I think I found my dream version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Sadly, I don’t think I’ll ever find a group with which to run or play it at this point in my life … but them’s the breaks. I’m just happy to have found it, to have read it, and to just know it exists. Someday …

The way I was introduced to playing D&D was sort of weird. However, I think it happened in a manner that many gamers who started playing in the late Seventies and early Eighties (like myself) would understand. I made an elf as my very first character, using the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert rules set for D&D – the ones with the Erol Otus covers. With a little “tweaking” from the DM, I played that character in “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” … a module written for 1st-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. My sister Laura had a similar experience, as she made a halfling from the B/X D&D rules and played it in “Tomb of Horrors” as her first adventure – talk about a trial by fire! In both of our cases, we made characters for one rules set and played them in another that was sort-of-but-not-really-100%-compatible … and, for the most part, it worked.

Most of my earliest gaming experiences worked like that, randomly bouncing things between “boxed set” D&D and the “rulebook” AD&D, like playing assassins in “Castle Amber” and other such things. For a long time, it didn’t really occur to me that there was anything really different between the two. Both D&D and AD&D were all supposed to be “Dungeons & Dragons”, so I assumed (as did most gamers I knew at the time) they were all meant to be part of the same game.

At the time, I was also flying model airplanes in competition events where there were four skill levels: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, and Expert. For some reason, I assumed that D&D worked exactly the same way as my model airplane competitions, and that “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” was somehow supposed to slide neatly between “Basic” and “Expert”. The fact that a careful analysis of “Advanced” D&D would instantly shoot holes in that logic never fazed me; at the time, that’s just what I believed. (I also spent an inordinate amount of time searching for “Intermediate” D&D rules, to no avail …)

Though the D&D/AD&D games I played back then eventually moved over towards something far closer to what was in the AD&D rulebooks, and the Basic/Expert D&D elements eventually got phased out, those games that I played always remained, by and large, houseruled games. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this in recent years, and I think it’s one of the main components of what I’d call the “grognard” experience. Basically, I learned how to play D&D/AD&D not from reading the rulebooks in any great detail, but simply by playing with more experienced gamers who “already knew the rules”. I learned enough of the rules so that I could make a character, but I never really knew a lot of the fiddly details. It was much more of an informal experience – rather than relying on the Rules As Written, there was much more of a reliance on the Rules As Played. When I eventually started running my own AD&D games, I essentially took the rules as I’d learned them through play, and used them to run my own games, despite the fact that a close examination of the rulebooks would’ve revealed I wasn’t doing certain things “correctly”, or at least with the Rules As Written.

I think this is how a lot of gamers learned to play back in the late Seventies and early Eighties. There was no online community, no global group of gamers with which to easily check and compare ways to interpret rules or to optimize characters. The only way to get rules clarifications from TSR was to mail a letter to “Sage Advice” in Dragon Magazine and hope that it got answered … in a couple of months. Rules disputes and interpretations back then were all handled within the group, without relying on “official” rules interpretations.

Compare that now to D&D 3.0, or 3.5, or 4E. When 3.0 was released, everyone started from the same playing field, so to speak … it was no longer a matter of learning from group to group, but an entire community learning how to play a game they loved all over again all at once. And, with the advent of the Internet, it was easy to share that experience, and to compare notes with one another, and to get “official” rulings and errata from the writers of the game very, very quickly. That’s when the game shifted more from something that had rules which varied from group to group, to something where everyone could adhere more strongly to the Rules As Written. I don’t look at either method as necessarily right or wrong … they’re just different.

I’ve learned over the years that I really liked the loose flexibility of my old AD&D games. I never really liked the mechanical bloat of D&D 3.0/3.5 and its stubborn insistence on explaining how everything works. I like D&D 4E a little better, but it strays perhaps a bit too far from the old versions of D&D/AD&D for my liking. I like both of those versions of the game, and enjoy playing them a lot, but they’re far from my own personal “ideal” version of the game.

My own dream version of D&D is something that’s rules-light, and that doesn’t rely on miniatures for combat. While I used to love painting miniatures, I never really used them in my own games, apart from big battle or when combat would get super-crazy in terms of the number of opponents the characters faced. I never used the weapon speed factor chart from AD&D as written (then again, who did?), instead relying on a slight penalty for polearms and a slight bonus for darts and daggers. I never used the flanking rules, or a whole bunch of other combat rules listed in the good old original Dungeon Masters Guide (most of which I didn’t remember, or even knew existed until a careful re-read of the book a few years ago!).

In short … my ideal version of the game is Basic/Expert D&D, with a healthy smattering of 1st-edition AD&D thrown in for good measure.

A few years ago, Goblinoid Games put out a game called Labyrinth Lord, a “retro-clone” of the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert rules set for D&D. Now, they’ve just put out the Advanced Edition Companion for Labyrinth Lord … an optional rules set that lets gamers add in fun stuff to their Labyrinth Lord games like gnomes, assassins, and the demon lord Orcus.

Kind of sounds like Basic/Expert D&D, with a healthy smattering of 1st-edition AD&D thrown in for good measure, and it is. And it works beautifully.

The main thing I love about the Labyrinth Lord/ Advanced Edition Companion combination is that it retains that wonderful “old school” simplicity while streamlining and cleaning things up. A Labyrinth Lord game using the Advanced Edition Companion wouldn’t be like the old days of mishmashing B/X D&D with AD&D – the Advanced Edition Companion makes the amalgamation of the two concepts pretty damn seamless.

Granted, I wish there were a few more tweaks to the Advanced Edition Companion rules that more closely matched some of the better house rules I’ve heard for AD&D (like giving magic-users a spell bonus for high Intelligence, in the way clerics get a spell bonus for high Wisdom), but overall, I can’t complain. It’s done extremely well. Kudos to Daniel Proctor for making such a great addition to an already great game.

