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.

The Articles of Dragon: "Into the Forgotten Realms"

I may be mistaken in this, but I don't believe I've ever featured an adventure in any of my previous entries in The Articles of Dragon series. If I am correct, then that's unfortunate in a certain respect, as Ed Greenwood's "Into the Forgotten Realms," which first appeared in issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), isn't a very good adventure – or, more charitably, it isn't a particularly notable adventure, except in one way: it's the very first published scenario set in the Realms. That alone is why I’ve chosen to write about it today and why I still remember it more than forty years later.

Now, I know that for many fans of old school Dungeons & Dragons, the Realms are every bit as anathema as Krynn and I can't completely fault them for that opinion, though I don't share it. I'm an unrepentant booster of the Realms or at least the Realms as they were in the pages of Dragon and in the days before the Time of Troubles did irreparable damage to Greenwood's original vision. (Yes, yes, I know TSR made lots of changes to the setting from the very beginning, but there's still a clear dividing line between the Realms before 1989 and after.)

I'd been reading about the Forgotten Realms through Greenwood's many articles since "Pages from the Mages" appeared in the very first issue of Dragon I ever owned. I enjoyed them for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was their feigned depth. Greenwood sprinkled all his articles with the names of rulers and battles, references to gods and monsters, and allusions to historical events without ever explaining them in depth. He gave the impression that his setting was both broad and deep, filled with detail on which he could draw for his engaging articles. Greenwood's occasional references to his home campaign were similarly intriguing and I often found myself wanting to know more about it.

This is why "Into the Forgotten Realms," for all its flaws as an adventure, was so compelling to me. Here, at last. Greenwood was showing us something a bit more practical, if that's the word, something that showed off how he used all this lore he'd accumulated over the years. We got to see a little bit of the ruined School of Wizardry within haunted Myth Drannor, not to mention a glimpse of the politics of the Dalelands. It wasn't a lot, to be sure, but it was enough of a taste that I felt like I'd been given some additional insight into the Realms as an AD&D setting rather than as fodder for magazine articles. This was the Forgotten Realms as she was played, so to speak, and that was no small thing to my fifteen year-old self.

As I said, the adventure itself is nothing amazing. It's basically just a dungeon crawl through a magical ruin filled with monsters and traps – pretty basic stuff, all things considered. Furthermore, the adventure was originally written for an AD&D tournament held at GenCon XVII (August 1984) and so suffers from some of the same sins as many tournament modules, such as limited scope and a contrived starting situation. None of these bothered me at the time, since a great many of TSR's official modules had the same problems and I'd learned how to adapt them easily enough. 

In truth, the appeal of "Into the Forgotten Realms" wasn't its potential use as a scenario anyway; it was what more it told me about Ed Greenwood's setting. In that, it did not disappoint. Though the focus was on room descriptions, there were enough tidbits scattered throughout that I was satisfied. In addition to historical information about Myth Drannor, there are other fascinating details, such as the suggestion, for example, that spells named for characters associated with the Greyhawk setting (e.g. Bigby, Tenser, etc.) don't exist in the Realms. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a huge difference, to be sure, but it's enough of one that I took note of it.

That's why "Into the Forgotten Realms" made an impression on me: it gave some concrete examples of how Ed Greenwood used the setting he created and how he tried to make it feel just a little bit unique. Whether anyone else enjoyed it as much as I did, I can't say for certain. However, TSR did reprint it in the 1987 boxed set under the title "Lashan's Fall," so I can only assume I'm not alone in liking it. Regardless, by the criteria established when I relaunched this series a year and a half ago, it definitely qualifies as worthy of discussion.

Dragonlance at the End of the World

One of many things that doesn't always come through in my campaign update posts are the little moments of roleplaying and character development that are, for me anyway, why I continue to participate in this hobby after so many decades. Reading those posts and the supplementary ones that draw attention to larger developments within them, one might well think the Big Stuff is all that matters to me. Of course, the Big Stuff does matter to me, especially in my House of Worms and Barrett's Raiders campaigns, where political, social, and religious struggles are important drivers of the action. Even so, it's the characters who matter most to me. They are, after all, the means by which my wonderful players interact with the situations I set before them and I appreciate the added texture they can add to the game world.

