Greyhawk Conversion - Dark Tower/Caverns of Thracia

Dark Tower and The Caverns of Thracia by Jennell Jaquays are two of the best adventure modules ever produced. Dark Tower especially brings back one of the most fun and exciting times I ever had as a player. As a DM I found them both to be treasures exceeding their use as adventures. They had an influence on my campaigns and certainly on my own style of DMing and adventure design.

I wont go into deails on either but recommend them most highly to any DM. But this post isn't a review. My thoughts are about placing these adventures in the greyhawk campaign.

For Dark Tower I placed it in Bissel as an ancient outpost of Baklunish civilization lost long before the Invoked Devastation. The gods can be changed to protect the innocent though the Baklunish pantheon is so empty that dropping some Earthly deities into it would fill in some holes. For myself I grabbed the ancient being Sutek from Doctor Who for my Set and he works well for my campaign.

Caverns of Thracia was discussed on Lord Gosumba's Twitch channel last week and I loved the suggestion of placing the adventure with auitable alterations in Slerotin's Passage. Something I will be adding to my own campaign.

Dragon Magazine Art - Dragon #1 - 4

Dragon Magazine Art - Dragon #1

4).

Dragon Magazine #1 Page 9

Artist: P.J. (Jaquays?)

I like this piece of art. It immediately starts me thinking of how I can use it in an adventure. There is a ghostliness present in the eyeless face, the creature at his shoulder, the blurred skull and books in the background, the skeletal fingers on the page...

Is this some mage with a demonic minion, the ghost of some tormented sage in a lost and decaying library, a vision granted to the characters of what may come or may have been?

For my game this will fit with the Lost Library of Q'Sh rather nicely. I can see it... the characters are in the First Stack area, a vast chamber lined with shelves. The bookcases are disordered, some overturned, many moved and they place is a maze. If they explore deeply into book-lined passages they come to a cul-de-sac where a table sits in the middle surrounded by bookcases piled haphazardly with books, skulls, scrolls, tankards and bottles, potions and leather pouches thick with dust. An old man sits with bowed head at the table. The light from a candle sitting in the neck of an old wax covered wine bottle casts dancing shadows across the books, illuminates his grey-white hair... He raises his head and where his eyes should be are blank pits, black, unilluminated, untouched by the candle's light. Something in the flickering light rises as well; the face of terror, a hell face that forms from shadow and candle flame resting upon his shoulder as if reading the book that is flat on the table and held upon by the eyeless man's claw-like hand.

Which is what the picture makes me think of when I see it.