So now, the Advanced Edition Companion sits on my shelf, patiently waiting to be played someday. Realistically, that day might never come. Most of the gamers I know right now are much more into D&D 4E, or Pathfinder, or Exalted. Of all the gamers I know and roll dice with, “old school” D&D seems to be something that only interests me at the moment.

But if you want a game that provides a fantastic old-school gaming experience, one perfectly suited for the dungeon crawling days of yore, look no further than Labyrinth Lord and the Advanced Edition Companion. It’s a perfect fit for that open style of gaming.

And who knows? Weirder things have happened. The Advanced Edition Companion may get its chance someday …

Certain monsters always grabbed my attention. I don't know why. I suppose it's because most of them featured prominently in many of the modules I played during my earliest forays into gaming. The yuan-ti, of course, remain the favorite. But I've also always had a soft spot for critters like the xorn, the phanatons from "The Isle of Dread", yellow musk creepers ... and, of course, vegepygmies, who very nearly killed my very first character during "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks".

I've tried - where I can - to incorporate these nasty beasties into the adventures I've written over the years. One of the reasons "Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar" remains my favorite published adventure to date is because it contains a good number of those creatures, such as the executioner's hood, the yellow musk creeper, yellow musk zombies, and vegepygmies. (True story - that almost didn't happen. I submitted the original outline for "Caverns" to Joseph Goodman, who sent back a quick note saying "Nice, but why don't you put a fungal garden somewhere in the caverns?" I thought about what sorts of creatures would live in that garden, and suddenly some vegepygmies and yellow musk critters decided to make their way into the adventure.)

I even went so far as to start writing some additional supplemental material about the vegepygmies in the adventure, but between word court and relevance to the actual story adventure, it didn't really fit. So I cut it out of the final manuscript, and saved it for a project for another day.

Today's that day.

"Behind the Monsters: Vegepygmy", published by the folks at Tricky Owlbear, is now available. It lists me as the writer ... truth be told, it's a collaboration between myself and Bret Boyd. For whatever reason, I could never get my original concepts to mesh in a finished format that I liked. It was mostly there, but certain elements were missing, and I wasn't happy with that. Bret took my ideas and polished them up nicely.

My personal favorite part of the piece is the vegegyant (someone big who's green but decidely not jolly), but overall, I think it came out pretty well.

If you're interested in checking it out, it's available at a bunch of places, like RPGNow, YourGamesNow, and Paizo. It was a neat little project to write, and I hope you enjoy it.

Confession time – I’ve never been a big fan of mega-dungeons.

I think this is more due to my typical game play style than anything else. Most of the original adventures run and played by my own long-time gaming group simply don’t fit the mega-dungeon format. Our adventures tended to prominently feature roleplaying and investigation, with a smattering of combat here and there. If anything, a typical adventure session of my group has aptly been described as a sword-and-sorcery version of “The A-Team” – receive a mission, come up with a ridiculously elaborate plan to combat the enemy, and then fight the enemy in one big battle. (The ridiculously elaborate plan rarely survives initial contact with the enemy, but that’s neither here nor there.) Sustained, small encounters didn’t fit the style of our group … nor did adventures taking place at a single location. Our characters were the original group of well-armed mercenary hobos, going from place to place in search of adventure, never stopping at any particular location for more than a gaming session or two.

As you’ll see later, it’s a style that doesn’t always lend itself well to a good mega-dungeon format.

That being said, mega-dungeons always fascinated me. They fascinate a lot of gamers. If you’re a longtime gaming grognard (like myself), I think the legend of Castle Greyhawk has a lot to do with that. Castle Greyhawk was undeniably the original mega-dungeon, and the late Gary Gygax wrote and spoke about it frequently in the early editorials of Dragon Magazine and other places, as did the other TSR folks who played in Gary’s original D&D campaigns. It always sounded awesome – bigger (literally!) and better than any other adventure. The fact that Gary kept talking about finally publishing it someday – but never getting around to it – also helped to build its mythical status as something grand, as anticipation built up steadily for it for years and years, with gamers wanting to finally get a glimpse of one of Gary’s greatest creations.

(Sadly, that never came to fruition; hints of what was and could’ve been only came through the wretched abomination known as the module WG7: Castle Greyhawk; the much-better modules EX1: Dungeonland, EX2: The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, and WG6: Isle of the Ape, which showcased some of the extraplanar levels of the Castle; the much-later Greyhawk Ruins and the much-much-later Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, which finally started to assemble some of Gary’s original scattered ideas for Castle Greyhawk into a consolidated format, but written by different authors; and finally, Castle Zagyg, which was finally the Gary Gygax-penned iteration of Castle Greyhawk everyone had always hoped to see … but it unfortunately was not fully completed before he passed away.)

And even if the legend of Castle Greyhawk was something that never piqued your interest as a gamer … there’s something about the mega-dungeon concept that’s just damn cool. Tackling a mega-dungeon is a challenge; conquering it is just awesome. The sheer size and scale of the mega-dungeon usually means that the player characters have to do far more to survive and be successful than they would in standard dungeons, meaning that the rewards – and the sense of accomplishment – of beating one is all the sweeter.

I recently began work on a “Lost City” mega-adventure that would’ve essentially been a mega-dungeon. Though this project sadly has been shelved (and I don’t expect it to see the light of day again), it did provide me the opportunity to sit down, look at a bunch of mega-dungeons and mega-adventures, and see what made them work or not work. The better ones, I think, all shared a few common themes. Here they are:

1. Big adventure, big picture, big story. The mega-dungeons that are essentially nothing more than ninety-thousand rooms filled with monsters, traps, and treasure do nothing for me. The adventure’s big, so the stakes need to be big. There needs to be compelling reasons for the characters to be tackling the adventure. The better ones have both small, short-term goals and larger “big-picture” goals for the characters to achieve. (And, ideally, some of these goals are completely unrelated – see the next point and you’ll understand.) But a big hook towards keeping the players’ interest will probably eventually be on the endgame for the mega-adventure – ending the prophecy, killing the big dragon, finding the lost artifact, or whatever else becomes the thing that makes your players go: OH HELL YES, I WANT TO DO THAT.

