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 Recent Posts
Great content, low price, convenient access ... what's not to 'respond' to? So ... how long 'til early issues of Dragon and Dungeon start showing up in this format? ;) -The Gneech
Well, once upon a time I pledged to start doing little capsule-reviews of each issue myself; I generally seem to get them about a week or so after the early birds here (just got mine today), however, so bear with me if it's old news. This is just a "first impressions as I look through it" review, not a detailed analysis. Cover: Githyanki vs. Tiefling! Nifty. :) Githyanki always get my attention. From the Editor: There's a neat thing here about a web supplement, but I can't see it around that humongous eye-bleeding ad on the opposite page. Yikes. Oh well, gotta pay the bills! Prison Mail: Random sidebar about Dungeon #122. Wow, it feels like it was just a few issues ago! Um ... why is this here? Given the world of forums (such as this one), I'm not surprised that actual paper letters aren't coming in the way they once did, but I've also noticed that you print interesting forum posts sometimes too. Three Faces of Evil: Nifty painting! The thing in the fountain looks like a cross between a girallon and Kali ... with a bit of hook horror on the side. Six arms ... Hextor motif. Cool! It's also nifty that this is a "sequel" campaign to the Shackled City. The adventure is full of neat ideas ... and The Faceless One is a wonderfully creepy villain. I don't need a 3rd level adventure at the moment, but the Age of Worms adventure path certainly looks like a promising candidate for my next campaign. Is that really a two-headed dire weasel??? Oh, no, it's two single-headed dire weasels scrunched together. Well, that's cool too. I think if I ever run this, I'll go with the two heads tho. Pit of the Fire Lord: Er, another arc adventure? I've posted elsewhere that having 2/3 of the meat of the magazine be pieces of arcs is a risky venture IMO. I like the arcs a lot, but I don't want them to take over. Seems like a solid enough adventure at a cursory glance, but nothing really jumps out at me about it. I like that it's tailored to Eberron, but that also limits its immediate usability for me, as I'm running a Greyhawk game at the moment. Maybe some future campaign! Seekers of the Silver Forge: Well, well! Here I was just last week requesting some higher-level stuff, and here it is! A whole adventure about psionics underwater, how cool is that? Hey, it's a sequel to "Death of Lashimire," too! Awesome, I'm planning to use that one! I'll have to slide this into my own "adventure path." I'll have to bump it up to 17th level (the only open slots left in my campaign plan are 17th level and higher), but that shouldn't be too hard. A few more hit dice here, another level of soulknife there, no problem! I particularly like that it is a big, "fantastic" adventure, rather than the same old dungeon catacomb with More Bigger Monsters. Besides, any adventure with the phrase "zombie plesiosaur" in it, has gotta be good! Gamer's Guide: Hmm, hmm, payin' the bills. I notice the Paizo ad doesn't list any prices. I bet that beholder doesn't come cheap, assuming there actually are any in stock. Still, it's fun to shop. :) Dungeoncraft: I love these things. This particular one would have been twice as useful to me two weeks ago as I was doing some heavy-duty campaign planning, but that's okay, it's still useful now. I'll mine this one for ideas at leisure. The Cast: Seneschals and Majordomos! Again, something always useful. Into the "instant NPCs" folder they go! In fact, I have a castellan-shaped hole in my campaign that might just be perfectly filled by one of these guys. Thanks! The Dungeon: Random potion stuff! Fun, although I doubt I'll ever actually use it. The Journey: Interesting food for thought here. Nothing immediately useful, but worth remembering for the future. Downer: "Have fun killing humans." Hee. :) It has started growing on me a bit, but I think that some of that is because the writing has gotten stronger. Last Page: A good cover always deserves a second viewing, without copy cluttering it up! ;) All in all, a pretty good issue. :) Probably very little I'll use right away, with the possible exception of one of the "cast" characters, but lots of things I might want to use in the future, especially the Silver Forge adventure. Only real downside, as I say, is the multiple "piece of a larger arc" adventures. After all, if I'm running the Age of Worms, I'm not likely to be running Shards of Eberron, right? But if they were generic adventures, I could easily use them both. Thanks! I'll post another one next month. -The Gneech
