25 Years Ago...

Behold, the first 3rd edition issue of Dungeon Magazine! And, to my complete lack of surprise, these are all low-level adventures, the highest one being for 3rd-level characters. My copy lacks the included map, but I have no interest in running a Sherwood adventure anyway, so I'm not going to sweat it. And I'm not going to review the Sherwood adventure, either; I'll focus on the three that are generic enough to use in almost any campaign instead. The magazine starts with an editorial talking about how to make a campaign stand out with 'an edge'. It references the Praemal campaign , Monte Cook's 3e playtest campaign, and talks about how to use the new features of the game such as monsters with character classes to present new challenges to the PCs. And the editor (Christopher Perkins) talks about his own weird campaign which involves symbiotic plants everywhere. Hey, whatever works. D&D is flexible like that. The first adventure is "Evil Unearthed",...

The Sunless Citadel  is the first published module for the 3rd edition game. It's for 1st-level characters, with a suggested party of four. It has a good reputation in the past quarter-century, and from what I understand, it was redone for the 5th edition of the game (which I have never seen, nor will I look for it). The introduction says that a copy of the Monster Manual  would be useful...but it hasn't been released yet. Fortunately, there aren't a lot of different monsters in the module, and they are all statted out in the back of this 32-page book. The inside covers contain the two maps of the dungeon, as well as a trio of smaller maps that give the important locations for the adventure. Which are the town of Oakhurst and the titular citadel. There's also a cutaway map that shows how the levels of the dungeon are stacked, which is useful and something that wasn't often presented in earlier editions. So, the premise is that this citadel used to be above ground bu...

It's time for another Map-a-Week before we dive into Dragon #275. This week's map is  Undersea Caverns . This is a set of six underwater locations that could be linked together in some ways, although I wouldn't care to try. I would likely use them as individual locations, particularly the sunken ship. And the bottom left looks more like a vertical map than a flat horizontal one with the water flooding areas 40 through 43. So, these would be separate for me. I'm going to have to hold off on stocking these until next month, since I don't have much in the way of aquatic monsters to work with until the Monster Manual  arrives. So, we jump to Dragon Magazine #275, which, as you can see from the above picture, is about warriors and combat. The issue starts with an editorial from the almighty Gygax, who talks about how the style of play has changed over the course of a quarter-century of game play. His conclusion? It hasn't changed all that much. Okay, then. I would te...

I suppose it would have made a bit more sense to do this before I did the Living Greyhawk Journal entry. Ah, well. The best-laid plans of mice and men, as they say. Or does anyone still say that? Probably not; nobody reads anymore. So why am I doing this? Anyway, the Gazetteer was the first campaign product for 3rd edition, released even before the Monster Manual . It's a short, 32-page book with a couple of pull-out maps that give a brief overview of the default 3rd edition setting, aka Greyhawk. I'm going to start with the maps. For some reason, two of the maps are identical, showing the same region of the Domain of Greyhawk. But first, there's a full map of the Flanaess, from Blackmoor to Hepmonaland. I can't help but compare it to the classic and rightly-famous Darlene maps from the original Greyhawk Folio (1980) and World of Greyhawk Boxed Set (1983), and this doesn't compare at all. Whereas those maps were poster-sized, this is just a fold-out on one side. T...

Okay, so this is the first 'official' issue of the Living Greyhawk Journal. This one is a 32-page magazine that covers quite a few more things than issue #0 did. We start with an announcement about the start of the Living Greyhawk Campaign, which lots of people attended at Gen Con and thoroughly enjoyed. I mentioned my feelings about the campaign and its regional restrictions in the entry on issue #0, so I won't go into that again. Instead, I'm going to look at the Living Greyhawk stuff in terms of its actual Greyhawk content, and seeing how it matches up with what I remember from back in the day. So, first up is Places of Mystery, which discusses a few interesting places that can be found around the Flanaess. The first is the Belching Vortex of Leuk-O (he of the Mighty Servant of older D&D lore), which is located in the Hestmark Highlands. It's a black membrane set against a sheer cliff face on one of the mountains in the area, surrounded by a barren wasteland ...