2. Escape is a healthy thing. The mega-adventure or mega-dungeon means you’re in the same place for a really, really long time. In my experience, that means players invariably get bored, no matter how exciting the adventure might be. You can mix things up a bit by throwing in some unrelated plot threads in your mega-dungeon, but sometimes players will just get sick of the place. Having a nearby town where the players can refresh themselves, reload, and have some different sorts of adventures is a good idea, so make sure the characters can leave the mega-dungeon without too much difficulty. (Portals to other places within the dungeon aren’t a bad idea either, provided your gaming style lends itself to that sort of wackiness.)

3. Payback’s a bitch. In my old campaigns, the incessant wandering of the heroes from place to place meant there were rarely repercussions for their actions. They never got to see that slaying the kobold tribe near the village meant that they’d effectively ended a decades-old war between the kobolds and the orcs, and that the orcs now could focus their hostility directly on the village the characters thought they had “saved”. In the mega-dungeon, because so much happens in essentially the same place, you can have fallout like that from the players’ actions. It’s easier to have recurring villains with long memories and axes to grind. The mega-dungeon’s a more living environment, where even the simplest of actions might mean dire things down the road.

4. Overall holistic design. Living environment also applies to the guys writing and designing the mega-dungeon as well. The place as a whole needs to make sense. How do the various denizens of the place get along? Are there groups of allies or sworn enemies? Also, keep in mind that stuff found in one part of the adventure could affect something else down the road, often to a great extent. That “invincible” frost giant jarl at the end of the adventure won’t be so tough if the characters loaded up on all the fire-based magic items you loaded into the beginning of the adventure.

5. No chokepoints. There better not be a point in the dungeon that the players hit where they are faced with “solve this/defeat this OR ELSE YOU CANNOT GET ANY FURTHER IN THE DUNGEON”. Should they fail, nothing sucks worse than this. Absolutes should not be a part of any dungeon, but their problems get magnified in a mega-dungeon.

6. Indexing and organization. There’s a hell of a lot going on in a mega-dungeon. Knowing that the key on the third level opens the chest on the ninth might be important, and being able to quickly look up that sort of information is extremely helpful. While an index is perfect for these sorts of situations, just organizing the adventure to cover those situations is very, very helpful. This gets back to holistic design – if the demon lord on the thirteenth level of the dungeon is badly affected by a magic sword found on level six, putting a page reference number to the stats for that magic sword in the demon lord encounter is a great idea.

Of all the mega-dungeons and mega-adventures I read over the past year, three stood out above and beyond the rest to me. Castle Whiterock, hands down, I consider to be the best of them. Maure Castle is also excellent (and possibly the closest thing we’ll ever see to a complete old-school Gygax-styled mega-dungeon), as well as the original Caverns of Thracia (odd to call it a mega-dungeon, as it’s just 80 pages, but author Paul Jaquays created something really cool, original … and open. There’s no right way to explore the Caverns, no great big villains or set pieces, but it really works great nonetheless).

Your favorite mega-dungeons? Your experiences with them?

I’d love to hear about them.

This is the one that pretty much got my freelancing career started.

When I first starting running games, my games of choice were some of the earlier editions of D&D and AD&D, and the first incarnation of the Warhammer FRPG. The first adventures I ran were published adventures, like “Dwellers of the Forbidden City” and “Shadows Over Bögenhafen”. Later on, as I got more confidence and gained more experience with running various game systems, I started writing and running my own original adventures, set in my own campaign worlds. The stories framing those adventures probably weren’t all that great, but they were mine. I learned a lot writing and running those adventures.

However, while the stories were original, the mechanics weren’t. I never really deviated from what you’d find in the rulebooks for those games. If there was an evil wizard in one of my AD&D adventures, all of his spells came from the Players’ Handbook. If there were monsters in a dungeon in a Warhammer adventure, they came from the rulebook or from a White Dwarf magazine article. I liked creating my own stories, but I didn’t tinker around with the games in terms of mechanics. For one thing, the existing mechanics worked; for another, I didn’t have a lot of confidence – yet – in straying too far from the Rules As Written.

When I started running RIFTS, though, that changed. I think it was because of the wide-open gonzo nature of the game. There were a lot of stories I wanted to tell in my various RIFTS campaigns, and quite honestly, the rulebooks didn’t nearly begin to cover what I wanted to do. (To date myself, there were only four RIFTS books when I started running the game: the main rulebook, the first sourcebook, and the Atlantis and Vampire Kingdoms world books.) The monsters were limited, the equipment was limited, there wasn’t much there in terms of magic … if I wanted to tell those stories, I was going to have to develop my own source material and game mechanics.

Also – although the possibility that rules could be “broken” hadn’t yet dawned on me – I did realized that certain aspects of the game really didn’t make much logical sense. So there were certain parts of the game where I started to adjust the rules so they’d make more sense for my gaming group.

So I began tinkering. I wrote my own monsters, my own spells, my own equipment, my own rules … in other words, I started designing. Again, I don’t think I knew what a game designer was at the time, but that’s what I was doing. Using the basics of the rules system, I went beyond just writing adventures, and started developing original game mechanics as well.

While running RIFTS and developing new material for my campaign, I also spent a bit of time submitting articles to Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, which at the time were still run by TSR. All of these proposals got rejected, but I had it in my head that I wanted to write games somehow, or to work for a gaming company.