An amusing case in point is Corporal Wayne "Rocketman" Schweyk. Rocketman was originally a back-up character, introduced during the unit's time in the Free City of Kraków. All the players had a back-up character, both to fill out the unit's complement, but also as insurance in case one of the "main" characters died in combat or through some other means. Rocketman, as his name suggests, had been part of a Multiple Launch Rocket System crew during the earlier stages of the Twilight War. He eventually found his way to the Free City and became part of a group of displaced American soldiers there, some of whom joined the Raiders when they fled Kraków and its Machiavellian politics. 

As a character, Rocketman has several defining characteristics. Most obviously, he likes rockets, missiles, grenade launchers, mortars, and similar weaponry. Second, he is a good driver and always volunteers to drive one of the unit's vehicles. Finally, he's an avid reader of Dragonlance novels and makes an effort to seek out new sources of them whenever it's practical. Now that the Raiders are back in the USA, this is a fair bit easier than it was in Poland. Recently, Rocketman has begun to branch out. He's expressed an interest in Forgotten Realms novels, too, a few of which he was able to obtain in trade from soldiers stationed at Fort Lee.

On the one hand, this bit of characterization is a joke, making fun of just how many of these novels TSR published throughout the '80s and '90s – and there were a lot of them. We looked into the matter and, assuming that, in the timeline of Barrett's Raiders, TSR stopped producing new Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels at the end of 1997, shortly after the first Soviet nuclear strikes against America, there'd still be just shy of 100 Dragonlance novels and a little less than 80 Forgotten Realms novels. As I said, there really were a lot of these novels, but, from what I understand, they sold very, very well, outshining even the gaming material on which they were based. Talk about brandification!

On the other hand, little details like help a character to come alive. They help set him apart from his comrades and often serve as motivations for what the character does. In the case of Rocketman, he really does spend time talking to other soldiers, learning if any of them shares his interest in fantasy novels and whether there's library or other potential source for more of them. Further, his interest helps ground the campaign in its time and place. Barrett's Raiders is presently set in December 2000 in an alternate timeline that diverged at least as far back as 1985, if not earlier. Seeing as we're a quarter century removed from its chronological date and in a different reality altogether, these small reminders have proven useful.

From time to time, I should probably devote more posts to stuff like this. I've repeatedly said that the success and longevity of my various campaigns is, in large part, due to my players, who have created some really fun and memorable characters. They're one of the things that keep me engaged week after week. Shining the spotlight on some of them might prove helpful or at least interesting to readers as well.

Off the Shelf

Last week,a reader had some interesting things to say in the comments to my post, "Now Make It YOUR Tékumel" (Part I):

James, I know your Tekumel campaign has been a joy for you and your players, but because there’s this continuous “gap” of not knowing the entire ins and outs of the world, doesn’t it make you just want to go back and run your own campaign worlds you were GM’ing in the past or develop a new one? My own setting may not be as rich as Tekumel, Glorantha, or others, but it is mine and mine alone, and the time I spend developing and learning about it is a far greater satisfaction than using someone else’s secondary world, so to speak.

These are questions that have probably been asked since the appearance of the first published settings for use with roleplaying games and they're very good ones. They're especially relevant in the context of old school gaming, which, by and large, tends to valorize "do it yourself" approaches to most aspects of our hobby. As with some many things, I don't think there's a "right" answer to these questions. However, I can offer my thoughts on the matter.

Without a doubt, one of the greatest joys I've had in this hobby is worldbuilding. I suspect many, if not most, referees first take up that mantle out of a desire to create – to sketch out maps, populate them with grand cities and petty fiefdoms, invent cultures, histories, pantheons, even languages and then watch as players interact with what they've created. The creative impulse is a powerful one and indeed central to why I've kept up this hobby for more than four decades. Given that, why then would anyone ever choose to use a setting created by someone else rather than make his own? Why play in Glorantha, Tékumel, the Third Imperium, or the Forgotten Realms rather than a world of one’s own devising?

The most obvious answer is this: pre-existing settings can possess virtues all their own. Chief among these benefits is depth. A well-established setting, particularly one with decades of development, represents an accumulation of creativity far beyond what any individual could achieve alone. Consider Tékumel, which is the fruit of a lifetime of imagining (and play!), from which were born details of multiple societies, cultures, languages, etc. The richness of Tékumel, its sense of authenticity and depth, would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate without investing a similarly long amount of time into developing a new setting. 

