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Dragon 127 Tucker's Kobolds By Roger E. Moore This month's editorial is about Tucker's kobolds. We ever seen were often weaker than the characters who fought them. They were simply well-armed and intelligent beings who were played by the DM to be utterly ruthless and clever. Tucker's kobolds were like that. get letters on occasion asking for advice on creating high-level AD&D® game adventures, and Tucker's kobolds seem to fit the bill. Many high-level characters have little to do because they're not challenged. They yawn at tar- rasques and must be forcibly kept awake when a lich appears. The DMs involved don't know what to do, so they stop dealing with the problem and the characters go into Character Limbo. Getting to high level is hard, but doing anything once you get there is worse. Tucker ran an incredibly dangerous dungeon in the days I was stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. This dun- geon had corridors that changed all of your donkeys into huge flaming demons or dropped the whole party into acid baths, but the demons were wien- ies compared to kobolds were just regular kobolds, with 1-4 hp and all that, but they were mean. When I say they were mean, I mean they were bad, Jim. They gradu- ated magna c-- laude from the Sauron Institute for the Criminally Vicious. When I joined the gaming group, some of the PCs had already met Tucker's kobolds, and they were not eager to repeat the experience. The party leader went over the penciled map of the dungeon and tried to find ways to avoid the little critters, but it was not kobolds on Level One. Thes One of the key problems in adventure design lies in creating opponents who can challenge powerful characters. Singular monsters like tarrasques and liches are easy to gang up on; the party can concen- trate its firepower on the target until the target falls down dead and wiggles its little feet in the air. Designing monsters more powerful than a tar- rasque is self-defeating; if the group kills your super-monster, what will you do next-send in its mother? That didn't work on Beowulf, and it probably won't work here. possible. The group resigned itself to making a run for it through Level One to get to the elevators, where we could go down to Level Ten and fight "okay" monsters like huge flaming demons. It didn't work. The kobolds caught us about 60 feet into the dungeon and locked the door behind us and barred it. Then they set the corridor on fire, while we were still in it. Thus encouraged, our party scrambled down a side passage, only to be ambushed by more kobolds firing with light crossbows through murder holes in the walls and ceilings. Kobolds with metal armor and shields flung Molotov cocktails at us from the other sides of huge piles of flaming debris, which other kobolds pushed ahead of their formation using long metal poles like broomsticks. There was no mistake about it. These kobolds were bad. We turned to our group leader for advice. Worse yet, singular super-monsters rarely have to think. They just use their trusty, predictable claw/claw/bite. This shouldn't be the measure of a campaign. These games fall apart because there's no challenge to them, no mental stimulation-no danger. In all the games that I've seen, the worst, most horrible, most awful-beyond-comparison opponents "NOO0000!" screamed the party leader. "It's THEM! Run!!!"

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Tucker's Kobolds Pt. 1


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