Somewhere during this time, while getting yet another rejection letter from Dragon (poor Roger E. Moore, who edited the magazine at that time – he must’ve hated reading the dreck that I sent his way) – I took a look at my desk and saw all the spiral-bound notebooks I’d filled with ideas for the RIFTS campaign. A lot of it was very, very detailed. And that’s when it dawned on me: why write something for D&D? Let’s write something for Palladium instead?

That didn’t exactly work out as expected. You can find the full story of that saga HERE, but suffice it to say that the material I wrote for that campaign never got published by Palladium Books. However, it did lead me to write two books. The first was “The Banwok Hunters”, and then I followed that up with a second book called “Demon Heart Falling”, which you can download HERE.

Much like “Demon Heart Falling”, I got a trip out of re-reading “The Banwok Hunters”, which was originally written about fifteen years ago. It brought back a lot of fond memories of that old campaign. I’d forgotten about stuff like the Hellstar Complex, the base that the player characters used (which was really a landbound version of the Liberator from Blake’s 7), or the villainous cybernetic Tyrannosaurus Rex known as Jericho (who I based on the Ultra-Humanite). Lots of gonzo, over-the-top stuff in there, which reflected that campaign pretty well. Crazy, but tremendous amounts of fun.

I hadn’t bothered to scan “The Banwok Hunters” into digital form only because my own copy of it was pretty crappy. I was afraid to put the pages through the scanning feeder, as I was pretty sure they’d get shredded in the scanning process. Fortunately, my friend Eric had a copy of the book … so, thanks to Eric, you now have a copy as well.

Curious to see what all this looks like? Download it by clicking: HERE.

I’m curious to hear what you think of it.

Enjoy!

1. Play more games.
2. Write an original D&D 4E adventure, and run it for some friends.
3. Write an original Pathfinder adventure, and run it for some friends.
4. Run "The Lost City" again. Maybe even for some of the guys who were in it the first time around.
5. Read the original "Slavers" series for 1E AD&D. Believe it or not, I've never, ever read this or played it. If it looks like fun, run one of the modules in this series for some friends.
6. Go to some more local conventions.
7. GenCon 2010 ... perhaps.
8. Find some more local gaming stores, hopefully friendly ones.
9. Tinker around with the rules for Nova Storm, my ever-in-development science fiction RPG.
10. Discover a good game that I don't know about at the moment.
11. Get the NaClaMoMo reviews finished this month, before the whole "month" part of the name gets too awkwardly ridiculous.
12. Finish writing one novel.
13. Get the other novel published, or at least well on the road to that goal.
14. Play more games.

Well, it's the end of 2009.

The year went a little differently than I thought it would, but then again, that always seems to be the case. On a personal level, all things considered, it was marvelous. After all, gaming has allowed me to become both acquainted with a marvelous bunch of new friends and re-acquainted again with many older friends, equally marvelous. Pretty damn good times with all of these people, both new and old, and I hope they continue in the months and years to come.

On the professional side of things ... while the real job is just fine, freelancing this year had a lot of challenges. Some projects went well; most didn't. I think the expectations I had for myself over the past few years are simply just never going to become a reality, and I've reached a point where hard work and persistence just isn't enough on its own to get to where I'd hoped to go. I just don't have the energy - or, sadly, the interest - to keep tilting at windmills anymore.

So it's simply time to be thankful for all the wonderful things I've worked on over the years, all the fantastic people I've met and all the great experiences I've had ... and start moving in a different direction. And, to be honest, moving in a new direction is pretty damn exciting, so I'm happy to be trying something new at this point, whether it's successful or not.

To all of you gaming freelancers out there, the very best of luck to you in 2010. I'm still rolling dice, and I can't wait to see what worlds and adventures you guys dream up.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Work, holidays, rewriting a project from a corrupted file … it’s been a hell of a busy month. Hoping to complete NaClaMoMo before year’s end, but we’ll see.

In the meantime … a quick rumination on writing in general.

I’ve been writing for a long time. I was writing short stories by the time I was ten, was writing my own adventures for games shortly thereafter … but I never really thought about being a writer, if that makes any sense. Writing was something that I did, but it didn’t define who I was. I enjoyed writing, but it wasn’t a part of my very being. Yet.

End of eighth grade. I’m fourteen, and I’m playing in a baseball game. Stretch out to make a play at third base, with one foot on the bag, and the baserunner tramples my ankles. Just doesn’t break it, he shatters it. So I get to spend the summer between middle school and high school like Paul Sheldon in Misery, laid up and hobbled. Fun, fun, fun.

During that summer, the family goes to visit my aunt in Michigan, and I go with them. There’s not a hell of a lot I can do. So I read. A lot. It doesn’t take me long to go through all the books I brought with me, so eventually I start reading whatever I can find on the shelves in my aunt’s house. Most of it’s not to my tastes. But I find one that definitely is.

I’ve never read Stephen King before. But his stories and his writing style just resonates with me. It’s not just his gruesome horror and his black humor, either. He develops characters so wonderfully well, especially the supporting characters. He captures the way characters speak in a believable way. He has a real sense of pacing, of timing – he’s a natural storyteller, with a very matter-of-fact, almost folksy way of telling a tale. He writes in a way that makes me want to write my own stories. By the time I finish the 1,100 pages of IT, the thought occurs to me: I want to be a writer.

(And if you want to know where I get my fondness and overuse of ellipses from … you can probably thank Mr. King.)

I heal up, and go to high school. Inexplicably, I wind up with a free period in the middle of the day that is shared by none of the few friends I have. So I do what any painfully shy, antisocial dork would do from about 10:00 to 10:40 in the morning. I go to the library. And I discover their collection of Stephen King books. During my freshman year, I proceed to devour the likes of The Stand, Salem’s Lot, Christine, Firestarter, and a good number of other early works by King.