Of course, one might reasonably argue that that's precisely the point of creating one's own setting – to build it up over time through imagination and play. I'm not disputing that and certainly not denigrating the value of it. However, not everyone desires or indeed is even able to devote that much time and effort into building up an imaginary setting in this way. Campaigns, after all, can be fleeting things. Players come and go, life circumstances change, and many referees may not have the luxury of decades to let a world gradually accrete the layers of history, culture, and depth that make a setting feel truly lived-in. There is something to be said for stepping into a world that is already rich with detail, one where the referee doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time he needs a new culture, language, or historical event to ground his adventures. With an established setting, that work has already been done, allowing the referee to focus on incorporating the player characters into an existing framework rather than painstakingly constructing it piece by piece.

Additionally, the act of worldbuilding itself is a different skill from running a compelling campaign. Some referees are natural improvisers, capable of crafting intricate scenarios and memorable characters on the fly, but may struggle to construct the background details that give a world texture. Others might excel at creating histories and cultures but find it challenging to translate those into dynamic and engaging play at the table. Pre-existing settings offer a way to balance those strengths and weaknesses, providing a solid foundation of background and depth while still leaving ample room for creativity and interpretation. By using a well-established world, referees can benefit from the hard work of others while still making the game their own, customizing and adapting elements to suit the needs of their campaigns without having to start from scratch.

This depth can translate into greater immersion. Players unfamiliar with a referee’s homebrew world often struggle to grasp its nuances. What’s the dominant religion? Who rules this land? What’s the history between these two nations? A pre-existing setting obviates some of the need for that by providing a shared foundation of understanding. Even if players aren’t deeply familiar with RuneQuest's Glorantha, for example, they can quickly grasp that it’s a Bronze Age-inspired world of myth and heroism, where the gods are real and ever-present. For many, that's a more solid base for engagement than the uncertainties of a homebrew setting.

Another virtue of using an established setting is that it frees the referee from the burden of having to create everything from whole cloth. Worldbuilding is rewarding, yes, but it’s also time-consuming, and many of us have only limited time to devote to the hobby. By using Tékumel or the Third Imperium, a referee can focus on what really matters: developing adventures, presenting engaging scenarios, and bringing the world to life at the table rather than, say, detailing the taxonomy of his world’s flora and fauna or coming up with the names of its deities. This doesn’t mean that one must slavishly adhere to every canonical detail; rather, an established setting provides a sturdy scaffolding upon which a referee can build, altering and expanding as needed without having to start from scratch.

Furthermore, a pre-existing setting has already been tested. The referee knows that Glorantha is a compelling place to explore, that Traveller’s Imperium provides a solid framework for intrigue and adventure, that the Forgotten Realms is filled to the brim with adventuring locales and NPCs. When crafting a homebrew setting, there’s always the risk that it won’t hold together under scrutiny, that it lacks cohesion, or that it simply doesn’t inspire one's players. A well-developed, pre-established setting has already proven itself.

There’s also the communal aspect of a shared setting. When a referee runs a game in Glorantha or Tékumel, he is participating in a wider conversation, connecting with an audience that extends beyond his own table. He can draw on the experiences of others, take inspiration from decades of published material, and contribute to a living world that exists in the collective imagination of thousands of players. This sense of shared history is part of what makes these settings so compelling. When one plays in Glorantha, for example, one walks the same mythic paths as countless other players, building on the stories and legends that came before. (This is also part of the appeal of pre-packaged adventure modules, but perhaps that's a topic for another post.)

As a general rule, I still prefer homebrew settings. There is an undeniable satisfaction in crafting one’s own setting and watching it take shape over time. However, I think it would be a misconception to assume that using a pre-existing world is somehow a lesser choice or that it stifles creativity. On the contrary, it provides a foundation upon which creativity can flourish. That's certainly been the case in my House of Worms campaign, for example. Adopting a well-established setting can enable a referee to gain access to a wealth of material, allowing him to focus on breathing life into the world and creating fun adventures that his players will remember for years to come.

Once again, I think I've rambled on longer than I'd intended. At the very least, I hope I've done a decent job of laying out some of the reasons why a referee might decide to make use of an "off the shelf" campaign setting rather than one he'd created himself. 