I love the linked adventures and I think they're a great idea. :) (The Istivin arc in particular has a reserved spot in my campaign sometime later this year.) Here's the giant HOWEVER that always shows up here: Mr. Jacobs is entirely on the right track with not wanting to go overboard. I would suggest no more than one arc adventure in any given issue. The modular, "drop this into your game TONIGHT" nature of Dungeon is one of its most useful aspects to me, and that takes a big hit when the adventure that's the right level for my group in this issue, is #4 of 6 from a long arc. So, statistically, if there are three adventures per issue, and there are two "path" adventures, there's a 66% chance that a particular adventure is going to be hamstrung this way. Having one path scenario per issue gives you the best of both worlds, IMO. The coolness of a path scenario, and the utility of stand-alones. -The Gneech
My campaign, roughly, has gone/will go something like this: SO FAR:
--at this point my game hit a hiccup, and was "rebooted" with everyone moved back to 4th level-- *Vanity (#93)
PLANNED FOR THE FUTURE:
The scenarios will be tweaked to fit the party's level ("Buzz On the Bridge," as written, would be very dull for a 6th level party, ferinstance), and as we near the end of the campaign, there'll be a lot more homebrew mixed in. (The party is in Bissel, fending off Evard's army of necromancers, and there'll be a lot of stuff that ties directly in to that in between.) -The Gneech
I wonder if Paizo are allowed to flesh out Greyhawk beyond the Flanaess? Highly doubtful.Let us hope that proves not to be the case.... Well, it's a tricky thing with Greyhawk, 'cause part of the premise of the setting is that it's all broad strokes, leaving the fiddly details for each GM to fill in on their own. FR is the super-detail setting. -The Gneech
As my campaign has progressed, I've come to really depend on Dungeon. About half of my campaign has been run more-or-less off the shelf from Dungeon magazine, with suitable alterations to fit my particular corner of Greyhawk. I've now also started using it as a campaign planning tool: I downloaded the 3rd Edition Adventure Index from 3d6.org, sorted it by level, and started lining up adventures that I can start working towards. It's been an eye-opening experience ... two weeks ago, I was wondering just what the heck to do with the next session, but now I have about five 6th-level adventures that would fit just right and I have to figure out a way to choose among them. I've created my own rough "Adventure Path" from this, looking a progression something like: "Cradle of Madness" (Issue 87, 6th level)
...and so on, with the "City of Shadows" arc having a nice, solid spot at 11th-12th. However, I have noticed that there is an effective ceiling of choices in Dungeon after 16th level. Since issue 82, there have been NO 17th-level adventures, three 18th, and one each of 19th, 20th, and 21st -- many of which were the climax to Shackled City. So my request is for a few more solid stand-alone adventures in the 17th-20th block! I won't need them right away, mind you -- my campaign is still at 6th level. ;) But I figure if I make the request now, there's a better chance they'll be around when it comes time for me to start the heavy-duty planning for that part. Meanwhile, keep up the great work! And thanks. -The Gneech
This past weekend, I finished running "Totentanz" from Issue #90, and I thought I'd post my thoughts on it for those who were interested. My game is set in Greyhawk, specifically in Bissel, and this adventure came right on the heels of "Vanity" from an earlier issue. At the end of that adventure, two characters had suffered level drains from the spectre of Dorl Tavyani and one was dominated by Skullcrusher, the evil, intelligent club. However, he had a problem: between the negative levels inflicted on him by the spectre, and the negative levels inflicted by picking up an opposite-alignment item, he should drop dead on the spot. I decided this was no fun, and instead had it be that every time he picked up the club, he passed out. And because I didn't want the characters to have to worry about permanent level loss (I don't think any of us could have taken them being fourth level again), I ruled that Tavyani's peculiar drain could not be shrugged off, but also would not be permanent