And then I start to write, because I know I'm a writer.

The early stuff, naturally, is nothing but short stories, nothing but horror, and is just a pale imitation of Stephen King. It’s crap, for the most part. But I don’t have my own voice as a writer just yet, and I don’t know quite what to write. So I’m just writing someone else’s stuff instead, trying to find my own original voice by using someone else’s first.

Meanwhile, I continue to read. I continue to devour King. Somewhere in there, I discover The Talisman, which was written by King and Peter Straub. I check out Straub, and books like Floating Dragon and The Throat (still one of my favorites of all time). I see how to write horror in a different way, in a more refined and elegant way. My stories and writings start borrowing elements of Straub as well as King.

And that’s how it goes for a while.

I discover the awesome works of Elmore Leonard, the crime novelist, who has the most amazing knack for writing believable, natural dialogue I’ve ever read.

I discover Neal Stephenson, who has an astonishing ability to seamlessly weave a host of strange and seemingly unrelated topics into a carefully crafted story.

I discover George R.R. Martin, the wonderful fantasy writer who puts unflinching grit into fantasy, and who effortlessly juggles dozens upon dozens of characters in his novels without difficulty.

And I discover dozens of others. I read. A lot.

Every time I discover one of these amazing authors, a little piece of what I admire in them gets added into my own style of writing.

And as I continue to write, the collection of pieces gets a little bigger … and the edges between them start to fade away. It’s not so much a collection anymore as a bunch of influences. For in the middle of them all stands my own unique voice, definitely shaped by these pieces, but ultimately something that’s completely my own.

I haven’t written a novel, or even short stories, in a long, long time. I stopped a couple of years ago to focus on writing for gaming companies. That was fun, and for the most part I enjoyed that experience immensely … but over the past year, I realized that it was time to leave the world of gaming for awhile, and get back into writing fiction. And that’s what I’ve slowly been doing for the past few months, as I wrap up my final gaming projects and obligations once and for all.

I recently started on a horror novel. It’s something I had kicking around for well over a decade, but never quite knew how to write it. Ten years ago, the story was beyond me. Now? I can see it. More importantly, I can see how to create it.

I jumped into the manuscript, which started falling together nicely. Almost too nicely. So I stopped, and took a critical look at it. I realized that in a roundabout way, the story does owe a few things to some of the works of one Mr. Stephen King – IT, for starters. And The Tommyknockers. And The Shining. I got a little uncomfortable.

Whose voice is this?

And that’s when I realized the voice was mine.

My story may be a bit like those novels or the surface, in a superficial way … but it’s definitely my story. Told my way, in my own style, and using my own ideas.

I felt good about that realization. In fact, I felt great.

So since then, I’ve continued to work on the story in earnest. Haven't slept much, but that's okay. I'm back in a creative groove.

I’ll let you know when it starts looking like something like a finished novel.

"Palace of the Silver Princess" is one of those modules better known for its checkered history than for its actual content … which is probably a good thing, since its content isn’t all that memorable. For those unfamiliar with the adventure, “Palace” was originally written by Jean Wells, and featured a now-infamous orange cover. Rumor has it that some of the “objectionable” interior art led to quite a stir in the TSR offices after it was printed … but what isn’t rumor is that virtually all copies of the module were destroyed before ever shipping out to stores. Only a handful of these original orange-covered modules survived, making them an incredibly rare collector’s item. Later on, a green-covered version of the module – now rewritten and co-authored with Tom Moldvay – actually made it to the shelves of gaming stores around the world, with all of the “objectionable” art removed and replaced.

For what it’s worth, I never understood the big deal about the art. The big rumor was that the “objectionable” pieces were very risqué, but they actually aren’t, or at least they aren’t any more so than artwork featured in stuff like Deities & Demigods or even Vault of the Drow. Wizards of the Coast actually posted the “objectionable” artwork on their website a few years ago, along with a downloadable file of the original "Palace of the Silver Princess". There’s one piece that’s arguably risqué … but I would venture to guess that a particular piece drawn by Erol Otus that happens to not be very flattering to one Mr. Gary Gygax caused more of a stir than anything else. If there’s a smoking gun as to why the original really got pulped, that would be the one I would point at.

Well, that, and it’s just not a particularly good module.

Both versions of "Palace of the Silver Princess" work with the same basic premise. Unwittingly uncovered by dwarves, a magical ruby known as the Eye of Arik has sent the valley of Haven into utter chaos. In order to save Haven, the player characters must travel to a ruined palace to destroy the Eye of Arik, prevent its evil, god-like owner – Arik of the Hundred Eyes – from escaping a dimensional prison, and save the Princess Argenta.

Apart from the clichéd “save the princess” motif, "Palace of the Silver Princess" departs from many of the other modules of the era in that it pre-supposes the player characters are indeed heroic. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes the DM’s life more difficult if they aren’t. (“Eye of Arik? Evil palace? Not my problem, let’s move on to the next town.”) From the get-go, "Palace of the Silver Princess" – both versions – make certain assumptions about what the players will do, and that’s not a good thing.

As for the rest … well, let’s look individually at each version of “Palace”.

THE ORANGE VERSION.

God, what a mess. The initial levels of “Palace” are structured much like “B1: In Search of the Unknown”, in that it’s assumed the DM wants to take a hand in the creation of the adventure. It’s a true sandbox … rooms are essentially empty, with the DM being told “put a monster in this room” or “put a trap in that room”, with little guidance otherwise. Different, but not necessarily a bad idea, particularly if the adventure’s being run by an experienced DM. However, since the module bills itself as “A Special Instructional Module” intended for new DMs and new players … not a good idea. Basic/Expert D&D came long before the concepts of Challenge Ratings and Monster Levels, so it’s easy for a neophyte to not really get the difference between sticking a single zombie in a room or sticking three ghouls in it, and inadvertently turning the adventure into something next to impossible.