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Seven Swords"

Like his "Pages from the Mages," Ed Greenwood's "Seven Swords" from issue #74 of Dragon (June 1983) is an article I remember reading for the first time very vividly. Not only was I keen for more information about Greenwood's then-mysterious Forgotten Realms setting, but I had come recognize the man as one of the more clever and imaginative writers to appear in Dragon's pages. A big part of Greenwood's appeal is the way that he could make something as seemingly banal as sword +1 and make it interesting – and he did it without having to introduce a host of new powers or abilities into the game.

What "Seven Swords" does is present seven different magical weapons, none of which is more potent than a sword +3. Each of these swords gets an extensive description of both its physical and magical properties. Amusingly, it's often the physical description that really sets these swords apart from the pack. Whether it's the huge cabochon-cut black sapphire in the grip of Adjatha, the six matched bloodstones set in the bronze blade of Ilbratha, or the rearing serpents who make the guard of Shazzellim, Greenwood makes each of these weapons unique in appearance as well as abilities. This is a small detail that many referees overlook, concentrating instead on game mechanical effects. Greenwood doesn't skimp on these either, but they're only one facet of what makes the titular swords special.

Each weapon also includes a "lore" section, detailing the history of the blade, from its forging to the present day. It's this section that I really ate up as a younger man. Re-reading them in preparation for this post, I can completely understand why that was the case. The lore Greenwood presents isn't extensive – no more than four or five short paragraphs in most cases – but it's evocative. It's suggestive of adventures and, better still, it gives even a lowly sword +1 an air of antiquity and individuality that makes it a weapon worth holding on to even when better weapons come along. That was probably the biggest lesson "Seven Swords" taught me: game mechanics aren't always what make a magic item special. It's a lesson I've kept with me all these years and one I'd like to see adopted more broadly.

Retrospective: Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures

I'm a sucker for historical fantasy – or even just fantasy that's heavily inspired by a particular historical period, society, or culture. That's one of the reasons I so eagerly awaited the release of Oriental Adventures in 1985: I saw it as an opportunity for Dungeons & Dragons (or AD&D) to finally present monks and ninjas and samurai within a more suitable context than the riotous goulash in which the game has existed since its inception. In my experience, most (A)D&D players never cared about this as much as I did, even back in the day, but such concerns grew increasingly important to me, especially during my teen years.

Consequently, when TSR announced that it'd be giving the Oriental Adventures treatment to the myths, legends, and folklore of the Middle East, I was pretty excited. Though Bulfinch's Mythology didn't include a section on these tales, I was nevertheless quite familiar with the stories of A Thousand and One Nights, not to mention the charming films featuring Sinbad the Sailor I'd seen as a child. And course D&D had long included monsters like the djinn, efreet, ghoul, and roc, in addition to the flying carpet and ring of wishes, all of which have their origin in Middle Eastern mythology.

Entitled Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures, this 158-page softcover was written by Jeff Grubb with the assistance of Andria Hayday. Grubb was a powerhouse designer at TSR at this time, having previously created Marvel Super Heroes, shepherded the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set to publication, and conceived Spelljammer, among many other influential projects. He brings the same imagination and enthusiasm for Al-Qadim that he did for its predecessors, resulting in a book of which I remain very fond, despite certain shortcomings. 

In the book's introduction, Grubb acknowledges that Arabian Adventures takes inspirations from three different versions of Arabia. The first is the Arabia of history, whose people, culture, and history spread from the Atlantic Ocean to India as a result of the Islamic conquests starting in the 7th century. The second is the Arabia of myth and legend. Finally, there is the Arabia of Hollywood, like the aforementioned Sinbad movies. Of the three, the second and third are the most important to Al-Qadim, which is not intended to be historically or culturally accurate but is, echoing the foreword to OD&D, "strictly fantasy."

Like Oriental Adventures before it, Arabian Adventures is not a stand-alone game but rather a supplement to AD&D, then in its second edition. Its purpose is to provide new and alternative rules for use with 2e rather than being complete in itself. Thus, for example, we get a variety of new character kits, as well as new equipment, nonweapon proficiencies, and spells. All of these are intended to differentiate the inhabitants of Zakhara, the Land of Fate, from those coming from more Western European-inspired locales, just as OA had done for the peoples of Kara-Tur. Al-Qadim is decidedly not generic in its presentation, but instead places everything within a very specific cultural and social context derived from the three sources Grubb mentioned in his introduction.