if they could find a restoration spell. Thus, they were searching for a cleric, and given how undead-heavy Totentanz was, I put an NPC in the town to join their group for the duraction of the adventure. The module took three sessions of roughly four hours each; combat, while present, was minimal and generally not very taxing to a group of six 5th-level characters. This suited everyone fine, after the pounding they all took in "Vanity." The first part of Totentanz as written has the characters travel to the town of Luzern through a handful of villages, picking up rumors, and occasionally having random encounters. I discarded all of this, and got the characters to Luzern by chasing their mentally-dominated member, who had fled the group, dragging the club on a rope behind him to avoid passing out. I also inserted an encounter that ties to my long-range campaign plot, which isn't worth going into here. Instead of a remote mountain town, I moved Luzern to the edge of "The Burning," a section of Bissel that was devastated by the war with Ket. THINGS THAT WORKED: Overall, I was pleased with how it went. Alas, the actual "Dance of the Dead" part of the adventure never came up -- when the characters learned what it was, they made a point of getting the heck out of town at night. The creepy ambience of the skeleton farmers in the fields, the skeleton townies going about their business, and of course the skeleton innkeeper serving them empty alemugs made a nice, Halloweeny atmosphere. Setting the Wizard's Keep as the only thing across the river was a brilliant stroke on the designer's part -- since it contained most of the big clues, making it be the obvious choice of something to check out right away managed to get the players the info they needed without hamfisting them into it. I also liked the little snippets of Luzern history (the suggested background of Lord Bohort and the river nypmh, reflected in the town fountain and the shrine, for instance); that made Luzern seem like a real place, rather than Generic Fantasy Village #1047. The strength in this adventure is really in the flavor text. The best moment in the thing, actually, came in the cellar of the wizard's keep. After coming up with creative ways to get past the lightning-floor trap, they encountered the gray ooze in the well, and decided it would be a handy way to get rid of Skullcrusher the evil club. In a bit of inspiration, I had the ooze absorb the club and undergo a metamorphosis into a _fiendish_ gray ooze, which burst out of the well and attacked them. (Only in D&D will you hear a phrase like "The fiendish ooze attempts to Smite Good on Dragor!") THINGS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER: I've never been a fan of forced-perspective exploded maps; I much prefer good old-fashioned flat maps of the "Keep On the Borderlands" variety. I eventually broke down and copied the maps over onto my own graph paper. While doing so, I added a walled courtyard and some servants' quarters to Luzern Keep to make it a little more interesting than just a big square block of stone. The writing was very scattered -- the contents of "The Book of Dancing Death" were detailed in the Wizard's Keep, for instance, even though the book itself was located at the Bridge Shrine. The description of Lord Bohort's sword was similarly buried somewhere in the text of the castle, even though the sword itself was hidden in the town temple. There were lots of examples of this, unfortunately. Background information being scattered through the adventure is annoying but workable; stats for items or key information about characters need to be where you encounter that item or character. OVERALL SCORE: I'd give this one 3.5 out of 5. It's a nice, solid adventure, if a bit pedestrian (driving the Wraith King out of Luzern was fun, but hardly epic). The not-so-great maps were outweighed by the strong sense of "place" given by specific details of local color. If the item stats had been WITH the items, and the whole thing been a bit more organized, it would have earned a 4. -The Gneech
Mere words cannot express how jazzed I am about this. I'd also like to extend kudos to Dungeon for the high level of representation Greyhawk has received compared to WotC's overall tendency to avoid it. (Yeah, I know, "what avoid, it's the default, yadda yadda." If it's so default, why doesn't, say, Sunless Citadel suggest a location in the Flaeness? But I digress.) In short, Greyhawk Goooood. :) -The Gneech
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