Later on, as we get to the detailed, keyed areas, there’s more problems. The map frequently doesn’t correspond to the adventure as written – for example, there’s no stairs leading to upper areas of the palace where important stuff is located. The encounters are also very disjointed, and read more like a random encounter list than a cohesive dungeon. (In this room, four fire beetles! In the next room, three zombies! In the room after that, a decapus!) I’m all for having monsters in every room, but there at least needs to be a coherent theme connecting them all, and the orange version of “Palace” sadly doesn’t have that. Worse still, the adventure features a slew of new monsters, all of which are incredibly lame. My favorite happens to be the bubble monster that attacks with … yes, you guessed it … bubbles.

The module also commits one of the cardinal sins of adventure design in that in order to achieve one of the big goals of the adventure – destroying the Eye of Arik – it assumes the players will find a number of items to let them commence with the destroying. If they don’t find all the items, though, they’re out of luck. Considering how easy it is to overlook a good number of these items (like a silver harp) – especially since YOU NEED STAIRS to reach some of them – not a good plan. Again, this is something I’ve covered in other NaClaMoMo reviews, but it’s worth mentioning here – having the items should help to destroy the Eye, but it shouldn’t be necessary to actually have them.

THE GREEN VERSION.

Well, now we have stairs, so that’s already an improvement.

Also gone are most of the lame “new” monsters, replaced by more traditional creatures, as well as the open-ended sandbox beginning. It’s clear in comparing the two that Tom Moldvay did a fair bit of overhauling the original module, and trying to make it more true to being “A Special Instructional Module”. Instead, the beginning now reads more like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, with very specific options and directions being provided to both the DM and the players. The DM is given read-aloud text for the players, which contains specific choices for the players; depending on which choices the players take, the DM is then provided very specific instructions as to what to do next. It’s a great idea for newbie DMs … the execution, though, isn’t very good. There’s certain lines of read-aloud text that probably shouldn’t be read-aloud (like “The DM should roll 1D6 to see if the party is surprised”), and if you actually follow the logical progression of “If the players do X, then go to Y … if the players then choose C, then go to D” … well, you can wind up in unending circular loops, or dead ends that could frustrate the players. Anyone actually using this as written probably needs to read through it very carefully before running the adventure.

As we get to later areas of the adventure, Tom Moldvay makes the adventure a bit more coherent – certain areas of the original adventure are removed and replaced with new ones, which improve the overall adventure quite a bit – but it’s still very flawed. A lot of the encounters still read like nothing more than a bunch of random encounters, and have little relation to the overall story contained in the module. There’s too much treasure – considering that the players may start as first-level characters, they could easily wind up with close to 10,000 gp and 2 magical weapons apiece by the end of the adventure. And the ending gets very tough. If the DM is awarding XP throughout the course of the adventure and allowing characters to “level up” as the module progresses, that’s not a problem; but if first-level characters are being used, there’s virtually no way to make it to the end of the module if the DM only intends to let the characters level up once the module is completed.

"Palace of the Silver Princess" is an interesting module with some good concepts, but overall, it’s one of the weaker adventures of an era filled with great ones. I wouldn’t even consider running the original version of the adventure – it’s a collector’s item, nothing more – and the later Moldvay revision of the adventure is something I would only consider with a heavy amount of rewriting.

Interesting history? Yes.

Classic module? Alas, no.

********************

Some quick housekeeping notes …

One – yes, it’s December. Yes, NaClaMoMo stands for National Classic Module Month … and it started in November. So sue me. Real life, as always, interfered with the best of intentions. I have two modules left that I intended to cover for NaClaMoMo – “The War Rafts of Kron” and “Starspawn of Volturnus” – and I will do that over the next week or so. So stick around for that, if you think that might catch your fancy.

Two – I’m pleased to note that NaClaMoMo has been embraced by some other writers as well. Rick Maffei chose to make his own personal review of “The Village of Hommlet”, which I enjoyed immensely. He covered several aspects of the adventure that I simply didn’t in my own review, and it’s well worth reading. He also reviewed “The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan”, a module that I like but admittedly know little about … thank you kindly, Rick, for the review! (I remembered the Metamorphosis Alpha nod but little else.) Your high praise for this one means I’ll definitely be digging that one out of storage and giving it a closer look – unless, of course, you still plan on running it at some point!

Though NaClaMoMo was essentially a challenge to myself – namely, to try and write a semi-regular series of articles for the website – if you’ve got your own website or a place on the Internet to write, why not write a little piece on a classic adventure you’ve always liked? You don’t even have to be overly verbose like me. Just a paragraph or so on something you’ve enjoyed, something that’s influenced you to roll dice and kill imaginary monsters, and to have fun with your friends while doing so.

I’d love to hear about the adventures that have inspired you.

HA! You thought all of these modules would either involve dungeons or dragons, didn’t you?

Well … think again.

Top Secret isn’t a great spy game (the criminally under-rated James Bond 007 RPG wins that particular honor), but it’s a very good one. I never played it all that much, at least not in comparison to D&D or some other games, but I enjoyed the hell out of it (along with Gamma World) when I first got into gaming. I first played Top Secret in an adventure that I think was called “Whiteout” that was published in Dragon Magazine … and then, later, I ran and played a few other modules, including one standout called “Operation: Rapidstrike!”.

The rules for Top Secret are a typical example of the TSR games published in the late 1970s and early 1980s – a mishmash of systems and subsystems, some related to one another, some not. Top Secret actually doesn’t hold much resemblance to D&D, apart from its loose usage of “classes” (player characters can belong to one of three espionage bureaus – Investigation, Confiscation, and Assassination). If anything, it’s reminiscent of a more complicated and detailed version of Boot Hill, with a reliance on lots of percentile-based rules, and with a pretty nasty and lethal combat system, especially when it comes to firearms.