By and large, the end result is excellent, better in some ways than Oriental Adventures in my opinion. The character kits – a concept that didn't exist at the time OA was published – do a very good job of tailoring AD&D's existing character classes for an Arabian-inspired setting. While most of them are interesting and flavorful, the ones I most liked were those that covered roles uncommon or unknown in other settings, like the barber, beggar-thief, and merchant-rogue. Likewise, the new spells and proficiencies went a long way toward making a Zakharan character feel distinct from his counterparts in other realms.

Where Al-Qadim falls down is its being branded with and tied to the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. This is not the fault of Grubb or Hayday, nor does it strongly weaken the quality of their work. In the early 1990s, TSR was very keen on tying all of its AD&D products to one or more of its existing settings. Since the Realms were TSR's "go-to" AD&D setting, the company plugged almost everything into it, including Zakhara (just as had previously been done with Kara-Tur). It's a pity, because I think Zakhara would have been much more interesting had it simply been its own thing, divorced from the rest of TSR's AD&D settings of the time.

One way that this impacts Arabian Adventures in a negative way is that we don't get any unique demihuman or nonhuman playable races. All the standard AD&D races, like dwarves, elves, and halflings, are present in Zakhara and, aside from the usual game mechanics associated with them (ability bonuses, special abilities, etc.), they're really little different from Zakharan humans, sharing the same customs, beliefs, and so on. There's nothing strictly wrong with this approach, but Oriental Adventures gave us several new nonhuman races to play and I think doing so went a long way toward making Kara-Tur feel distinct. I would have liked to have seen the same for Al-Qadim.

The other "flaw" in Al-Qadim is that it's pretty clearly meant to be an alternate Players Handbook. Unlike Oriental Adventures, there's not much in the way of referee material included in this book. There are no new monsters or magic items, for example, and while both those omissions would eventually be dealt with in follow-up products – several, in fact! – their lack in this book was something I felt pretty keenly at the time. I would have preferred something a bit more expansive in its content, but, as I said at the beginning of this post, Arabian Adventures isn't a stand-alone product and, given TSR's approach to publishing AD&D at the time, there was probably little to no chance it would have included such material when it could more profitably be sold in later releases.

All that said, I really like Al-Qadim and regret that, like so many other AD&D products with which TSR flooded the market in the '90s, I never got the chance to make much use of it. One of my friends was a big fan of the line and purchased a lot of the later material, including the Land of Fate boxed set. From what I could tell, all of the setting's support material was of a very high quality – imaginative and fun, with plenty of great ideas to aid the Dungeon Master in refereeing his very own version of A Thousand and One Nights. It's one Second Edition's better supplements and deserves more love than it generally gets.

Retrospective: Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms

I remember being very excited about the imminent release of the Oriental Adventures in 1985. Aside from the obvious reason – the introduction of playable ninja and samurai into Advanced D&D – I was quite keen to see "the Oriental lands of Oerth," as promised in the "Coming Attractions" section of Dragon #102. However, when OA was released in November of that year, there was no real evidence in that book that Kara-Tur, as its setting was called, had any connection whatsoever to the World of Greyhawk. This fact was further demonstrated when the first adventure module for use with Oriental Adventures, Swords of the Daimyo, came out the next year. Though it included a gazetteer of part of the land of Kozakura, there was once again no evidence that it had any connection to Gary Gygax's campaign setting.

None of this really mattered, of course. Though I was a big fan of the World of Greyhawk, the connection (or not) between it and Kara-Tur had no impact whatsoever on my ability to use the rules of OA or my enjoyment of Kara-Tur. Even so, when TSR finally got around to releasing a boxed dedicated to detailing this vast continent and its peoples, I was more than a little baffled to see it had suddenly – and definitively – been placed in the Forgotten Realms setting. In retrospect, this made sense. In the aftermath of Gygax's ouster from the company, TSR had turned the Realms into the setting for AD&D. Everything that could be (and quite a few things that couldn't) were jammed into Ed Greenwood's brainchild, often to its detriment. 

