{"id":3608,"date":"2017-05-13T07:15:39","date_gmt":"2017-05-13T11:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3608"},"modified":"2017-05-10T12:13:48","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T16:13:48","slug":"dungeon-magazine-134","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3608","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine #134"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nHome Under the Range
\nBy Michael Kortes
\nLevel 3<\/p>\n

A linear \u201cunderdark\u201d escort adventure with a farcical pretext. The party is charged with herding giant beetles through the underdark from one location to another. Five encounters later they reach their destination, currently the site of a pitched battle. Along the way you meet stone giants bowling, and three ambushes, all the while trying to keep the loses of the beetles low. I\u2019s linear, and essentially a series of set pieces with the generally hated \u201cescort mission\u201d ltag attached to it. And yet \u2026 I have a fondness for the absurd, or, maybe, the ALMOST absurd. This is running right up close to the line. Generally I like my DM pretexts normal and my players to do the wacky shit, like come up with plans that say \u201cI have the perfect plan! First we need forty giant beetles \u2026\u201d Too much from the DM and the games in danger of Paranoia ZAP territory. But this one? I don\u2019t know. Something may have triggered my Personal Preference O\u2019Meter, or I\u2019m in a weird mood today. <\/p>\n

It does get in and out in only about twelve pages, with half page art\/maps on most that\u2019s not a bad page count by Dungeon standards. It also has a hook I like. 3e-era players are looking for masterwork weapons at low levels. Sending the players to the dwarf hold and herding the beetles is a nicely little integrated response to the players wants\/needs. THIS is the way plot os developed in D&D. Not by the DM but in response to what the players want. \u201cWe need\/want this thing.\u201d Well Mr and\/or Ms Player, you can go get it here \u2026 Player driven action. (Even if it does fall in to the \u201cthen why don\u2019t the dwarves herd them\u201d sin of \u201ccan\u2019t be bothered.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Madness Followed
\nBy Kevin Carter
\nLevel 9<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the wrong way to do things. Like this. It\u2019s a King in Yellow\/Yellow Sign themed adventures, with a group of travelling bards performing the play and turning villages in to aberration-monster zones. You visit a village and get attacked by monsters. You visit a town where the town center has gone to hell. You visit a city where the play is being performed in a playhouse. End. It relies on the party being do gooders. It has a one-page description of a NPC that somehow you are supposed to absorb and run, full of the usual nonsense that doesn\u2019t need to be there because it has no impact on the adventure.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of nice spots. The middle combat, the town, has the town barricading off the town center, keeping the madnes-creatures trapped there. The whole \u201ctown in chaos\u201d, barricades, zombie apoc thing is an appealing concept, although they don\u2019t really do much with it here beyond hearing things beyond the barricade. Too much tell and not enough show. <\/p>\n

The first encounter, the village, has a manor home you can search. This is an abstracted manor home search. Roll your search check and the DM will give you a piece of information. I\u2019m interested in methods other than \u201croom\/key\u201d format for other types of actions. Room\/Key works great for exploration. The whole Mind-Map thing works great for social environments, as does presenting things in tabular form. The question of \u201care there other formats for other adventure types\u201d is one I find interesting. Is there a better way to present investigations? The method in this adventure, a search check with the DM then feeding information, seems too abstracted. It reduces an \u201cAh Ha!\u201d moment to a simple die roll. Room\/Key format may be cumbersome for this sort of thing, but just listing the \u201cimportant\u201d rooms and what someone can find in it would seem to be both better than the die roll and the room\/key. It preserves the player agency, eliminates the \u201call D&D elements are die rolls\u201d nonsense, and can be relatively dense\/terse in presentation.<\/p>\n

FInally, the hooks fall in to two types, both of which I find interesting. In one the players are almost inquisitors for the church of St Cuthbert. That takes care of the \u201cdo gooder\u201d motivation. The other two are variations on the \u201cDying fan gets to watch Star Wars early\u201d theme. Please go find the players, my favorite, I want to see one last time before I die, blah blah blah. It\u2019s stupid, but I would TOTALLY ham this up, with pajamas, posters, drinking cups, etc. <\/p>\n

Into the Worm Crawl Fissure
\nBy James Jacobs
\nLevel 19<\/p>\n

Age of Worms adventure path, the second to last one. The party wander around three adventure locations, then \u201cexplore\u201d a Kyuss shrine and fight the Kyuss herald: the dragolich. There is something going on in this adventure, but man is it a mess. There\u2019s supposed to be a ghost, split in to three parts I think, that you can reunite to get help against the dracolich. I\u2019m pretty sure there\u2019s a vision the party has when they arrive at the site, which leads them to the first part, which leads to the other two. Those are the three adventure locales you can explore. It\u2019s presented on a kind of small regional map with nine locations on them. But only a couple are actually detailed. For example, there\u2019s the lair of a dragon from the last adventure, almost certainly dead now (because of the players.) That\u2019s all you get. Why include it? If you\u2019re not going to to do anything with it then what does it add to the adventure? This being Pathfinder, errr, 3.5, the state blocks frequently stretch to a full page, Combine that with all the background nonsense and the \u201cused to\u201d and \u201clike to relax here\u201d sorts of stuff that creates the text overload and you\u2019ve got a mess. Better yet, the locations on the map don\u2019t actually relate to locations presented in the adventure. So the map is labeled 1 through 9. The overview location page is labeled 1 through 9. The ACTUAL adventure locales are Part 1, Part 2, and so on, and you only know which witch is which by reading DEEP in to the text. This would have been so much better if 90% of the text were trimmed. Would it be good? I don\u2019t know. Kyuss worms. Pools of slime, Hydras & chimeras, crazy lich, friendly ghost \u2026 it\u2019s got the basic elements. A special callout to the dracolich treasures. A little overly described in places, but a scandalous dress, a nice violin, a large drinking horn emblazoned with runes and carvings of dead dragons. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Home Under the Range By Michael Kortes Level 3 A linear \u201cunderdark\u201d escort adventure with a farcical pretext. The party is charged with herding giant beetles through the underdark from one location to another. Five encounters later they reach their … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3607,"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-3608","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\/2017\/04\/d134.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608","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=3608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3609,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608\/revisions\/3609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}