Woontal's page

After all the weeks of competitive competitioness, I find it a little disappointing that the winners don't actually appear anywhere on the Relics of War web-page anymore. The entries are now owned by Paizo, there is really nothing stopping them from using the winner's entries as examples...

If the magazine has a sidebar for - Next Month In Dungeon: Why doesn't the website?

With issue #137 coming out late, will this affect the upcoming issue in any way (and further down the track #139, #140, etc?)

So in every issue of Dungeon that we buy, there is a small column to tell us what's coming up in the next issue...

Why is it not on the website?

*bumping*

Still curious Dungeon bosses....

After a break from writing I've decided to put in another submission to Dungeon. Usually when contacting the lovely people at Dungeon I ask what type of article is in demand at the moment, and the answer is usually what I go for.

This time, however, I was thinking more along the lines of asking EVERYONE. Since we all buy the magazine, why not put a request to see what people would like to see (realistically) within the pages of our favourite mag.

I'm assuming that the needs of Dungeon are similar (it always seems to need higher-level writers, if not feel free to correct me), but I'd like to hear other people's opinions before I put pen to paper...

I was reading a recent article by Skip Williams that read:

Other Options While Pinning an Opponent

Here are a few optional maneuvers for use against a foe you've pinned.

Toss Your Foe: Make an opposed grapple check as a melee attack. If you succeed, you can literally pick up your foe (provided you can lift your foe's weight). Make a Strength check; if your result is at least 10, you toss your foe 5 feet. For every 5 points your Strength check result exceeds 10, you toss your foe another 5 feet, to a maximum of 25 feet.

So given this interpretation, would the size modifiers of a creature affect this roll, and would creatures with Supernatural flying abilities be able to resist the force of the throw (assuming that natural flyers would not be able to manuever into correct flying stance in time)?

I'm a big fan of snatching dragons throwing PC fighters into PC mages, so I'm wondering about hit rolls, ranges, and so on...

One of the somewhat uncommon topics that I read about is the use of music in people's sessions (not saying that the actual event is rare, it just doesn't grab that much magazine space).
I find myself sometimes using music (usually in the last few sessions of a campaign) for atmosphere, or when they encounter musical characters (anyone remember the Dungeon module with the singing Troll? Genius...).
The recent thread of 1001 Adventure ideas got me thinking, with music being a relatively common appearance in some games, and with a Bard being a base class, why is it that Dungeon has not published an extensive musical adventure?
With different events in the adventure suggesting music to play in the encounter would be an easy and cheap way to do it (without supplying a CD which would no doubt cost a fortune), couldn't it be simple to have an all-singing, all-dancing adventure ala Buffy/Xena/Lexx/god knows how many other shows? With multiple songs to choose from for a scene so that the DM may have access to at least one, this could be a unique adventure that everyone could get into. And you can't tell me that that half-dragon cleric/fighter of Hextor can't belt out a tune or two....
I'd love to hear what people think of the idea, and also what the Powers That Be think of the validity of the concept.
Crivens.

After reading all of the installments of the Adventure Path series (bar the finale, still waiting for it in Australia) I seem somewhat uninspired.
Initially the propsect of following an entire story/campaign through to completion appealed to me, recently only a handful of modules supplied a storyline that existed beyond one adventure. But as I read each adventure one-by-one, I felt a little, cheated...
Stay with me, I can hear a multitude of people screaming injustice as I condemn a storyline which they loved dearly. In fact many segments I enjoyed greatly myself, but again many points soured me a little.
It seems that the Adventure Path is hardly a original idea, if fact creating a unique storyline is very difficult, especially to the level required within Dungeon. But have the designers fell into their own traps? In the writers guidelines it says: "There are many more overused plot devices that might seem new and fresh to you, but that we see many times each month."
Does this include: beginning an adventure with a kidnapping (#97 - Life's Bazaar), the destruction of an artifact (#114 - Thirteen Cages), or the invasion of the prime plane by demons (um...just list all of them here)?
I'm far from complaining about the storyline, I find it quite good and most of the individual adventures are very well introduced. But the fact that the entire story is based upon the premise of releasing a Demon Lord? Is that not the most cliched idea of them all?
Perhaps I'm preaching to the wrong crowd, but I'd hoped that the writers that I'd come to enjoy would create a unique storyline that would put all of us DMs to shame. Need I mention the Demon Lord again? *sigh*
The concept was fantastic! The delivery was good...The background was poor...The plot?...ewwww...
I have read that in Adventure Path 2 the storyline will be a lot clearer from the beginning. Fantastic! Could you also look into a few other points:
-> If you're going to set the adventure around an exciting locale like a volcano, don't rest on your laurels or follow a predictable path (the volcano erupting), we can do that at home and without your help, for free.
-> NPCs. I liked them, they were very pretty numbers. I even eventually got a feeling that they played a purpose in the plot apart from simply showing the PCs where to go and what to kill.
-> Bad guys. Get some. The Cagewrights were quite cool, had an excellent name, and apparently let any one with a sufficent Challenge Rating to join. A Tattooed Monk? What did she bring to the conspiracy? Dress sense? Early in the adventure the 'bad guys' noticed the PCs, and attempted to deal with them. Obviously not realising they had several dozen spells that would've worked quite well to 'erase' them. Pick bad guys with a little more vision and appropriate abilities, or make the nice grunts simple minions.
-> A World. Get one. I realise that the adventures are designed to simply 'fall' into any campaign world easily, so everyone can enjoy it. But the same time it takes the DM to drop it into his world will not change if you simply say: 'It's in Greyhawk/FR/Ebberon/Dark Sun/Mystara/Blackmoor' If we want to play it, we'll do the ground work. You have a fantastic mythology in the existing worlds, allow them to grow as each story is created for them. Create less 'Stand Alones' and build on the stories that you already have...

Let me reiterate. I enjoyed the Adventure Path for what it was, an experiment. The story was good, some of the locales were good, it was good. But it was cliched, and I hope that DMs as a whole recognise the need for the writers on a project such as this provide ground-breaking ideas and plots.