Welcome to month 2 of Dungeon Corner! As always, these posts hit Patreon several weeks before they go live here on Loot The Room.

Unsurprisingly, today I’m looking at issue 2 of Dungeon Magazine, dated November/December 1986. I realised that we’re nearly halfway through this month and I haven’t had a chance to look at this issue yet, so since there are only four adventures I’m just going to tackle them one at a time over the next week or two. Here’s the table of contents:

• The Titan’s Dream by William Todorsky
• In The Dwarven King’s Court by Willie Walsh
• Caermor by Nigel D. Findley
• The Keep at Koralgesh by Robert B. Giovanni and Jonathan H. Simmons

We’ve got a good range of levels in this issue, covering everything from first level to ninth, but today I’m just going to look at “The Titan’s Dream”. We also don’t have any repeat authors from issue 1. The editor’s introduction ends with a call for submissions that I think is quite interesting:

I’d particularly like to see Immortals- and Masters-level adventures, but the readership may wish lower-level ones (Basic to Companion).

We are still hunting for short, quickly played modules, such as The Elven Home and Guardians of the Tomb from issue #1. Shorter modules allow for more adventures per issue and greater variety. We have some longer modules on hand, too, good for several nights’ play.

There are two things I find interesting here. It’s my experience of publishing on the DMs Guild that lower level adventures definitely sell better than those for higher levels. I remember reading somewhere – and I can’t remember where, nor am I inclined to try and find it, so this memory could well be inaccurate – that most play happens between levels 1-5, and this seems borne out commercially as well. It’s interesting to see that this higher demand for lower level adventures has been the case for at least 40 years.

I have many theories about why this is. It’s hard to write good higher level modules anyway, so a lot of the extant ones simply aren’t very good, but my main thinking is that by the time players have reached higher levels it’s simply much more likely that the GM is making everything that sees play rather than relying on modules. By the time you’re at levels 10+ you’ve been playing for a long time, you’ve built up a vast web of “story” in your ongoing game, and it’s much harder for a GM to slip a module into that and have it make sense. Very few people are playing one shots at high levels, so you’re always trying to aim a high level module at a very small audience of people with high level characters, whose GM doesn’t already have something planned or written.

The second part of that introduction – the call for short, drop-in encounters – is interesting because it sort of validates the way in which I’ve always used Dungeon. Those short encounters are so much more useful to me than a long adventure, and I think their appeal is there for similar reasons to the dearth of higher level modules. That is, they’re much easier to actually use than a 40 page adventure. (The fact that I’ve staked my career on writing longer adventures surely isn’t a cause for concern after this realisation, right?)

There’s also a letter printed here from Greg Hazzard of Eden, North Carolina, that I think is interested purely from a publishing standpoint:

Dear Mr. Moore,
Regarding your periodical, I have two questions. What do you put into a cover letter? Also, what do you consider a word?

This seems like a silly question, especially “what do you consider a word”, but the primary concern of magazine publishing is how much physical space you have on the page, and while “the” and “transubstantiation” are both single words, they obviously take up much more space on the pace. The answer given is fairly illuminating on this point:

Some periodicals consider a “word” to be a measure of space. A group of six characters thus forms a word for editorial purposes. When I calculate payment for a module, however, I have my computer count the number of actual words in the manuscript.

There’s no insight to be had here, I just thought it was an interesting thing to see. (I also googled Greg Hazzard to see whether he ever sold anything to Dungeon or had a career in RPGs but, alas, it seems he didn’t. He did have another letter published in Dragon #254 in 1998, though, so good for him.)

Anyway. On to the adventures.

The Titan’s Dream

This is an AD&D adventure for levels 5-9, described as “a casual visit to a living, nightmare theater” and “a bizarre journey into the realm of sleep”. We’re given the standard breakdown of which sorts of characters should be used here (“an even mix of the standard character classes (fighter, thief, magic-user, and cleric) would do well here”) and I’m now curious to note when this stopped being a convention. I’ll try to remember to keep an eye out for it as I read.

