REVIEWS

I haven't done a review in quite a few months. So, after all this time, why on earth am I reviewing a couple of magazine issues? Well, both Dungeon and Dragon have revamped their formats, their content, and their approach. But, in truth, the real reason goes like this: Lots of people send me things to review. My policy nowadays isn't to review something unless I think it's quite good -- so it's always a recommendation. It's not that I say nice things about everything I get, it's that if I can't give a product high marks, I don't do a review. So when Paizo sent me their new magazines, I looked at them, and really liked them. So I'm going to tell you about them.

(As a caveat, I should mention that I'm a contributor to Dungeon. I write the Dungeoncraft column. It used to be in Dragon. I don't have anything to do with any other part of either magazine, however, and my contribution of the column has nothing to do with this review.)

Covers
You can't judge a book by its cover, but can you judge a magazine? No, of course not. But the new covers are certainly worth a mention. In fact, it's what got my attention right away. The art is wonderful, but that's par for the course. The change is in the presentation. For the last few years, Dragon and Dungeon have looked more and more like standard newsstand magazines. They followed traditional newsstand strategies, including featuring just one (sometimes two) static figures on the cover -- which is to say, not a scene, just a character or characters -- and running lots of text, often printed over the art. Some readers will remember me commenting on this before.

I'm happy to say that as I look at the new Dungeon cover, for example, we see a host of well-rendered characters charging into action toward us through a strange ruin, with no words obscuring them. This cover is sharp and very striking. It looks like something you'd put on your shelf, not something you'd read on the bus and then throw away (and you should save your copies of Dragon and Dungeon, as opposed to most traditional magazines).

Dungeon's Adventures
But let's look at the content, starting with Dungeon. When we open up the magazine, we see that the meat of the issue is adventures, as it always has been. The difference is that the editors are making a specific effort to include a low-level, a mid-level and a high-level adventure in each issue. This strikes me as not only practical from a publishing point of view, but attractive as a reader. Now I know that whatever kind of campaign I'm running at the moment, there's likely to be an adventure in every issue of Dungeon for me. It also means that if I'm running a mid-level campaign right now, when the PCs advance, I can look back through older issues to see if there's anything I want to use. And when I start a new campaign, I could flip through them yet again, looking at the low-level adventures.

Let's look at the adventure format before getting to any of the specifics. Gone is the attempt at making the adventures look like Wizards of the Coast products. The adventures each have their own layout now, and I think that's for the better. For example, the adventures are all in a three-column format rather than two, which I actually think lends itself well to adventures. Each adventure opens with a two-page spread that has a nice piece of art running across both pages and the intro text you need to get started.

As in previous issues, stat blocks for right-out-of-the-book Monster Manual monsters give only hp and refer you to the right page in the MM. This is brilliant. A lot of effort was made in the design of 3rd Edition to make the MM monster stats as usable as possible. Stat blocks are wholly inferior, although obviously a necessary evil for some creatures and NPCs (by their nature, stat blocks are crowded, the information doesn't fall in the same place with each one, and they are full of shorthand and abbreviations that makes them shorter but in the end less user friendly).

Lastly, each adventure comes with a sidebar for scaling the scenario for different levels. Sometimes the suggestions are easy and quick (replace the shambling mound with a troll, and so on), but sometimes they are difficult and time consuming (reduce the levels of all classed creatures by 1 or 2). Also, in this issue, there's an error where the "Scaling the Adventure" sidebar for the first adventure is repeated in the third adventure.

The first of the adventures, for low levels, is called "Mad God's Key," by Jason Bulmahn. This is an adventure set in the City of Greyhawk, but it strikes me as one that could easily take place in any port city. The background is somewhat convoluted, but it all plays into the flow of the adventure, so it's worth it. I'm always thrilled to see an adventure for 1st-level characters -- like this one is -- that doesn't have the PCs going into a dungeon to fight kobolds or other standard 1st-level fare. In other words, it's tough to make an adventure for 1st-level characters where they actually get to do interesting things. This adventure includes a chase across a number of barges on the wharf (in my mind, not enough adventures work chase encounters into the action with nice instructions on how to handle it, deal with obstructions, slippery surfaces, and so on), an infiltration of a thieves' den, some research, and an exciting conclusion in a very memorable (and disgusting) tomb filled with cultists and nasty things. It's a finale that a group of players will remember for a long time.

Now, allow me a bit of a nitpick -- although it's really a personal peeve. "Mad God's Key" continually refers to the PCs as "heroes." "The heroes later hear of the brash theft..." "Hero" is an important word to me, and plenty of PCs in a D&D campaign ain't one. Unless it's in the text of adventure for a scenario or a game (like Champions) where the PCs are indeed always heroes, I think it's inappropriate.