The main rules and the early adventures didn’t provide much details for the campaign setting of Top Secret, but that was okay – like most of the games of that era, I think it was kind of expected that DMs (or Administrators, in the case of Top Secret) would be making up their own campaign worlds. About the only thing I found frustrating about the game, then and now, is the relative lack of technology. If you wanted a gadget-filled campaign that would make James Bond envious, Top Secret was not the spy game for you. (Said gadgets only came in later supplements, and only for the revised version of the game, Top Secret S.I.). It’s not necessarily a bad thing … it just means that choices are limited. Any Top Secret adventure is going to run more along the lines of the stripped down “Casino Royale” than the over-the-top “Moonraker”.

And speaking of adventure … this one was my favorite.

Besides being a module that’s just plain fun, “Operation: Rapidstrike!” is a shining example of one of my favorite tools when it comes to writing adventures: the Ticking Clock. Used sparingly, the Ticking Clock is a great way to nudge players in a certain direction without railroading them. It basically means that unless the players do something in a certain timeframe, dire consequences occur. (I also call it the “Or Else” method – you need to do this, or else …)

A badly written Ticking Clock is one that involves black-and-white consequences – do this, or die. Do this, or the bad guys get the atomic bomb and blow up the city. You never want to pin players back to something truly horrible if they fail, especially if the reason they fail is just plain bad luck. Rather, the Ticking Clock should mean that success makes future actions easier, and failure means things become tougher later on, but not impossible. As a tool for the DM/Administrator, the Ticking Clock provides a way to keep the adventure moving, and to keep the players from either preparing for every possible contingency, or from arguing over plans, details, and other minutia that in excess can detract from the adventure. (Don’t get me wrong – I love sitting behind the game master’s screen, watching the players concocting plans! – but when it takes an hour to decide something simple like what door to take, things need to be pushed along, and a Ticking Clock serves nicely for pushing.)

A spy adventure, of course, is a perfect place for a Ticking Clock – and “Operation: Rapidstrike!” features four of them running simultaneously. The players’ mission is to rescue a kidnapped scientist, Dr. Felix Fendelmann, who (of course) inadvertently created a deadly drug known as Zucor. The evil Mademoiselle Larreau abducted Fendelmann and forced him to create large supplies of Zucor on a secluded island. The players are expected to rescue Fendelmann, destroy the supplies of Zucor, learn about Mademoiselle Larreau’s evil plans (and possibly neutralize her), and also locate a mole on the island known only as “Gregor”, who has been supplying information to the player character’s agency. It's a tall order, but it's not impossible.

What makes things interesting is how the players choose to approach achieving these goals. Depending on what they choose to do first, later goals may become either easier or more difficult. It might be easier to rescue Fendelmann early on in the adventure, for example, but having to drag him along throughout the adventure might pose some problems, and might cause Larreau’s guards to up the security on the Zucor supply if news of Fendelmann’s rescue spreads across the island. Also, if the players take too long in accomplishing their goals, Larreau and some of her henchmen might leave the island with their supplies of Zucor, causing the players’ mission to end in failure.

There aren’t any particular “WOW!” moments that make the module truly stand out, and I suppose that’s my main complaint about the adventure – there’s no signature moment that’s particularly memorable. But it’s very good all the way through, and there aren’t any weak moments in the adventure, either. If anything, I think it’s a better version of “Keep on the Borderlands” in that it seems to be designed to show off the rules of the game and what they can do, so that players in the adventure can better learn how the game works. There’s plenty of fighting, plenty of investigation, plenty of roleplaying opportunities, and plenty of action … depending on what the players choose to do, there’s even a potential chase scene involving a helicopter, which is kind of cool. It might not be the best spy adventure ever written, but it’s action-packed and always fun.

Better yet, it’s solid. Like a lot of the other modules being covered in NaClaMoMo, it hits that great balance between being open-ended and covering all contingencies. The players are free to do a lot of things in “Operation: Rapidstrike!” and the module is written in such a way that the players can do all of them in many different ways, in many different sequences of order – there’s not a lot of railroading going on in the adventure. But it’s also not so open that it’s a total free-for-all, which might be a disaster for somebody new or inexperienced running the module. It's got goals and direction, just not a specific order in which they need to be accomplished. It’s got that nice balance of firm guidelines that are flexible enough to let players make a lot of choices, but still keep the adventure on track towards a grand finale. Not many modules hit that sort of balance, but “Operation: Rapidstrike!” nails it perfectly.

I picked up the boxed set of “Top Secret” about a year ago on eBay on a lark, mostly to see if the game was as good as I remembered, or if my fond memories of the game were colored with nostalgia. It wasn’t quite as good as I remembered … but it was still pretty good nonetheless. And so was “Operation: Rapidstrike!”

Both are great examples of a different age of gaming. Not better, not worse … just different. And fun.

I’d love to run “Operation: Rapidstrike!” at GenCon someday for some friends.

Maybe I’ll see you at the table.

Assuming, of course, you choose to accept the mission.

Put simply, “Drums on Fire Mountain” is probably one of the better adventure modules that you’ve never read, and probably one you might not even know. It's an oft-neglected little gem that deserves some attention.

My first forays into being a DM started with Basic & Expert set D&D. “Palace of the Silver Princess” and “The Lost City” were the first real modules that I successfully ran … and that led to running “Isle of Dread” and “Castle Amber”. All four of these modules ranged from “very good” to “outstanding” in terms of quality (with most headed towards the “outstanding” part of the range), and all were written exceptionally well for a newbie DM like myself. All provided enough guidance to help keep the adventure on track, but a little room for some creative experimenting and freelancing.

