25 Years Ago...

Alright, we're back with the latest issue of Dungeon magazine. We have five adventures in this one, ranging from 3rd level to 15th, so plenty of variety. The big one (and by big I mean 40+ pages) is elf-centric, or at least drow-centric. Let's get to it. There are a couple of 'Maps of Mystery' here. The first is a mountainous peninsula with a few small islands off the coast. I'd say this should be scaled pretty big, so that this is easily big enough for an entire campaign to take place. Then there's a two-page map of the Halls of Huhueteotl, the Lord of Fire. This is 100% Aztec in nature, complete with step pyramid overlooking a lake of lava. Sure, why not? It wouldn't be too hard to make an interesting adventure with this map. The Harrowing is our first adventure, and it is the aforementioned 'big one'. It's for 15th-level characters, and it's about Lolth's daughter's efforts to take over the Demonweb. Yes, Lolth's daughter. Sure...

So, this is the second of the 3rd edition Dungeon Magazine issues. This one definitely has a peculiar theme to it; nothing is quite what you would expect. I'm going to skip the letter column and editorial and get right to the adventures this time. The first adventure is called "Deep Freeze". This one is for 2nd-level characters, and is 'officially' set in the Theocracy of the Pale in Greyhawk, but it can easily be adapted to any campaign setting, such as the Forgotten Realms, Mystara, or Ravenloft. No, none of those have been adapted to 3rd edition at this point in time, but it's still possible. So, this is yet another 'find a missing person' adventure hook, and this one takes place in winter. There is an insane asylum up in the mountains where the missing people are supposed to have gone. When the party gets there, of course the guy in charge has no idea where they are. This is about as paint-by-numbers as you can get. The smarter play would have been...

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",...