Retrospective: Earthshaker!

I mentioned in yesterday's "The Articles of Dragon" post that, by 1985, I had begun to sense a nebulous but nevertheless real shift in TSR Hobbies and its games, though I could not then have really articulated what precisely it was that I was sensing. Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, I'm still not entirely sure I can pinpoint what my younger self was picking up on – but I don't think I was mistaken in my hunch. That's why I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at some of TSR's releases around this time to see what they were like and what, if anything, they might reveal about the early years of the Silver Age of Dungeons & Dragons.

That's where the subject of today's Retrospective post comes in. David Cook's Earthshaker!, written for use with 1984's D&D Companion Rules, is a very unusual adventure module, containing many of the elements that mark this transitional period for TSR and its games. It's very clearly an attempt to try something different, both in terms of subject matter and tone. For example, Cook, in the "How to Run This Adventure" section, notes that "this is not an entirely serious adventure." That's not to say it's a "joke" module, but neither is it self-serious in its presentation. Like I said, it's an attempt to try something different and, on that front at least, it succeeds.

The module takes its name from a massive, magically powered war machine that trundles across the landscape, leaving destruction in its wake. At once a fortress, a vehicle, and an engine of conquest, the Earthshaker is a mobile threat that cannot simply be ignored or bypassed. In some ways, it's also an interesting inversion of the traditional dungeon. Rather than the character venturing into a static, well established locale, the "dungeon" comes to them in the form of an Empire State Building-sized steam-powered robot. Most of the adventure takes the form of the characters have to infiltrate this immense machine and stop its relentless march across the domain of a local lord (who can either be an NPC or, if the Companion rules are being fully used, one of the player characters). 

The adventure begins with the arrival of traveling impresario, Formiesias of Thyatis, who has made his way to the Kingdom of Norwold with his Exhibition of Wonders. Chief among these wonders is Earthshaker. Formiesias does not know the origin of the device, though he recounts several legends about it, one of which claims that it was once an evil giant who, upon having the gem that contained his soul stolen, he turned to iron. A clan of gnomes dwells within Earthshaker and they're responsible for its operation. In fact, Formiesias doesn't really understand its operation himself, though he does command a unique spell that enables him to transport the giant machine from place to place without its having to walk across – and destroy – the countryside.

Enter a group of villains who've managed to obtain the soul gem Formiesias mentioned. Turns out that it's not merely a legend but real and the key to seizing control of Earthshaker. The main action of the adventure, therefore, is the characters attempting to stop them from reaching the Brain Deck of the machine and, with it, command of the ancient device. It's a pretty straightforward premise for a scenario, all things considered, even conventional. What sets it apart is the locale in which it takes place.

A map is provided of the Earthshaker’s interior, divided into a series of decks stacked on top of each other. Unlike a more traditional dungeon, most of these decks aren't keyed with encounters or treasure. Instead, they're simply described as environments in which battles against the villains can take place, as the characters try to foil their plan. There's also some information on the inner working of the Earthshaker, too, but it's limited in scope. The Earthshaker is supposed to be this mysterious, ancient thing rather than something explicable.

Despite Cook's suggestion that Earthshaker! is not entirely serious, I don't detect too much in the way of humor. Certainly the gnomes who inhabit it possess a degree of whimsy that's reminiscent (probably intentionally) of the tinker gnomes of Dragonlance, but their presence here does not overwhelm the overall situation the module describes. Likewise, some of the NPCs, like Formiesias and even the villains, have a flamboyance that borders on comical, yet I don't feel they cross the line into parody. It wouldn't be wrong to call Earthshaker! "light hearted" in its overall tone, though. The Tomb of Horrors this is not!

I’d even go so far as to say there’s a certain exuberance to Earthshaker! There’s a sense that Cook was exploring the outer limits of what D&D could encompass. The presence of a gigantic, walking war machine in a fantasy setting harkens back to a time when the game’s identity was still fluid and the boundaries between genres were porous. I find that aspect of the module appealing now, though I recall being somewhat irked by it at the time. Even so, the environment Cook presents is sufficiently intriguing that I was willing to overlook any reservations I had about its blending of fantasy and quasi-technological elements.

That said, I never actually ran Earthshaker! Like many modules of this period, it offered compelling ideas but never quite rose to the level of a “must play” scenario for me. Re-reading it forty years later, I’m no longer certain whether that judgment reflects a shortcoming of the adventure itself or simply my own preferences, both then and now. Indeed, I can’t help but wonder whether some of the shift I perceived in TSR during the mid-1980s was, in fact, a shift in me. I turned sixteen in 1985 and had already been playing Dungeons & Dragons for nearly six years. It’s possible I was simply growing restless and, without quite realizing it, projected that restlessness onto the game.

Viewed in that light, Earthshaker! might be less a misstep than a sign of a game stretching beyond its earlier boundaries, sometimes awkwardly, but not without imagination. It may never have compelled me to play it, but its central idea was clever nonetheless, a testament to the power of a strong conceit even when its execution is uneven. If nothing else, it serves as a reminder that D&D has always been at its most interesting when it dares to be a little strange.

Retrospective: Mage: The Ascension

I know that, for some readers, White Wolf's World of Darkness games represent a definitive break with the early days of the hobby and, therefore, aren't a fit topic for discussion on this blog. I won't argue the larger point, even though I think White Wolf's RPGs represent less a revolution than an evolution of trends begun many years before. What I will say is that these games played an important role in helping me to better understand what I liked and what I didn't in roleplaying games and, for that reason, I cannot simply dismiss them. 

Even so, I was never a big fan of Vampire: The Masquerade. For a variety of reasons, it never quite clicked with me and its immediate successor, Werewolf: The Apocalypse held even less appeal. Mage: The Ascension was a different matter entirely. Released in 1993, it was the World of Darkness game that made me finally take serious notice of the line. Like its predecessors, Mage presented a contemporary setting shot through with supernatural elements and an emphasis on mood, theme, and personal struggle. Unlike them, however, Mage was not content merely to reframe familiar folkloric monsters. Instead, it aimed at something more ambitious: the reimagining of Reality itself as a mutable construct, shaped and constrained by human belief.

This is the beating heart of Mage: The Ascension. As presented in the game, Reality is not fixed, but rather the product of consensus. What humanity collectively accepts as possible becomes so; what it rejects becomes difficult or even impossible to achieve. The titular mages are those rare individuals who have awakened to this truth and, through force of will, can impose their own understanding of Reality upon the world. It's an absolutely terrific premise and one that works well within a modern-day setting. It allows for a conception of magic – or magick, the rulebook rather portentously calls it – limited only by imagination. At the same time, this conception also includes the risk of paradox, the backlash that occurs when a mage’s actions too flagrantly contradict the already established consensus of the world.

Mechanically, Mage divides magic into "spheres," which are broad domains such as Forces, Mind, and Time. In principle, the system grants players remarkable freedom to devise magical effects on the fly, constrained only by their characters’ knowledge of the relevant Spheres and their own imaginations. In practice, however, this freedom comes at cost. The system demands a degree of negotiation and interpretation that can prove taxing, particularly for referees accustomed to clearer guidelines. Where most roleplaying games offered more concrete procedures for adjudicating actions, Mage often substituted a framework that must be continually interpreted and, at times, reinvented every time a character attempted to employ magic.

That's not necessarily a criticism, since Mage attempted to incorporate some of this tension into its setting as well. The conflict between boundless possibility and practical playability is mirrored in the conflict between the various Traditions to which characters belong and the agents of a rationalized, scientific consensus known as the Technocracy. The Technocracy is both a terrific adversary and brilliant bit of worldbuilding. Not entirely villainous, its agents are committed to the preservation of a stable and predictable Reality, one in which even "sleepers" (i.e. non-mages) can enjoy the fruits of magic in the form of technology. Consequently, the central struggle of Mage is not a simple battle between good and evil, but a more nuanced contest between competing visions of how the world ought to function. It's this philosophical battle that drew me in all those years ago and still compels me even now.