I didn’t really pay attention to who wrote each module back then (hey, I was barely a teenager!), so I just started assuming that anything from the “B” series or “X” series would be good. However, after finishing up “Castle Amber”, I moved on to my latest purchase, “Curse of Xanathon”, and found a genuine dud.

“X3: Curse of Xanathon” will not be getting the fullNaClaMoMo treatment, but suffice it to say that it’s a prime example of how not to write a module. It features a lot of heavy-handed, awkward railroading of the players throughout the adventure, and there’s a lot of strange things going on throughout the module that simply defy logic. (As examples, the module relies on players listening to the offhanded remarks of a drunken dwarf in a tavern to propel them towards saving the kingdom; players – who may be of Lawful alignment – are constantly put in situations where they have to kill Lawful town guards; and don’t forget the giant temple of Chaos being built in the center of town that no one seems to care about. And that’s just scratching the surface.) Part of this is due to the module being set first in a city, and then in the wilderness, which lends itself to being fairly open-ended … but how that module handles that open-ended nature is just appalling.

My experience running “Curse of Xanathon” led to the first real bad DMing experience of my time in gaming, as I stubbornly tried to stick to the awkward railroading, and my players tried stubbornly to get off of its ludicrous rails. We never actually finished that one … and after the debacle of “Xanathon”, I avoided the “X” series for awhile, and ran some AD&D modules instead.

It was probably a year or so later when I went to Tiny Tots and found this module.

The cover was what caught my eye (the title certainly didn’t) … and I’ll admit, the little flag in the upper left-hand corner intrigued me. What’s a British module like? I didn’t know, I was curious, so I bought it. And a few weeks later, I ran it.

“Drums on Fire Mountain” did everything right that “Curse of Xanathon” did wrong. Like “Xanathon”, “Drums on Fire Mountain” takes place in an open-ending setting – the entire adventure happens on the island of Teki-nuri-ria. The module starts with a slight amount of railroading, as the player characters are hired by merchants to hunt down and slay the devil-creature KalnaKaa, who has riled up the native kara-kara savages on the island. They are given two specific suggestions as to how to get to the dormant volcano Ni-malowa, where KalnaKaa is thought to be hiding … and then, from there, things get interesting.

The two suggestions for getting to Ni-malowa – using an underground slavers’ tunnel, or simply going overland to Ni-malowa from where the ship’s captain wants to land – are given the most detail in the adventure. However, the module’s writers (Graeme Morris & Tom Kirby) do an outstanding job of quickly fleshing out the entire island with a few set encounters and a well-written random encounter guide, in case the players decide to simply explore the island instead of tending to their mission, or decide to approach Ni-malowa in a more unconventional way. (“The slavers’ tunnel? It must be a trap! Let’s head to the northern reaches of the volcano instead, they’ll never expect that …”)

It’s an excellent example of adventure balance. Writers only have so many words with which to write an adventure, and in an open-ended setting like an island, it’s hard to balance out the encounters and the adventure against all the possibilities that the players might choose. Spend too many words on the “obvious” choices like the slavers’ tunnel, and the DM isn’t given much material to work with when the players choose to ignore the obvious courses of action. Spend too much time fleshing out details not particularly relevant to the main adventure, and more important adventure material and details get short shrift. It’s not an easy thing to balance, but “Drums on Fire Mountain” just about gets it perfect.

The NPCs of “Drums on Fire Mountain” are also well-written and memorable. The kara-kara (who are essentially “tough tribal orcs”) aren’t just mindless monsters – they have reasons for following KalnaKaa, but those reasons disappear if the players manage to accomplish certain things. KalnaKaa’s daughter Maerie makes an interesting foil in the adventure as well – she’s tough, she’s certainly loyal to her father, but she isn’t evil. As for KalnaKaa himself … while he’s a despicably evil sort, he’s more interested in survival than just trying to destroy the player characters, so that switches up some of the encounters in ways the players might not expect. As with some of the other modules covered in NaClaMoMo, “Drums on Fire Mountain” has an abundance of roleplaying opportunities for the player characters, if they choose to take them. The NPCs of “Fire Mountain” are certainly much more than sword fodder.

The module does possess one potentially big, fatal flaw, though. Halfway through the adventure, it’s expected that the player characters will encounter KalnaKaa for the first time, and that KalnaKaa will manage to get away from this encounter, setting up for a rematch and grand finale with him at the end of the module. If things work out that way, it makes for dramatic and awesome adventure … but I’ve learned never to bet against the players in my group. If they manage to take down KalnaKaa the first time around and prevent his escap, it makes for a pretty short adventure, and there’s no contingency plans in the module covering what to do in case the players happen to be a little too successful in combat.

Still, “Drums on Fire Mountain” does far more right than it does wrong. It’s got a lot of distinctive flavor and feel, and really evokes a haunting atmosphere of the strange and the savage. It has a terrific mix of roleplaying opportunities, combat, puzzles, and other sorts of challenges. And it has a lot of options – I doubt two groups would ever play the module the same way, which to me is a sign of a great adventure.

There were two old classics I always wanted to give the “Dungeon Crawl Classics” treatment (much as I gave “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” the “Dungeon Crawl Classics” treatment with “Talons of the Horned King”.) One was “Castle Amber”. The other was “Drums on Fire Mountain.” At this point, I don’t expect to ever get the chance to do so, but that doesn’t change this undeniable fact – both are exceptional adventures that to me exemplify the way all adventures should be written, whether old-school, new-school, or however the hell you want to classify them. Both have stood the test of time, and in my opinion, are just as good today as they were when they were first released.

But you’d probably heard of “Castle Amber” before, and knew that it was a classic.

“Drums on Fire Mountain” is definitely a classic as well.

And now you’ve heard of it as well.