plot based adventure that wants to be an investigation. It contains such wonders as \u201clet the bad guy escape if they catch on too soon\u201d and \u201ceven if they use scry, don\u2019t give them the clues\u201d, as well as \u201cthe DC to interrogate is 50.\u201d Warforged are being killed and the party investigates. The ties to the killer are, essentially, non-existent, until a programmed encounter of a massacre in a bar, and even then it\u2019s a little soft. That\u2019s never good. The DM is routinely instructed to punish the party for good play, with the scry scenario being a good example. If the party thinks to scry, pushes their odds and makes it then they should be given helpful information. Likewise if they capture people to question the DC should NOT be 50 for a run of mill hired thug. They should be rewarded for their interesting and non-combat\/non-linear attempts of actually trying to play D&D instead of a mini\u2019s combat game. The bad guys lair is put behind a secret door and thus the adventure stalls if its not found \u2026 never a good design. Finally, the thing pushes the limits of suspension of disbelief at times. Bad guy creates a bunch of wands of soften earth so he can dig out a lair behind a broom closet. And bad guy is a warforged\/robot. This kind of shit turns a potential Planescape-like interesting gritty environment in to a shit-fest with an adversarial DM. <\/p>\n

Strike on Shatterhorn
\nBy Christopher Perkins
\nLevel 18<\/p>\n

Oh boy. The Shackled City adventure path again. I can\u2019t wait. <\/p>\n

Remember Cauldron, the volcano city? The refugees have all been taken care of easily. Consequence free adventureing, that\u2019s what really embeds an adventure in the parties minds, isn\u2019t it? Knowing that nothing they do matters.<\/p>\n

This is the usual linear dungeon combat dreck. In room one, a bad guy eternally hides behind a low altar, waiting for intruders. Then there\u2019s the will o\u2019 wisp pets up above. Secret doors that you can\u2019t find because they are three inches of plaster and automatically repair themselves after an hour if busted through. Oh, oh, and get this \u201cEach plaster pillar holds a medusa rogue in temporal stasis.\u201d There is,of course, the usual \u201cused to be\u201d and endless background text. This thing has, as far as I can tell, one good sentence out of its bajillion pages. Up above the dungeon, in the surface ruins, are some baboons that get eerily quiet when they see they party. \u201cOnly if attacked do they scatterm in which case they retreat in a strangely orderly, unnervingly silent exodus.\u201d Also, unnerving is a conclusion. It\u2019s telling instead of showing. Strike that word. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing here. Just linear combat, room after room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raiders of the Black Ice Blackmoor By Wolfgang Baur Level 1 Journey through the Black ice to a fortress to rescue from captured villagers. This is done over eighteen pages, with enough content to fill about five or six \u2026 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3386,"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-3389","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\/12\/d115.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389","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=3389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3390,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3389\/revisions\/3390"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}