Despite – or perhaps because of – this, Mage is not an easy game to run or to play. Its rules, while evocative, are often vague, leaving much to the discretion of the referee. This can result in a lack of consistency, as similar situations may be adjudicated differently from one session (or one group) to another. Moreover, the demands placed upon both players and referee are considerable. To make effective use of the system requires not only a firm grasp of its mechanics but also a willingness to engage with the underlying assumptions of its worldview. Even then, if my experiences with the game are any indication, it was often tough going. 

That's why, in the end, I judge Mage: The Ascension as a flawed masterpiece that's very much of its time. Its themes of subjectivity, relativism, and the limits of objective truth remain compelling, of course, especially to the more philosophically inclined segment of the gaming population. Likewise, I can't help but admire its boldness in attempting to expand the scope of what roleplaying games might address, both mechanically and thematically. However, I think it's fair to say that its reach exceeded its grasp – but at least it was reaching for something genuinely new and imaginative. When I first read the game back in the '90s, I thought that was worth celebrating and I still do.

Retrospective: The Argon Gambit

Today, I make good on a promise I made two weeks ago to write a retrospective on the other adventure included in GDW’s Double Adventure 3 for Traveller, The Argon Gambit. Compared to its companion, Death Station, it rarely receives much attention, even among dedicated Traveller fans. That’s understandable to a degree, since it is more closely tied to the Third Imperium setting and therefore less easily adapted to other contexts. Even so, The Argon Gambit is a solid scenario that plays to Traveller’s strengths as a more “serious” science fiction RPG. Rereading it, I was struck by how influential it must have been on me when I was younger, as its overall structure closely resembles many of the scenarios I’ve written or refereed over the years.

The Argon Gambit is very explicitly set in the Solomani Rim, far removed from the familiar Spinward Marches. This sector is defined primarily by human conflicts, especially the ideological tensions between the Solomani and the Third Imperium. Solomani belief in the superiority of Terran humans casts a long shadow here, shaping the sector's politics in ways that The Argon Gambit exploits for their adventure potential. 

In terms of structure, the adventure begins simply, in a way that familiar, almost clichéd, for longtime players of Traveller. The characters, in need of money, are hired to steal a set of genealogical documents from a villa in the titular city of Argon on the planet Janosz. Like all such jobs, it appears straightforward at first, but, as it turns out, the documents in question are being used for blackmail and their contents carry explosive political implications, since the Solomani Party places great emphasis on the genetic "purity" of its members. 

After the initial job, The Argon Gambit becomes a political mystery involving a three-way struggle within the local Solomani Party. A hardline supremacist, a moderate rival, and an ostensibly neutral power broker all maneuver for advantage. Behind them lurks a deeper game. The patron who hires the characters is himself an Imperial agent, seeking to manipulate events so that both major factions are discredited, leaving his own puppet in control.

It's a terrific set-up for an adventure that could only really work within the context of GDW's Third Imperium setting. That's both a blessing and curse, depending on how wedded one is to the game's official setting. For me, it was great, but I can easily imagine people less enthused with the setting finding it too obscure or focused on setting-specific minutiae to be useful. That's why I suspect The Argon Gambit doesn't get as much love as Death Station.

At the same time, the adventure, designed by Frank Chadwick, makes excellent use of the classic Traveller adventure components, like rumors, which it categorizes by source and ties to the characters’ backgrounds (e.g. Navy, TAS, noble title, etc.). These rumors are essential to understanding the situation on Janosz, though their presentation is frustrating. The referee must piece together the scenario much as the players do, only really understanding the full scope of what's happening after reading explanatory notes at its very end. That's not a problem as such, but it means the referee probably needs to read the adventure several times before attempting to run it (yes, yes, I know, that's only common sense ...).

More interesting, I think, is the moral ambiguity of the scenario. Everyone involved is compromised in some way and acting according to their own best interests. There's no obvious "right" way to proceed. The characters begin as pawns in someone else’s scheme, but, as they uncover more of what's actually happening, they, in turn, have the opportunity to bring about a conclusion that they think is best and the adventure passes no judgments on that. Consequently, it's a very open-ended and heavily reliant not just player choice but referee implementation. This is the kind of adventure that could kick off an entire campaign – or complicate an existing one.

It's a shame that The Argon Gambit isn't better known and appreciated. As I said at the beginning of this post, I hadn't realized the extent of its influence over my own personal style and preferences as a referee until I re-read it in preparation for writing this. I tend to include lots of moral ambiguity and compromised figures in my games. While I don't favor "edgy" or "dark" content, I likewise shy away from clear "good guys" and "bad guys," preferring NPCs whose motivations and actions are more muddled and, dare I say, human. I'm not sure I picked these tendencies up solely from The Argon Gambit, but there's no question the adventure played a role in my doing so, hence my continued affection for it after more than four decades.

Retrospective: Fading Suns

(Yes, I know I said I'd do a post today about Argon Gambit, the other adventure found in GDW's Double Adventure 3 and I will, but the Muse had other thoughts, as she often does, and here we are.)

When I initiated the Retrospective series back in 2008, my unthinking assumption was that I would limit myself to writing about RPG products from the first decade or so of the hobby, since that was, more or less, the period when most of what we now call old school games were published. Even though I hadn't given it much thought beforehand, this was, I think, a perfectly defensible position at the time. However, eighteen(!) years have passed since I wrote that first Retrospective post, meaning that more and more of RPG history is now further in the rearview mirror, with even the mid-1990s being three decades ago. 

Likewise, my own interest in the history and development of the hobby has similarly expanded, meaning that the scope of what I want to discuss here is not quite as narrow as it once was. That and the fact that I'm now seventeen sessions into my Dark Between the Stars campaign made me think that maybe I should take a look at Holistic Design's Fading Suns science fiction roleplaying game, whose first edition was released in 1996. 

I distinctly recall when I first saw a copy Fading Suns on the shelf of my local game store, sitting right beside Deadlands, which had come out at the same time. Being an inveterate science fiction fan, I was naturally drawn to the book's weird and moody cover, featuring what I eventually realized was a jumpgate floating in the void of space. Flipping through it, I was similarly struck by its black and white artwork, which reminded me of the illustrations I'd seen in some of White Wolf's offerings. That shouldn't have been a surprise, since the creators of Fading Suns, Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg, who had previously been the developers of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Vampire: The Masquerade before working at Holistic Design and brought some of White Wolf's sensibilities with them.

It's worth noting that Holistic Design is not primarily a roleplaying game publisher but rather a developer of computer games. One of its games was the turned-based strategy game Emperor of the Fading Suns, released in early 1997, six months or so after the RPG. From what I understand, Bridges and Greenberg were brought in to develop the setting of the computer game, which eventually became sufficiently detailed and complex that it was decided to release it as a tabletop roleplaying game. At the time, I knew nothing about the computer game, so my interest was entirely in the RPG, whose aesthetics brought to mind a mash-up of Dune, Warhammer 40K, and Gene Wolfe's "New Sun" series.

As it turned out, my instincts on this score were not far off, as that's pretty close to the general vibe of the setting of the game. Set at the dawn of the 51st century, Fading Suns posits a kind of interstellar Middle Ages, after the fall of a technologically sophisticated Republic. In its place arose an empire composed of scheming noble houses, a Church whose priests command real divine powers, and merchant guilds who retain some of the technology of earlier times. Arrayed against the empire are rebels, heretics, barbarians, and – worst of all – demonic powers dwelling in the dark between the stars. Then there's also the phenomenon of the titular fading suns, as the stars themselves are noticeably dimmed from an unknown cause, adding to the pre-apocalyptic feel of the setting.

The result is a portentous, wonderfully baroque setting that pulls on multiple threads of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, byzantine political and religious intrigue, and some genuinely compelling mystical flights of fancy. For someone like me, this is catnip. Fading Suns manages to combine all these different elements together in a way that doesn't always cohere, but they nonetheless have a vibe that feels distinctive even if it's very obvious from where they're ultimately derived. It's an impressive act of creative alchemy that still holds up well three decades after its original release.

