Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 97/156: Mar/Apr 2003
part 4/10
Life's Bazaar: Our first series of adventures kept each adventure regular size and standalone until the final one, which only narrowly broke the previous record for largest single adventure on top of its other achievements. In sharp contrast, this not only makes a big fanfare about being a lengthy series where you’re supposed to play the whole thing in order, but the first instalment is a mammoth 51 pages long. Now Chris Perkins has both the first and second spots for longest adventure in here. A fitting revenge for all the times they trimmed down or rejected his ideas as a freelancer.
Welcome to the city of Cauldron, so named because it’s built in the inner caldera of an extinct volcano. This means steep streets, limited building space and lots of tunnels underneath the city where who knows what monsters lurk? Why just recently there’s been a rash of kidnappings! It’s about time some brave adventurers solved the problem. A pretty standard hook to start an adventure. The difference is in how long it’ll take and where things will lead after that. If your players aren’t the kind to proactively seek out adventure, you can have them stumble across a cleric of St Cuthbert being roughed up in an alley. He was investigating the disappearances himself and it’s obvious someone really doesn’t want interference if they’re hiring thugs to silence people. Get through that and he’ll take you back to the temple, where they have a cryptic riddle from their attempt to use divination magic to find the missing kids. If you’re good at riddles this’ll let you skip to the next section, but they have detailed other several areas for you to investigate just in case. One way or another you’ll wind up at a locksmiths place, who’s an unwilling accomplice of the kidnappers. They’ve been holding his familiar hostage and forcing him to make them skeleton keys to all the locks he’s made over the years. Persuading him to help will be tricky but not impossible, and if you do it wrong may well wind up with him dead, as he’s under surveillance by his Skulk blackmailers. Whether he lives or not, a good search of his place will reveal a secret door down to a (not so) abandoned gnomish enclave. This has lots of weird gnomish tech, more than a few skulks using it as a lair, and a few items that still carry a particularly nasty and hard to cure but slow acting disease that is the reason it became abandoned in the first place. If they can make it through this, (not guaranteed by any means as it’s both one of the densest dungeons we’ve ever seen in here and filled with puzzles) they’ll find an elevator down to the Malachite Fortress, which is somewhat smaller and less confusing in layout, but much tougher in terms of combat encounters. In there you’ll find the kidnapped kids and main villain of this adventure, along with the person he’s trying to sell them to as slaves. Whether you go straight to combat, try to negotiate, or just wait around stealthily for a chance to rescue them, a beholder (more likely to be our actual cover star than the previous one this issue) will appear after a few rounds, demand the return of one of the kids, as apparently they’re special in some way, then teleport out with just that kid leaving you mystified and still having to rescue the other three yourselves. That concludes this adventure, but you’ll now know there are bigger plans afoot that will be revealed in future instalments if you stick around and investigate.
So far, it’s been a large adventure, with each of the two dungeons larger than many a standalone adventure in here, but not exceptional in either direction in terms of quality. While there is a definite linear sequence of events that the players are expected to go through, this does feel like it’s been properly stress tested and contingencies made for if they do something unexpected, with some bits skippable entirely and a whole load of worldbuilding of the city around to draw upon that feels like it will continue to be significant in future issues. The final encounter has some deliberately annoying railroading, but still leaves room for the PC’s action to make a real difference in the lives of some kids and leave some enemies alive (or not) to seek revenge, plus it looks pretty likely you’ll get to encounter the beholder again further along the line when you’re high enough level to have a fair fight with it. Hopefully they’ll continue to design future adventures so the PC’s don’t feel like they’re simply following a path where their choices don’t matter.