That’s it for the first one-on-one Challenge series. Filling out the week, here is Road to Danger (1998), one of two anthologies of adventures drawn from Dungeon Magazine. I had no idea they existed until recently, though I always wondered why Dungeon collections weren’t a thing; now I wonder why there weren’t more than two of them.

Anyway, this is from the elderly days of 2E, when TSR was dead but before Wizards of the Coast sold to Hasbro. It’s a bit of a Wild West period, marked by an influx of semi-generic products like this one, which often harkened back to the 1E era in some way. This collection does it explicitly, as all but two of the scenarios it reprints were written in the 1E era.

It’s…OK. They’re all tuned to beginners, which is nice, but also flattens expectations somewhat. The first scenario is about killing or capturing the leader of a failed coup, if the players can get past his norker minions. The last scenario is pretty similar—root out hobgoblins from a castle so a player character can inherit it. Retrieve a stolen spellbook from a devil-worshiping priest. Do…something…with some xvarts (I don’t quite get how this one is supposed to work). Nothing outright bad, but also nothing making me sit up and take notice.

The worst scenario is a riff on Romeo & Juliet, which I feel like shows up in every videogame RPG and I could have done without it cropping up in D&D (again). The best one is “Trouble at Grog’s,” in which players have to clear the name of a half-ogre innkeeper. Of all of these, that’s the one I’d consider inserting in my own campaign.

The Elmore cover is recycled from the Dragonlance novel Stormblade (though credited to Caldwell, annoyingly). The interiors are pretty great, the work of Justine Mara Andersen. Not super familiar with his work, but his heavy lines and strong detail are the best part of the book.