Where Fading Suns falls down, in my view, is its Victory Point rules system. They are, at best, workable, combining elements from White Wolf's Storyteller system and Pendragon with a blackjack-style "roll high but stay under a target number" approach. It's not the worst system ever conceived for a roleplaying game but it's often clunky in play. More than that, I have always found it hard to remember, which leads to frequent rulebook-flipping to confirm details of its implementation. That's always been the biggest downside to a game I've otherwise considered one of my personal favorites. 

Fading Suns cannot, by any stretch of the term, be considered an old school RPG. It's very much an example of the '90s push for more "narrative" games that placed a greater emphasis on mechanizing a character's inner life (i.e. beliefs, drives, passions, etc.) in a way intended to mimic literature and other media. These efforts are still in an embryonic form compared to later, more focused designs, so they don't bother me much. I still referee my current campaign in a rather old school, almost sandbox fashion, with the characters interacting with a setting full of factions all pursuing their own plans independent of them. Fading Suns practically begs for this kind of approach, since the Known Worlds already possess a multiplicity of power groups contending with one another for dominance.

Having contributed professional to its second and current editions, I am no doubt biased, but, for all its flaws, I consider Fading Suns a really good game, one that I've had a lot of fun with over the years. It's not perfect – what game is? – but it packs a lot of compelling, evocative ideas under one cover. I'm very glad to be revisiting it with the former House of Worms crew for however long the campaign lasts. 

Retrospective: Death Station

GDW's Traveller is justifably lauded for the wealth of tools it provided the referee in generating his own adventures, such as procedures for generating worlds, handling trade, and creating encounters, among many others. However, the company also published a large number of ready-made adventures, too, starting with The Kinunir in 1979 and I think they deserve to be better appreciated for how much they contributed to the success of the game. Though not all every Traveller adventure is a winner, many are classics.

One such classic is Death Station, one of two adventures published in 1981 as Double Adventure 3 (the other being Argon Gambit, about which I'll talk next week). Designed by Marc Miller, Death Station exemplifies many of the sensibilities of early roleplaying adventures by being compact and largely concerned with providing a referee with a location, a problem, and a handful of dangers with which to challenge the player characters rather than much in the way of background detail. 

The scenario's premise is simple. The characters are hired by Lysani Laboratories to investigate a lab ship orbiting the world of Gadden after communication with it has been lost. Upon arrival, they discover that most of its crew is dead, while the station itself shows signs of damage. Further investigation reveals scattered clues pointing to psychochemical experiments intended to produce a new type of combat drug that heightened personal strength, dexterity, and endurance. The experiments were successful to a degree, but sabotage by a rival company resulted in the entire crew being exposed to an early version of the combat drugs that enhanced their physical abilities at the cost of their sanity. Now deranged, they pose a threat to anyone who boards the lab ship.

In a sense, Death Station offers what might be called a science fictional "dungeon,” complete with "monsters" in the form of the deranged crew. The lab ship is mapped and divided into keyed areas through which the player characters must move cautiously, examining laboratories, storage areas, and crew quarters. As in a fantasy dungeon, each location aboard ship offers the possibility of discovery, danger, or both. Logs, notes, and physical evidence gradually reveal what happened, while the deranged survivors and similarly deranged lab animals ensure that exploration is never safe.

The influence of movies like 1979's Alien is clear, I think, but, rather than resorting to an unknown extraterrestrial threat, Death Station opts instead for reckless science running afoul of corporate espionage, which fits well within Traveller's more sober approach to SF. Even so, the adventure has great atmosphere, which is a big part of why I count it among my Top 10 Classic Traveller adventures. The scenario relies less on direct exposition than on the gradual accumulation of clues. Some of that is a direct consequence of its sparseness of its descriptions and room keys, which is as much intentional as it is driven by the shortness of the page count.  

Even so, Miller includes four pages of referee's notes that help provide not only a brief overview of what happened aboard the lab ship and why but also guidelines for how to run encounters with the deranged crew and experimental animals. This is useful, since part of the fun of Death Station is navigating its cramped rooms and corridors while its inhabitants also move about and stalk the characters. Also included in the notes is a discussion of the effects of the experimental combat drug, which is also helpful in handling encounters involving the crew who are affected by it. 

My own experience with Death Station is that it’s both straightforward to run and surprisingly tense in play. The confined environment of the lab ship, combined with the unpredictable behavior of the drug-crazed crew, creates a constant sense of unease. The situation is made more tense due to the fact that, once the characters understand what's going on, they likely won't want to kill the surviving crew but instead seek a way to subdue and possibly cure them – at least, that's what has happened when I've made use of the scenario in the past.

From chatting with other Traveller fans, I've come to realize I'm not alone in regarding Death Station so highly. Its premise is immediately understandable, its structure is easy for a referee to grasp at a glance, and its atmosphere remains effective. Like many of GDW’s adventures, it provides just enough detail to establish the situation while leaving ample room for the referee to elaborate as needed. That balance between guidance and openness is a plus in my opinion and it’s certainly why Death Station has a lot of replay value, even after more than four decades since its publication.

Retrospective: The Gamer's Handbook of the Marvel Universe

I've no doubt mentioned on numerous occasions that, as a kid, I was never a big reader of comic books – at least not superhero comic books. Even so, many of my friends were avid comic readers and, more than that, it would have been quite difficult growing up in the 1970s and '80s to not know at least a little bit about comic book superheroes, particularly those published by Marvel Comics, merchandise for which was seemingly everywhere at the time. So, while I never a devoted fan of the genre, I was familiar with its characters and storylines.

Consequently, once I got into roleplaying games, I inevitably picked up Champions and had a good time with it, though it was never going to rise as high in my affections as, say, Dungeons & Dragons or Traveller. Champions was too ponderous and math-heavy for my tastes and seemed, to my way of thinking at any rate, to be a poor fit with the fast and frenetic action of superhero slugfests. Champions was good enough, because I didn't have any other ready alternatives, but I never connected to it the way I did with other RPGs.

TSR's Marvel Super Heroes, on the other hand, was pretty close to perfect for my purposes. That it was published by TSR certainly helped, I am sure, but, unlike many of TSR's other non-D&D offerings, Marvel Super Heroes was one that I played regularly, because it hit a sweet spot in its design and presentation. This was a game that was meant to be played and my friends and I had a blast with it. Sure, one can quibble about its lack of a robust character creation system, but that mostly didn't matter, because the whole point of this game was taking on the roles of one of Marvel's immense pantheon of heroes. 

That's what made the Gamer's Handbook of the Marvel Universe, released in four 256-page volumes over the course of 1988, so appealing. Modeled on the 15-volume Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe series from Marvel Comics, TSR's Handbook provided game statistics for nearly every Marvel character ever to appear in its comics, as well as information on their history and even roleplaying notes. If you were playing Marvel Super Heroes, this was pretty much a must-have product, especially if, like me, your favorite heroes and villains had never appeared in other MSH products or in the pages of Jeff Grubb's excellent "The Marvel-Phile" series.

Much like the Monstrous Compendium for AD&D Second Edition, the Handbook's pages were five-hole punched so that they could be organized into a binder. Unlike the MC, I don't believe TSR ever produced officially-branded binders for this purpose, but my memory is hazy. Interestingly, Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, released between 1985 and 1987 in obvious imitation of Marvel's earlier effort, was released in a similar loose-leaf format. I have no idea whether TSR was, in turn, borrowing a page from DC or if it was simply something the company had, for whatever reason, hit upon as a useful format for releasing its products at the time.

I loved these books and regret that I no longer own my original copies of them. Unfortunately, they came out during my college years and a lot of things I acquired during that time went missing as I regularly moved between my parents' home and various dormitories. TSR released four more, slimmer follow-up volumes to the originals – annual updates that included new or overlooked characters, in addition to literal updates previously presented characters. I never saw any of these and so cannot speak to their specific contents, but I get the impression that, like the initial volumes, they were well-regarded and useful.