Now, like I said, that's a nickpick. But it relates to my main qualm about the adventure. It hinges on the PCs intervening when they see someone committing a crime. While some might, it would also seem just as easy to do nothing, or to just call for the City Watch. It bothers me that this kind of initial hook might encourage metagame thinking: "Well, clearly we're supposed to get involved here, so let's go get the thieves..."

Of course, if that's my main qualm, it's obviously a pretty good adventure. And it is.

The second adventure, "Torrents of Dread," is a neat little trip down nostalgia boulevard (Dungeon seems to do a fair bit of this lately): a mid-level adventure set in the Isle of Dread. This adventure was written by Greg A. Vaughan with a 10-page overview of the entire island by Gary Holian. The Isle of Dread, which originated in an D&D module from 1981 by David Cook and Tom Moldvay, is a mysterious island with all the trappings: noble but dangerous natives, dinosaurs, zombies, giant beasts, sunken ships, strange fish-men, and so on. The issue even includes a well-rendered -- albeit low on detail -- poster map of the island.

The adventure itself is a fairly straightforward trek across the wilderness to the dungeon crawl at the end, but that's not really a criticism. In fact, I like it. It doesn't have the memorable qualities of "Mad God's Key," but it's pretty solid. It seems pretty well balanced for 6th-level characters and would be fun to use. And the island as a whole provides a wonderful setting for any number of exotic adventures.

The third adventure, "Thirteen Cages," is the ninth part of Dungeon's "Adventure Path" series, but it seems pretty easy to use as a stand-alone. The adventure, written by Chris Thomasson, is for 16th-level characters. "Thirteen Cages" involves demodands, creatures from Carceri, and detailed (for 3rd Edition) in the Fiend Folio. One cool thing about the adventure is that it provides interesting substitution ideas for the demodands if you don't have the Fiend Folio.

The adventure is a race against time, a type of adventure that's difficult to handle for low-level PCs, but the capabilities of 16th-level characters should make the fact that they can't stop to rest only a slight problem. "Thirteen Cages" is basically a dungeon crawl in a setting called the Fiery Sanctum. Although the chambers of the villains' lair are imaginative, as are the villains themselves, I'm a little disappointed that it deals with the advanced capabilities of the high-level PCs (teleportation, divination, etc.) by simply negating them. Sure, there's a story reason for it, and nullifying PC abilities can be interesting sometimes, but it always feels a bit forced. To its credit, the adventure text does anticipate other problems, in particular the PCs using the ruin the adventure spell -- I mean the find the path spell. (People ask me sometimes about things I regret in the 3rd Edition design, and find the path is toward the top of the list. But that's for another time.) The very intelligent and powerful -- and as I said, imaginative -- inhabitants of the Fiery Sanctum are also disappointingly static, with few developmental notes for what they might do other than sit in their chambers and wait for the PCs. In the end, the adventure has a nice section detailing what happens if the PCs succeed, fail, or manage something in between.

Thus, "Thirteen Cages" is good, but it's my least favorite adventure of the three. I'd use it, but I might change a few things.

Dungeon's Articles
So, the very fact that Dungeon has articles at all is one of the new things about the revamp. Breaking down the whole issue, pages 18 to 92 are adventures, pages 93 to 106 are articles and comics, so it's still primarily about the adventures, as it should be. These articles are aimed at DMs, and I think it's a smart idea to put DM material in with the magazine that carries adventures. The articles as a whole are short and snappy, and full of interesting ideas.

The first article is the Dungeoncraft column, and I won't get into that except to tell you that it's the start of a new series for the column, and it begins with things you need to think about before starting a new campaign.

"Lairs with Flair," the second article, is written by Rodney Thompson. This useful idea article offers various suggestions for spicing up encounters by playing around with the environment -- throwing in obstacles, shifting terrain, running water, etc. Good advice.

Next is "Spice Up Your Travel" by Travis Stout. This article takes the various climate/terrain types (forest, desert, swamp, and so on) and provides six different descriptive ideas to give a trek through the area more flavor. It's a decent article that will help DMs get out of the rut of having all their forests be flat plains filled with trees and having all their deserts be flat plains covered with sand.

"Lassiviren the Dark" is by Robert J. Schwalb. This details a powerful assassin that originally appeared in the 1st Edition product Rogues Gallery (I told you Dungeon's been into nostalgia lately). It not only has his history and stats, but lots of suggestions for using him in different campaigns. Neat.

Finally, we have the last-page article by Wil Wheaton called "Wil Save." He talks about the joys of getting a D&D game together with his kids. It's a nicely written article.

All in all, I really like this issue. More importantly, I like the direction the magazine is going. I highly recommend checking this issue out if you weren't going to. Dungeon has always been the industry's best value for your DM dollar (three 20- to 30-page adventures for $7? Hard to argue with -- and that's the newsstand price). Now, in my opinion, Dungeon is better than ever and is nicely focused toward DMs running D&D games.

Next: Dragon #323's new format and contents

Back to Reviews Archive Page / Back to Monte's Home Page