This is a very weird adventure. The party travels to the home of a titan to consult with him over whether or not the king should have his daughter wed a prince of questionable character in order o forge peace between the two nations. When they reach the titan’s temple they find him sleeping and are sucked into his dreams, which play out as “three, five-act plays […] running continuously and simultaneously. The party enters one of the 15 acts at random, as determined below; the scene will already be in progress. The party has to accomplish a good-aligned task in each act to successfully complete that act. Completing an act resolves a conflict in the titan’s mind, allowing him to go on to other topics (i.e., other acts)”.

There are two things I really hate in module design – railroads, and what I call “diorama encounters” (those being the sort of encounters where the PCs are constantly walking into rooms to find the occupants right in the middle of some activity, as though they’ve been standing frozen in action waiting for the door to open). When I read this pitch I assumed that I was about to read the worst kind of diorama module. And make no mistake – this is very much a railroad. We’re told that “if a character tries to leave a scene without interacting with it, he simply passes into the fog and reenters the same set by walking out of the fog from a different place”. The PCs – and the players – have no escape until they played through all fifteen of these little pre-written scenes and found the right way to progress.

And it gets worse. If the PCs find a way to affect the scene and exit that act, but they don’t find the “right” answer – i.e. their actions are “evil or inadequate”) – then at some point later in the adventure they’ll find themselves back in the same scene they thought they’d already got out of once, which “will be at the same point as it was when the party originally entered it”.

I can’t state this strongly enough: I hate this. Thankfully the players don’t need to “solve” all fifteen scenes, they only need to find the solution to five of them, but frankly that’s five too many. This isn’t the only thing I don’t like about this adventure, either. Take this:

The same five sets are used in all plays. Each act uses a different set, but the sets won’t appear in the same order for each dream-play. The details of each set have been deliberately left sparse to allow each DM to put his personal touches on the layout. The five sets are:

SET A: A forest clearing with five trees and three rocks

SET B: A section of underground passage with doors and chambers (the doors can be ordinary, secret, or concealed as the DM wishes)

SET C: An open section of ground covered in grass or sand

SET D: A long, twisting cave with rough walls and chamber

SET E: A free-standing, single-story building with three rooms

This puts me in mind of one of my biggest problems with Christopher Nolan’s Inception. The trailer for that film showed us characters twisting reality with their minds, folding cities in half and making use of weird dream logic to achieve their goals. The promise was this weird dream-hopping, reality-shifting sci-fi extravaganza. The reality was a series of three Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare maps, one of which turned upside down but otherwise did nothing out of the ordinary. The execution was entirely underwhelming when placed next to the premise.

That’s what’s happening here. I firmly believe that one of the main purposes of a good module is to provide the GM with things they couldn’t come up with themselves. Here you’ve placed us into the dreams of a titan who happens to be a master of illusions, and what we get is “a forest clearing with five trees and three rocks” and “an open section of ground covered in grass or sand”. This is, frankly, insulting. This should never have been published.

I won’t drill into each of the “plays” in detail. I’ll just pick one at random to show you what we’re dealing with here. This is Act 1 of dream #2, “The Squirehood of Sir Staghart”, which takes place in Set D.

Sir Bombast is badly wounded but fighting bravely; lesser devils, all barbeds, are falling before his sword. Suddenly, a hugh barbed devil (the only survivor) appears before him and, with a mighty blow, kills Bombast. When the squire moves to defend his master, the huge barbed devil strikes him in the chest with its tail. The squire falls and is left for dead.
The party arrives just before Bombast is slain and cannot reach Staghart before he is struck by the barbed devil.

Tasks:

A. The party may interrupt and drive off the barbed devil before it can deliver a fatal second blow to Staghart.

B. The party mat save Staghart by defeating the barbed devil or removing the squire’s body from the cave.

C. The party may pray to a good-aligned deity to protect Staghart (if done, this action automatically succeeds).

There are other equally thrilling tasks in this adventure, such as “ignore a small child’s pleas to play a game with him until he teleports away”, and “kneel before a Valkyrie and do nothing”.

This is the kind of module where I read it and think that the author should really write that novel they wish they had time to write instead of forcing their friends to play through their plays under the guise of gaming. I sincerely hope the rest of this issue is better than this first adventure!