Thinking back on this series of products, I find myself remembering just how good Marvel Super Heroes was and how much I enjoyed playing it. Though I've played (or attempted to play) several other superhero RPGs in the years since, none has ever really grabbed me the way MSH did. That might just be because I'm not, as I said, a diehard superhero fan and thus have never really committed to the genre for roleplaying purposes. However, I prefer to think it's more likely that Marvel Super Heroes was just a solid, intuitive design that fit its subject matter in a way few others have. I miss it.

Retrospective: The Ruins of Myth Drannor

I know that, for many fans of old-school Dungeons & Dragons, Ed Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms represents a decisive (and unwelcome) break from the game’s early days, both in content and especially in presentation. I don’t agree with that assessment, though this isn’t the place to rehearse that entire argument. What I will say is that revisiting TSR’s Forgotten Realms products from the late 1980s through the 1990s, I find a body of work that is not the betrayal its detractors claim, but is instead a mixed bag – occasionally frustrating, frequently ambitious, and at times genuinely impressive.

A good case in point is The Ruins of Myth Drannor, a 1993 boxed set detailing the fabled elven “City of Song.” Myth Drannor had long loomed large in the background of the setting. For years prior to this set’s release, Greenwood referenced it repeatedly as a shining example of magical harmony undone by hubris and catastrophe. Consequently, when the boxed set finally appeared, I eagerly snapped it up.

From the first time I read about it, I imagined Myth Drannor as one of the great fallen cities of the Realms. Its destruction defined much of the Forgotten Realms’ melancholy grandeur. The Realms, at least as I understood them, were not a setting on the ascent but a world in decline, a place of fading glories and lingering ruins, closer in spirit to pulp fantasy than to high heroic triumphalism. Myth Drannor is where this comes into sharp focus. 

Transforming such a mythic ruin into a playable location was no doubt a challenge. Myth Drannor is not a megadungeon in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a shattered metropolis sprawled across the forest of Cormanthyr. Its districts, academies, towers, temples, vaults, and magical zones warped by a magic effect that once protected the city. TSR had previously attempted little else on this scale. One might point to Dwellers of the Forbidden City as an early precursor, though the comparison only goes so far. In spirit, its closest analog may be Chaosium’s Big Rubble for RuneQuest, which is still, in my opinion, the gold standard for “ruin crawl” locales.

In many respects, The Ruins of Myth Drannor succeeds admirably in its goals. Greenwood presents the city as an environment. It is effectively a mini-sandbox, a vast urban wilderness suitable for exploration, salvage, factional conflict, and long-term campaigns built around survival amid arcane devastation. The conceptual foundation is solid. The boxed set offers history, factions, current inhabitants, and numerous adventure hooks. This is all good stuff. Where it falters is in execution.

The set does not consistently provide the Dungeon Master with the tools necessary to bring so large a space to life in play. The maps are expansive and the descriptions evocative, but there is surprisingly little in the way of random encounter tables, stocking guidelines, event generators, or even name lists to help a referee improvise within such a vast environment. Instead, we are given several more fully fleshed-out adventures and a handful of small, somewhat uninspired mini-dungeons that can be dropped in as needed. Those adventures are serviceable, but they do not quite match the promise implied by the scale of the city itself. 

This absence of these kinds of referee tools is all the more striking because the physical presentation of the boxed set is impressive. The poster maps are sweeping, delineating districts and geography. They convey scale beautifully. One can easily imagine months of play wandering the overgrown avenues and shattered towers. Yet, that same scale exposes a weakness. Much of the city is described in broad strokes. The maps suggest more than the text delivers or indeed could deliver.

The background material is quintessentially Greenwoodian, dense with names, lineages, magic, and history. For readers invested in the Realms as a setting, this lore is rich and rewarding. For referees seeking immediately usable material, however, it can feel overwhelming. Even as someone who once delighted in “Realmslore,” I occasionally found myself wishing that some of the word count devoted to ancient history had instead gone toward practical game tools.

One element the boxed set gets absolutely right is its intended level range. The Ruins of Myth Drannor is not for novice characters. The ruins teem with formidable threats, like elven and mind flayer liches, demons, devils, magical constructs, and strange, magic-eating abominations. These are adversaries suited to mid and high-level characters. For referees who enjoy high-level play – and who know how difficult it can be to challenge powerful characters – Myth Drannor fills a genuine need. It offers a compelling and dangerous playground for experienced adventurers.

In the end, I think The Ruins of Myth Drannor exemplifies much of TSR’s output during this period. It is ambitious, atmospheric, and lavishly presented. It's also frustrating. It gestures toward an open-ended and exploratory style of play that strongly matches old school sensibilities, but it stops short of fully embracing the procedural support such play demands.

Even so, I still very much like this boxed set. When it was released, I used it and mined it for material to use in my campaign. Its flaws required work on my part as referee, of course, but the raw material was there, waiting to be shaped. Perhaps that is the most old-school aspect of it after all: not a perfectly engineered product, but a rich, uneven trove of ideas demanding engagement.

Myth Drannor, both as a fictional city and as a boxed set, stands as a monument to a fallen age – within the Realms and within TSR itself. Imperfect, excessive, occasionally exasperating, yet grand in conception, it reminds us that decline and greatness are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes they are, in fact, the same thing viewed from different angles.

Retrospective: Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting

Let's begin by making a clarification. This week's Retrospective concerns the AD&D Second Edition boxed set released by TSR in 1993 called the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. This is not to be confused with the AD&D First Edition product released in 1987 called the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set, about which I've already written a Retrospective post – though the former is indeed a revision and expansion of the latter. Why the two products have such similar yet still different titles eludes me. I expect the answer is most likely an oversight on the part of TSR's production team.

In any case, the 1993 product is a simultaneously terrific and frustrating product. At the time of its release, I was just beginning a campaign set in the Realms – the last AD&D campaign I would run before more or less abandoning the game for other RPGs – so its appearance was a godsend. Though I already owned (and loved) the 1987 set, it was several years out of date, both with the current AD&D rules and with events in the setting itself, so a more substantial update than the Forgotten Realms Adventures hardback was long overdue.

Say what you will about TSR in the 1990s, but one thing the company did very well was produce boxed RPG products and this one is no different. Coming in a sturdy, deep box, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set was positively stuffed with material: a 128-page A Grand Tour of the Realms, 64-page Guide to Running the Realms, a 96-page Shadowdale book (not to be confused with the terrible adventure module of the same name), several Monstrous Compendium pages and cart-apart sheets of cards, and, of course, four large, full-color maps of the Realms. It's a truly impressive collection of softcover books and other accessories.

A Grand Tour of the Realms is the heart of the boxed set, providing an overview of the setting and its locations. It's packed with information – probably too much, to be honest – and that's both a blessing and a curse, as I'll eventually explain. When I was refereeing a Realms campaign, it was probably the book I consulted the most often. By contrast, the Guide to Running the Realms, though seemingly intended as the Dungeon Master's companion book to the setting, is much less useful. More than half of its pages are spent detailing NPCs, large and small, as well as the various deities of the setting. It's not a useless book by any means, but I rarely looked at it.

Shadowdale is better. It's a deep dive into the most famous of the Dalelands, making it a suitable starting point for a new Forgotten Realms campaign, as well as a "home base" for adventurers who want to roam the region between the Moonsea and the Sea of Fallen Stars. The Dale is described in exhaustive detail – a recurring pattern in this boxed set – with almost every location given at least a short paragraph, often more. Several of these locales even have interior maps. Finally, there's a lengthy adventure, "Beneath the Twisted Tower," for beginning characters that not only makes good use of the material already presented but could easily serve as the kick-off to an entire campaign in and around the Dales.