At last, we have reached the part of the DMG  that matters most to players: Magic Items. And there are a lot of them. They are divided up into nine categories: Armor and Shields, Weapons, Potions, Rings, Rods, Scrolls, Staffs, Wands, and Wondrous Items (which used to be called Miscellaneous Magic, but people don't talk like that anymore). We are given a discussion about handling magic items in the game, as in placing them, how characters ID them, how they look, and how they are used. As with so much of this new ruleset, everything is codified and explained in detail. There are limits on what can be worn (you can't wear three magic cloaks at the same time), which was common back in the day, although of course people often ignored those rules or found ways around them. I'm sure that won't happen in this edition, though. Now we come to the types of bonuses. I like this section because it differentiates between different types of bonuses and how they interact. The basic rul...

Okay, so now we get to look at the real reason people go on adventures: The Rewards. This chapter covers experience points, treasure, and other rewards. It's another short one, so let's jump right in. First, XP. This is how you level up. I've already seen the basics of the XP system in the 2000 Survival Kit in the back of the Player's Handbook . The system is basically unchanged in the DMG. First of all, every encounter has a Challenge Rating. Monsters, NPCs, and traps all have CRs which indicate how tough they are to overcome, and how many XP the party receives from overcoming them. Note that XP for treasure is no longer a thing. That's a big part of the old system removed, but on the other hand, leveling up is a lot faster now, and the rules suggest that characters should be advancing roughly one level per adventure now. Which is going to shorten campaigns, since if you're reaching the highest levels of play after only twenty or so sessions, you're not goi...

Another short chapter, this one discusses World-Building. This is a pretty important topic for long-running campaigns, so I'm surprised it's so short. Ah, well...more room for magic items, I suppose. So, there are two philosophies about world-building in D&D. The first is to start small; this is the 'inside out' method here. Basically, you just work on what you need to get started; a home base like a village or a small town, a little bit of a wilderness around it, and a dungeon to get started. Tons of campaigns have started out like this. As the characters get experience and explore more of the campaign world, you add to it as needed, never going past what the characters need to have available. There's no point in writing up what happens on the other side of the mountain range if the PCs don't even go there, right? The advantage to the 'inside-out' method is that it requires less work on the part of the DM, and the players can help develop the world ...

  Chapter 5 is all about Campaigns. As all DMs know, a campaign is a connected series of adventures; sometimes those connections are very tenuous, sometimes they are as serial as a modern TV mini-series. You can create your own, or use a pre-published campaign; we'll be looking at the first such published campaign for 3e later this month. Some games don't run as campaigns; they're just a series of adventures that have no connection except the players themselves; they might not even use the same characters from game to game. But most people do play in campaigns, even if it's a short-term deal. Campaigns need to be maintained by the DM, and input from the players can be very helpful in this regard. To run a well-organized campaign, you need consistency, calendars and timekeeping, and a reactive environment. These factors all keep the campaign running smoothly. You also want to build on the past; NPCs might be recurring characters, the PCs might form relationships with tow...

We interrupt our walkthrough of the 3rd edition Dungeon Master's Guide  to bring you this important message. Okay, it's just another map, this one of more ruins. And this one looks a lot more connectable than the previous ruins and castle map. This one is called Ruins 2 . The tag suggests it could be dwarven ruins or the home of drow. Well, it's neither of those in the Tasiri campaign setting. Instead, these are the Cursed Catacombs. Since I just finished Chapter 4 of the Dungeon Master's Guide , which discusses how to randomly stock a dungeon, guess what? I'm going to randomly stock this dungeon. I'm going to use the random tables for doors and for room contents. And I'm going to make this dungeon three separate levels for encounter purposes; the first part will be a 5th-level dungeon, the second part a 6th-level, and the third a 7th-level dungeon. I'll link the three together into one extensive network that can be further expanded at a later time if ne...

Yeesh...another lengthy chapter. But then, this book is 256 pages long, and the first chapter was only 20 or so pages. So yeah, they're all going to be long, I guess. Anyway, this chapter is about adventures, specifically how to create them and make them interesting for players. Away we go! So there are two basic types of adventures: Site-based adventures (such as the Tomb of Horrors or the Keep on the Borderlands), and Event-based adventures (Dragonlance, especially the 2nd adventure, Dragons of Flame). My preference has always been site-based, but then I grew up reading the old dungeon modules which were almost entirely site-based up until the aforementioned Dragonlance appeared. Site-based adventures can be static, where the only thing that changes is the bodies left in the wake of the adventurers, and dynamic, where things are constantly in motion regardless of what the PCs are doing. It's important to know how to motivate the players into doing the adventure, so make sure ...