Combined with all the other extras included inside the box, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting is a terrific product, one that really does give the Dungeon Master nearly everything he could possibly want for starting a new campaign in Ed Greenwood's storied setting. I know I found it invaluable when I was refereeing my campaign decades ago, especially as I hadn't been keeping up with all the changes TSR wrought on the Realms during the years since the release of the original 1987 boxed set. In terms of simple utility, this is a good candidate for the best setting material TSR produced during the company's existence (though there's an embarrassment of riches to choose from).

At the same time, if you're familiar with both the original boxed set and/or Greenwood's articles about the Realms in the pages of Dragon, it's hard not to be a little frustrated by the 1993 set. I've already noted several times now how much material is found within the three included books – so much that it could be overwhelming. I understand that not everyone is put off by lots of detail and, as a longtime fan of Tékumel, I feel vaguely hypocritical for grousing about the much more modest information found in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. Still, I feel as if the nature of the Realms started to change in this era, moving away from a more open-ended, almost sandbox-y setting into something more defined and therefore less flexible, at least when compared to its roots.

A big part of that probably has to do with not merely the Time of Troubles but how many products TSR had already produced for the setting. TSR turned the Forgotten Realms into the default, baseline setting of Second Edition, which meant that it shoehorned all manner of stuff into the setting that didn't really fit with Greenwood's original depictions of it. For example, several regions were made less fantastical and more like analogs of real world cultures and historical periods. This genericized the Realms and bled it of its original flavor. That disappointed me even at the time and does so even more now.

For all that, I still have a lot of affection for this boxed set. I not only made good use of it, but it's a fine example of a style of RPG product that no one really makes anymore – a largely complete description of a setting in a single box. I know there are all sorts of reasons why such a product is no longer as feasible as it was in the early 1990s, but that doesn't change my nostalgia for it. At the end of the day, I feel the only true judge of a gaming product is how much fun it engendered in play. By that standard, I consider the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting a winner.

Retrospective: Forgotten Realms Adventures

After spending last week’s Retrospective criticizing Shadowdale, the product intended to help transition the Forgotten Realms AD&D setting into Second Edition, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a more positive look at another release from shortly thereafter: the 1990 hardback Forgotten Realms Adventures. Written by Jeff Grubb and Ed Greenwood, the same duo behind the original 1987 Forgotten Realms boxed set, Forgotten Realms Adventures (or FRA, as my friends and I called it) functioned as a bridge between that First Edition boxed set and the newly released Second Edition rules. Unlike Shadowdale, I have far more positive associations with this book. While it isn’t without flaws, it’s better written and, more importantly, genuinely useful.

At 154 pages long, Forgotten Realms Adventures is shorter than either the Second Edition Player's Handbook or Dungeon Master's Guide, but it still feels much of a piece with them in terms of its layout, art, and graphic design. If you like that sort of presentation, with its cramped three-column text, blue highlights, and Stephen Fabian interior artwork broken up by full-color, full-page illustrations by icons of the Silver Age, like Caldwell, Easley, and Elmore, then you'll in for more of the same. If, like me, you merely tolerate it as an artifact of its era, you'll probably be less happy. (And if you actively dislike it, odds are good you never bought or played any AD&D 2e stuff to begin with.)

Content-wise, the book is, quite literally, a mixed bag. Its first chapter is devoted to updating the Realms to not merely Second Edition but also to the consequences of the Time of Troubles/Avatar Crisis. A whole post (or series of them) could probably be written about the whys and wherefores of TSR's changes to the Forgotten Realms setting (which had already been changed from Greenwood's vision in several ways), but, in the interests of brevity, I'm going to gloss over most of them here. What's most important to understand is that the aforementioned Time of Troubles involved the fall of the gods from their Outer Planar homes to the Realms, thereby throwing the setting into chaos.

That chaos was intended by TSR as cover for introducing changes to the Forgotten Realms. Some of those changes were necessitated by changes in the rules of Second Edition, while others were to make the setting more amenable to the "angry mothers from heck," who'd been plaguing the game almost since its inception. Given that, Forgotten Realms Adventures isn't a completely coherent book. It's written and presented more like one of those annual encyclopedia updates some of us probably remember from our youths. The goal here is to give players and Dungeon Masters involved in Realms campaigns with all the rules and setting information necessary to use it with the newly-released 2e – at least until the release of a natively 2e boxed setting in 1993.

That first chapter is actually pretty good in my opinion, largely delivering on the promise of Second Edition to make AD&D more flexible and receptive to setting-specific changes. So, there's discussion on how, for example, certain classes fit into the Realms and what 2e options for them should be employed. Chapter 2 expands on this approach by focusing on priests, whose powers and abilities depend heavily on the details of the setting. Those first two chapters are nearly forty pages long and, while that might seem like a lot, most of the material is only vital if you're making use of a specific character class in play. That's why I made the comparison with those old encyclopedia updates. Forgotten Realms Adventures is not a book you're meant to read cover to cover but refer to when needed.

As a setting, the Forgotten Realms is known for two things: the prevalence of magic and Ed Greenwood's love of setting detail. The bulk of the book provides both in copious amounts. Chapter 3 offers up many, many new wizard spells, while Chapter 4 describes two dozen settlements, large and small, within the setting. These descriptions include both a high-level map of the location and a key of important places and people within it. These are very useful and something I appreciated at the time, when I was refereeing a Realms campaign. Chapter 5 looks at several important secret societies within the setting and Chapter 6 looks at gems and jewelry, a topic Greenwood had previously covered in issue #72 of Dragon (April 1983).

As I said, FRA is a mixed bag of content. It's not as well presented as, say, Dragonlance Adventures, but neither is it the mess that was Greyhawk Adventures. It's not really a stand-alone book. It's clearly written for people who are already making use of the Forgotten Realms setting and who already know its ins and outs. For those people – and I was one of them – this was a good and useful addition to my AD&D library and I regularly turned to it in play. However, it has minimal to no utility for anyone else. It's completely useless as a primer to the Realms, which is almost assuredly the reason TSR decided a couple of years later to release a new and expanded boxed version of the setting (about which I'll talk next week). Of course, that was never the book's purpose and I think it unfair to judge it on that basis. Viewed as an update to an existing setting, I thought it quite decent and, even after all these years, still have considerable affection for it, warts and all.

Retrospective: Shadowdale

Since I alluded in yesterday’s post to a shift in how TSR approached the Forgotten Realms, it seems worthwhile to examine the point at which that shift became unmistakable: Shadowdale, the 1989 AD&D module by Ed Greenwood. The first of three linked adventures intended to usher the setting into Second Edition, Shadowdale also served to advance the “Time of Troubles” metaplot through which TSR fundamentally reshaped the Realms. Lest anyone think otherwise, let state at the outset that, as an adventure, Shadowdale is deeply flawed. As a historical artifact, however, it is far more compelling, marking a decisive change in how the Forgotten Realms was framed and understood, both by TSR and its audience.

In many respects, Shadowdale is not really an adventure module at all, at least not in the sense that term had traditionally been understood. Rather than presenting a locale to be explored or a problem to be solved, Shadowdale instead serves primarily as a vehicle for presenting unfolding setting events over which the player characters have no control. Certainly, the characters are present during moments of great importance, like the fall of the gods to Toril or the assault on Shadowdale by the Zhentarim, but their role is largely one of observation. Outcomes are predetermined, major NPCs dominate the action, and the larger flow of events proceeds regardless of player choice. The module reads less like an invitation to adventure than as a dramatization of a story someone else has already decided.

This represents a sharp departure from earlier presentations of the Forgotten Realms. In the version of the Realms seen in Greenwood’s many Dragon articles, the 1987 campaign set, and its early supplements, the Realms functioned as a richly detailed backdrop rather than an unfolding narrative. History was largely static, providing a deep reservoir of implications, ruins, and grudges for Dungeon Masters to draw upon. Even powerful NPCs, such as the much-derided Elminster, were framed less as protagonists than as fixtures of the setting. They were figures with their own agendas, but not the only drivers of action within the setting. There was still plenty of scope for the player characters to leave their marks on the world.

Shadowdale signals a shift away from that understanding. With the Time of Troubles, the Realms acquired a timeline with canonical turning points and inevitable outcomes. The fall and return of the gods is more than a bit of background; it's a story to be told and told in a particular way. The module establishes that such events will happen whether or not the players intervene, as well as that future products will assume they have happened exactly as written. In doing so, it subtly but decisively shifts ownership of the setting away from DMs and players and toward the publisher.

This is not simply a matter of railroading, though Shadowdale certainly does that. The deeper issue is one of priority. The module is designed to support novels, sourcebooks, and future adventures rather than to stand on its own as a flexible piece of play material to inspire. The prominence of NPCs makes sense in this context, because they are central to TSR's narrative of the Realms, but their dominance leaves little room for the player characters to matter in any meaningful way. At best, the PCs can assist, but, more often, they will simply, as I said above, observe.

I believe it would be deeply unfair to lay all of this at Ed Greenwood's feet. In retrospect, Shadowdale reads less like an expression of his original conception of the Forgotten Realms than like a compromise between that earlier vision and TSR’s late-80s priorities. Greenwood’s affection for his NPCs and his fondness for intricate lore were always present, but earlier Realms material generally kept these elements in the background. Here, under the pressure to launch Second Edition with a bang and to synchronize the setting with an ever-expanding range of novels, those tendencies are brought to the fore. The result is a Realms that feels less like a setting to be explored and more like a story to be witnessed.

Shadowdale and its sequels offer little opportunity for meaningful choice, improvisation, or emergent play. Encounters are often structured to showcase NPC competence rather than to test player ingenuity. Deviating from the expected course of events is not merely difficult but implicitly discouraged, as doing so threatens the integrity of the metaplot the module exists to establish. This is admittedly not new territory. TSR had been down this path already with Dragonlance, but here it feels even more jarring, at least to me, perhaps because Krynn only ever existed as a vehicle for storytelling whereas the Forgotten Realms was intended as something more open.

For all these shortcomings and more, Shadowdale is nevertheless important. Its influence was profound and long-lasting. It set the template for how the Forgotten Realms would be handled throughout much of the Second Edition era. For players and DMs who enjoyed that approach, the module represented an exciting moment of transformation. For others, especially those of us who valued the older conception of the Realms as a flexible sandbox, it marks the beginning of an estrangement that would only deepen in the years to come.

Seen in retrospect, Shadowdale is, therefore, best understood as a turning point rather than as a mediocre adventure. It is the moment when the Forgotten Realms decisively stopped being merely a place where adventures happened and became, instead, a stage for stories to be told. Whether that change constitutes progress or decline is ultimately a matter of taste. What is beyond dispute is that, after Shadowdale, the Realms would never quite be the same again.

Retrospective: Cities of Bone

I've mentioned before my affection for the Al-Qadim line for Second Edition AD&D. Though not without flaws, I thought it did a better job of translating its source material into Dungeons & Dragons terms than did Oriental Adventures (which I also like). One of the reasons I feel this way is that Al-Qadim leaned very heavily into the fantastical rather any attempt at historical Arabia. That was a choice I appreciated then and still do now and one I often wished Oriental Adventures had embraced to the same extent.

This approach is especially evident in the boxed supplement, Cities of Bone. Until I read a comment to last week's Retrospective, I'd almost forgotten about it. Though I owned the original Arabian Adventures book, I wasn't a devoted follower of the line and only picked a select number of its supplements. This was one of them and, though I never made use of it in play, I enjoyed reading it. I hope that's not damning Cities of Bone with faint praise, because that wasn't my intention. Certainly, the only real metric by which to judge a RPG supplement or adventure is how useful it is in play, but there are often products, like this one, that are nevertheless inspirational. 

In this case, that inspiration comes from subject matter very near and dear to my heart: ancient ruins, undead, and necromancy, subject matter that was also of great interest to Clark Ashton Smith. That's the real reason I am looking back on Cities of Bone: there are bits of it that feel like they could easily have been drawn directly from the works of the Bard of Auburn. That's not to say that they were, at least not directly, but I'm inclined to agree with last week's commenters that there's a broadly Smithian vibe to the whole thing. It's fitting, too, since Smith earliest works of fiction, written when he was an adolescent, had Arabian or Orientalist settings. 

Written by Steven Kurtz and released in 1994, during TSR’s final flourish of lavish boxed sets, Cities of Bone appeared after previous supplements had already established Al-Qadim's Zakhara setting as a land of bustling bazaars, glittering genie courts, and swashbuckling adventure. Against that backdrop, Cities of Bone stands out precisely because it turns away from the living world and toward the titular ruins of ancient kingdoms – and those who both dwell within them and would despoil their buried treasures for their own benefit.

Cities of Bone included a 64-page adventure book, a 32-page campaign guide, and an additional 8-page supplement, as well as the usual maps, handouts, and loose accessory sheets that could be found in all TSR's boxed sets of the era. I can't deny that, for all my complaints about this era, the boxed sets it produced were often beautifully presented. There's a strange joy in opening them up and goggling at all the stuff TSR managed to pack inside. That's true here as well, double so, because Al-Qadim products have these faux gilt pages and striking arabesque decorations. 

What I remember most about Cities of Bone was the way it handled the ruins it presents. Rather than being generic dungeon crawls transplanted into the desert, they're rooted in the historical, cultural, and religious context of Zakhara. Likewise, some of the undead encountered within them are tragic figures, bound by oaths, regrets, or unfinished duties rather than simple malevolence. Many scenarios hinge on moral and ethical choices, such as how to treat the dead, how to honor the past, how to balance the lure of wealth with the demands of propriety and faith. It's an unusual approach, one that's subtly at odds with uncritical tomb robbing that D&D implicitly espouses. 

I call Cities of Bone a "supplement," but it's really more of a grab-bag of locations, NPCs, and scenarios intended to be used however the Dungeon Master wants. In a sense, they support – no pun intended – sandbox play, as the characters wander about the Land of Fate and encounter these ruins to explore. Some of the scenarios are short and largely inconsequential, while others are longer. By far, "Court of the Necromancers" is the best of the bunch and clearly seems to be channeling Clark Ashton Smith's "Empire of the Necromancers" – not that that's a bad thing!

All of which is to say that Cities of Bone is far from a must-have supplement, but there’s still enough stuff in it that I was glad to have been reminded I even owned it in the first place. I like ruins; I like the undead. There’s plenty of both here, along with some nice maps and snippets of history that help to give everything an extra overlay of… something. Mood? Atmosphere, maybe? A sense that these places were once alive and important and are now only half-remembered, half-understood, waiting to be misused or disturbed by characters who don’t fully grasp what they’re poking at.

As a whole, Cities of Bone is definitely a product of its time. It's uneven and occasionally frustrating, but also oddly earnest in its ambitions. It’s not polished enough to recommend without reservation, nor is it inspired enough that I'd recommend anyone seek it out. However, referees who enjoy plundering older supplements for ideas, imagery, and the occasional spark of inspiration, would find it has its uses. I myself can easily imagine lifting things from it and then weaving them into something of my own. In that sense, Cities of Bone succeeds in the modest way many such supplements do.

Retrospective: Trail of Tsathogghua

I continue in my Quixotic quest to find RPG products that show the influence, explicit or otherwise, of Clark Ashton Smith. As I wrote last week, this has proven a surprisingly difficult endeavor, so I hope I can be forgiven for grasping at whatever straws I can find, which is why, this week, I'm taking a look at Trail of Tsathogghua, a scenario pack for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, first published in 1984. 

Now, as I've mentioned many times before, the Dungeons & Dragons module, Castle Amber, is probably – probably – what first introduced me to Clark Ashton Smith. I can't say that for certain, especially after forty-five years, in part because Call of Cthulhu was released the very same year, 1981, and it includes a number of references to Smith and his creations, most notably Tsathoggua. Having been a devoted CoC fan since its initial appearance, it's just possible that it was this game rather than Castle Amber that turned me on to CAS, but I think that unlikely.

Speaking of Tsathoggua, perceptive readers will no doubt have noticed that I spell the name of the Hyperborean bat-toad god differently than does the title of this scenario pack. For reasons unknown to me, author Keith Herber inserted an "h" into the deity's name, an addition not attested in Smith's own work nor, for that matter, in Call of Cthulhu itself, whose entry on him spells it as I do. Given that CAS includes a mangled spelling of the name (Zothaqquah) in his Averoigne stories, this isn't a particularly unusual variant, but I nevertheless can't help but wonder why it was used here.

Trail of Tsathoggua is a 64-page book, featuring a terrific cover by Steve Purcell, an artist who, in his later career, would work for LucasArts, Nelvana, and Pixar. The book consists of three adventures, the first two of which are loosely connected to one another, while the third stands on its own and is, by far, the best of the trio – and indeed widely regarded as one of the best Call of Cthulhu scenarios of its early years. 

The first adventure shares its title with the book itself, albeit with the definite article added, "The Trail of Tsathogghua." It concerns an Miskatonic University archeological expedition to Greenland, where a massive stone slab carved with a giant bas-relief and odd hieroglyphs has recently been discovered. As it turns out, the slab is an artifact of ancient Hyperborea, as described by Clark Ashton Smith, providing information not just about the prehistory of the region but also about the location of a temple to Tsathoggua that is strongly implied to be the same one Satampra Zeiros attempted to plunder untold millennia ago.

The second adventure, "The Curse of Tsathogghua," moves to Canada, British Columbia specifically, as characters investigate rumors of the Sasquatch and a connection to the Greenland expedition from the first adventure. Like the first scenario, this one has a connection to Smith's work, albeit a more tangential one, since the Sasquatch are depicted as present-day descendants of the furry Voormis of Hyperborea. The adventure also includes the possibility that, if successful, the investigators might draw the attention and patronage of the Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King (incorrectly called simply William Lyon McKenzie [sic] in the text), who, in real life, was secret Spiritualist with a keen interest in the occult. 

The third and final adventure, "The Haunted House," a title it shares with the classic adventure found at the back of the Call of Cthulhu rulebook, takes place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has little to do with the other two. Instead, it focuses on the Van Laaden Mansion, which is plagued by all manner of unusual and possibly supernatural events. The explanation for this is a clever and genuinely spooky one: centuries ago, a druid merged his consciousness into a tree that was later felled and shipped to America as some of the lumber used to build the Van Laaden Mansion. Now, his spirit possesses the place and wreaks havoc.

Taken as a whole, Trail of Tsathogghua is a mixed bag, but there are enough good ideas here to make it useful to almost any Keeper running a Call of Cthulhu campaign. As a fan of Clark Ashton Smith, it's nice to see ideas from his Hyperborea cycle incorporated into the game, even if the incorporation doesn't have a huge overall impact. Too few RPGs look to CAS at all, so I suppose I'm naturally inclined to give bonus points to products like this one that make even a small effort to do so.

Retrospective: Mark of Amber

Because I’m focusing this month’s posts on the life, works, and legacy of Clark Ashton Smith, I’ve been trying to find roleplaying game products to discuss in my weekly Retrospective series that connect, even tangentially, to him. I’ve been surprised by how difficult this has proven, a fact that’s probably worthy of a post of its own. Still, while pondering the question, I was reminded that fourteen years after the publication of Castle Amber for the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh edition of Dungeons & Dragons, TSR released a follow-up adventure, albeit a rather unusual one.

Released in 1995, Mark of Amber is a strange product, at once a sequel to 1981’s module X2, an experiment in multimedia presentation, and part of a broader effort by TSR to retrofit its “Known World” setting for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Consequently, this boxed adventure offers a revealing snapshot of TSR in its final years, as it looked backward for inspiration while simultaneously trying out new gimmicks in the hope of reinvigorating sales.

In the abstract, the core idea behind Mark of Amber is a solid one, namely, a return to the old-school weirdness of Castle Amber and expand upon it in interesting ways. Unfortunately, the published adventure is very much a product of its time, the mid-1990s, and all that entails. The tension between the original module’s unrepentant eccentricity and the narrative design impulses then in vogue results in a product that feels caught between two worlds, neither fish nor fowl.

It’s important to remember that, while Castle Amber has many virtues as an adventure, subtlety was never one of them. Tom Moldvay trapped the characters inside a haunted manor populated by eccentrics modeled on figures from Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction. Once ensnared, the PCs were expected to poke around the castle, encountering all manner of bizarre and often dangerous oddities. Castle Amber was thus a classic funhouse dungeon that, despite its literary inspirations, made no great pretensions about itself. It was simply a module where curiosity was its own reward – and frequently its own punishment.

Mark of Amber presents itself as a sequel, taking place decades after the events of X2. The d’Ambreville family still looms large, but the tone has shifted considerably. Gone is the open-ended exploration of a cursed mansion. In its place is a more structured mystery involving murders, secret identities, and dreamlike visions tied to the immortal Étienne d’Ambreville. This shift, I think, reflects a broader change in adventure design. Where Castle Amber invited players to wander, experiment, and uncover strangeness at their own pace, Mark of Amber asks them to follow a plot. Events are paced. Clues are arranged. The Dungeon Master is given a clear narrative spine to maintain.

This approach is by no means unique to Mark of Amber and isn’t even necessarily a flaw. Mystery scenarios, for example, often benefit from structure. Still, it does highlight just how different TSR’s adventure design priorities had become by the mid-1990s. If Castle Amber feels like a haunted museum for the characters to explore freely, Mark of Amber feels more like a guided tour. There are still plenty of strange sights to see and unhinged NPCs to interact with, but the route to them is far more constrained.

To the extent that Mark of Amber is remembered today at all, I suspect it’s largely because of its inclusion of an audio CD. TSR intended it to be played during the session, with specific tracks keyed to certain locations and encounters. The disc contains ambient soundscapes, musical stings, and even narrated segments designed to heighten immersion. This wasn’t the first time TSR had experimented with audio accompaniments, but it was, so far as I can recall, the only time I encountered it myself.

As ludicrous as this might seem now, in 1995 it was actually a somewhat ambitious idea. Tabletop RPGs were still overwhelmingly analog experiences. I doubt every group even had a CD player available at the table and, even when they did, cueing tracks mid-session would almost certainly disrupt play. As a result, the CD was probably more trouble than it was worth. For me, it stands as a perfect emblem of TSR’s late-era mindset: occasionally bold and genuinely experimental, but often out of step with how most people actually played their games.

An equally interesting aspect of Mark of Amber is its place within the evolution of the setting that would come to be known as Mystara. In its earliest conception, the Known World belonged firmly to the Basic/Expert line. AD&D already had its own distinct stable of settings, like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Krynn, each with different assumptions about character power and campaign focus. Nevertheless, beginning in 1994, TSR began adapting Mystara for AD&D and Mark of Amber is part of that effort.

How well this translation worked overall, I can’t really say, since I didn’t purchase any of the other AD&D Mystara products. Even so, I sense a certain contradiction here. Mystara was built as a sandbox setting, with clear geography and room for emergent play, while many AD&D adventures of that time emphasized plotted narratives. Mark of Amber embodies this mismatch, taking place in a setting born in the freewheeling era of the early 1980s now pressed into service for a much more scripted style of play.

All of this leaves Mark of Amber as an uneven adventure. It boasts strong atmosphere, memorable NPCs, and an ambitious presentation, but it’s probably best remembered today for what it reveals about the state of TSR and, by extension, Dungeons & Dragons, just a few years before the company was acquired by Wizards of the Coast.

Bringing this back to Clark Ashton Smith for a moment, Mark of Amber is a curious artifact. Its connection to CAS is almost entirely inherited rather than organic, filtered through Castle Amber rather than drawing directly from the source. Where Moldvay’s original module gleefully embraced the weirdness and excess of Smith’s fiction, Mark of Amber seems to me to approach that inheritance with a more cautious, narratively controlled hand.

In that sense, the adventure neatly encapsulates TSR’s situation in 1995. It looks backward to a beloved classic, tries to dress it up with new technology, and then situates it within a setting undergoing corporate redefinition. The result is neither a pure revival nor a bold reinvention, but something in between. It's a respectful sequel that never quite recaptures the anarchic spirit that made its predecessor memorable.

Castle Amber remains, in my opinion, a monument to Golden Age D&D’s joyful strangeness. Mark of Amber, by contrast, stands as a reminder of how much the game (and its publishers) had changed. For better or worse, it shows us what happens when old school weirdness is filtered through the sensibilities of the 1990s, becoming more polished, more controlled, and ultimately less surprising.

REPOST: Retrospective: Dwellers of the Forbidden City

Despite the fact that David Cook's 1981 adventure, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, is one of my favorite D&D modules of all time, if not my actual favorite, I've never done a retrospective post on it. I did use the module previously as the centerpiece for my early ruminations of location-based adventures, but I don't think that post did the module full justice. Today's post is thus a partial attempt to make up for that fact.

Though parts of what would become Dwellers of the Forbidden City were used in the official AD&D tournament at Origins 1980, module I1 doesn't include a scoring sheet and referees are halfheartedly encouraged to design their own if they choose to use it in a tournament fashion. The module also conspicuously lacks the tournament "vibe" of other early modules, lacking both a precise, straightforward goal or a high density of combat/trap encounters intended to test the mettle of the players, instead opting for a more open-ended, exploratory style. In that respect, I1 might be an exemplar of the "Electrum Age" that marked a shift in the style and content of adventures from the earlier Golden Age, a shift some cheer and others decry.

Ostensibly, Dwellers of the Forbidden City is about the characters, in the employ of merchant leaders, seeking to put an end to raids on caravans passing through a remote jungle locale. However, once pointed in the right direction, the characters soon discover that there's more going on in the jungle than mere caravan raids, as they stumble across the mysterious Forbidden City, a lost city that recalls Robert E. Howard's Conan yarns – no surprise given David Cook has admitted that the City was inspired by "Red Nails." Though getting to the Forbidden City is an adventure in itself, with multiple means to enter it and lots of potential allies and enemies along the way, it is within the City (a version of whose map is reproduced below) that the real adventure begins.

As can see from the map, the Forbidden City is large and located within a canyon and thus isolated from the rest of the jungle. It is a world unto itself, one that operates according to the whims of its inhabitants, chief of whom are the yuan-ti snake men, who make their debut appearance in this module. In my younger days, I used this module innumerable times with several different groups of people, including some I barely knew. What's interesting is how similar the experience was right up until the point where the characters enter the Forbidden City. From that point on, nearly every group did something different, with quite a few completely forgetting their original mission and focusing instead on exploring the Forbidden City and its strange inhabitants.

Dwellers of the Forbidden City is only 28 pages long, so it's necessarily brief when it comes to describing its titular locale. Yet, that never bothered me. Indeed, I think it's probably one of the great strengths of the module and the reason I was able to use it so often: it was easy to make and remake the City to suit my present needs, whatever they were. My personal preference for modules these days are ones that fire my imagination; they give me the bare bones details I need to get started but they don't weigh me down with extraneous details that either get in the way or easily forget in the heat of play. Far from needing, in the words of James Wyatt, "more detail, more fleshed-out quests, and another hundred pages or so," module I1 is almost exactly the right length. Anything more than what it includes would, I think, have lessened its spartan appeal for me.

Re-reading Dwellers of the Forbidden City in preparation for this post brought back a lot of memories, all happy ones. I could recount many tales of adventures past, but those in the Forbidden City are among the most vibrant nearly 30 years after the fact. I remember well when Morgan Just and his stalwart companions braved this place, doing battle with the yuan-ti, the tasloi, and the bullywugs united under King Groak. I remember too my expansions of the City, using the adventure seeds Cook includes at the end – the under-city warrens filled with ghouls and demons, the vampire orchid-men, the Black Brotherhood, and time travel to the days when the City was at its decadent height. This was a module I literally played to pieces; my original copy of the booklet fell apart from so much use and its maps were smudged and stained from similar service. With the possible exception of The Isle of Dread – another David Cook module – I'm hard pressed to think of a module that more powerfully engaged my imagination and showed me what a powerful game D&D could be.

Retrospective: Bermuda Triangle

Recently, I came across a couple of “news” stories about the Bermuda Triangle, a topic I hadn’t thought about in years. Growing up in the 1970s, however, the Bermuda Triangle seemed to be everywhere. I vividly remember Charles Berlitz’s 1974 book on the subject – yes, that Charles Berlitz – as well as the steady stream of television documentaries solemnly recounting the mysterious disappearances of ships and airplanes. The 1970s really were a wild time, a period when the Unexplained was treated less as fringe nonsense than as a challenge to modern rationality. UFOs, ESP, ancient astronauts, haunted houses, and Atlantis all enjoyed a curious semi-respectability. The world, it seemed, was stranger than we had been led to believe and I, of course, ate it up.

Thinking about this cultural moment reminded me of a boardgame from the same period that I adored as a child, Bermuda Triangle. Published by Milton Bradley in 1975, it is not a particularly well-known game today, but I suspect that those of us who remember it at all do so largely because of a single plastic component central to its play, the Mystery Cloud. Ships caught beneath it might be removed from the board entirely, creating a physical absence that felt far more consequential to my friends and me than simply flipping a cardboard counter or sliding a token backward. Watching one’s ship laden with cargo and hard-won progress vanish into the Cloud’s plastic depths was a small but unforgettable drama.

Mechanically, Bermuda Triangle is a straightforward enough game. Two to four players each control a fleet of four merchant ships, attempting to move them from port to port to collect goods and return them safely to their home port. The first player to amass $350,000 in goods wins. Achieving this requires a mix of luck, timing, and a modest amount of tactical awareness. Ship movement is governed by dice rolls, with vessels advancing along established sea lanes. Crowding matters, because landing on an occupied space displaces the other ship, pushing it backward, and ports themselves can hold only four ships at a time. This creates opportunities for deliberate obstruction, allowing players to slow one another’s progress through careful positioning.

Beyond the roll of the dice, though, looms the game’s defining feature, the aforementioned Mystery Cloud. At the end of each turn, after each player has moved, a spinner determines the Cloud’s direction of movement across the board. Over time, it will inevitably drift into the sea lanes, crossing paths with the merchant vessels. Each ship token contains a small magnet, as does the Cloud itself. Depending on the Cloud’s orientation and direction of travel, it may “suck up” a ship it passes over, removing it from play entirely.

It is a simple mechanic, but a remarkably effective one. There is no certainty that a ship will be lost even when the Cloud passes directly overhead – the magnets were quite finicky, as I recall – and that unpredictability only heightened the tension. Would the ship survive or would it "vanish?" That moment of suspense, repeated again and again, gave the game a sense of menace wholly out of proportion to its rules complexity. I am convinced that this single feature carried the game for us, encouraging repeated play of what might otherwise have been dismissed as a fairly ordinary, even dull, roll-and-move affair.

Seen in retrospect, Bermuda Triangle feels like a perfect expression of its era. Its mechanics are serviceable, its strategy modest, but its theme and, crucially, its physical embodiment of that theme tapped directly into a cultural fascination with mystery and unseen forces. The game didn’t explain the Bermuda Triangle, but simply assumed its reality and invited us to suffer its consequences. In doing so, it captured something about those days as I remember them, namely, that the world was unstable, unpredictable, and perhaps unknowable. 

The game left a lasting impression on me in a way that Monopoly or Sorry! never did, since, on many levels, it's no better of a game design than either of those staples of childhood. The combination of the Mystery Cloud and its ostensible subject matter, though, was enough to elevate Bermuda Triangle in my imagination. Until I started thinking about this again, I hadn't realized how much I liked this game – or how much of a role it may have played in feeding the earliest embers of my lifelong fascination with the Unexplained. Not bad for an old boardgame!