That didn't stop me from buying it, of course. Even in 1988, I was still very much a fanboy of TSR. Plus, I have always been something of a collector of campaign settings. Consequently, there was pretty much no chance that I wouldn't buy Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms when it was released. Furthermore, it truly was an impressive product, consisting of two 96-page books and four double-sided, color maps of the region, all for $15 (about $40 in today's debased currency) – a steal! In addition, the books were amply illustrated by the late, great Jim Holloway, along with cover art by Jeff Easley. All in all, a terrific package and I'd have been foolish not to have picked it up.

The two integral books are unusual in that they're essentially a single book split into two volumes, right down to sharing page numbers. Volume I covers the lands of Shou Lung and T'u Lung – analogs of China during centralized and Warring States periods respectively – as well as Tabot (Tibet – ugh!), the Plain of Horses (Mongolia), and the Northern Wastes (Siberia). Volume II covers the lands of Wa and Kozakura – analogs of Japan during the Edo and Sengoku periods respectively – along with Koryo (Korea – ugh!), the Jungle Lands (Indochina), and the Island Kingdoms (Indonesia and the Philippines). It's an impressive amount of material, covering nearly every aspect of these lands that you can imagine, from geography and history to religion and politics. In addition, each realm gets NPCs, monsters, adventure ideas, and sometimes even new spells and magic items. 

What's interesting is that Kara-Tur has no single author. Instead, different authors cover different lands, with the whole thing "coordinated" by David Cook, primary author of Oriental Adventures. The authors are a diverse bunch of people, most of whom were not employees of TSR at the time: Jay Batista, Deborah Christian, John Nephew, Michael Pondsmith, and Rick Swan. I'm not sure how common such a practice would have been at the time, but it strikes me as unusual, at least compared to many similar projects, which were usually the work of a single author. Consequently, Kara-Tur has a somewhat uneven feel to it, as if each author had a slightly different vision of what he had in mind while writing. 

This unevenness comes through most clearly when you look at certain lands, whose histories, societies, cultures, and names(!) are lifted almost entirely from the real world, while others are a bit more fantastical. That's probably my biggest problem with Kara-Tur as a setting: it leans to heavily on the real world, particularly when compared to the larger Forgotten Realms, which is largely unmoored from any specific real world inspirations. Some of that, I suspect, has to do with the relative unfamiliarity of Asian history – and fantasy – in late 1980s America. It was probably much easier to look to the real world, file the serial numbers off, add some wizards, and be done with it. Unfortunately, the results are often quite mediocre, not to mention at odds with the overall tenor and feel of the Realms of which Kara-Tur was supposed to be the eastern half. 

It's for this reason that, while I proudly bought and owned Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms, I never really liked it. Compared to many of TSR's other campaign settings, this one seemed to me to be lacking in imagination. That's a great shame, because I feel like the cultures of Asia offer great fodder for the fantasy roleplaying games. Maybe that was a goal that was more difficult to realize almost four decades ago than it would be today, I don't know. Regardless, Kara-Tur falls well far of the mark of what I would have liked back in the day and even more so now. Alas!

Can You Go Home Again?

Despite my preference for playing RPGs with a group of friends, I've long enjoyed video and computer games. In fact, over the past Christmas holiday season, I finally completed Legend of Grimrock, a computer game I bought more than a decade ago and never finished. The premise of Legend of Grimrock is that the your party of four characters have been accused of crimes they (probably) didn't commit and must serve their sentence within the dungeons of Mount Grimrock. If they somehow survive its dangers, they will be absolved of their crimes. Of course, no one has ever escaped Mount Grimrock, so the odds of their doing so are not good.

I had a lot of fun with Legend of Grimrock (and, earlier this year, its sequel). It's a tough, occasionally frustrating dungeon whose challenges are a mix of puzzles, traps, resource management, and, of course, combat. In fact, I had such a good time playing it that I experienced a little bit of sadness when I finished the game. I wanted there to be more and there wasn't, so I naturally set out to find other games that might scratch the same itch. Surprisingly, there weren't a lot of computer or video games out there that had quite what I was looking for – at least not current video games (by which I mean, games released within the last decade or so). 

Fortunately, fondness for and appreciation of the products of earlier eras is not limited to the realm of tabletop roleplaying games. Indeed, I suspect there is probably even more nostalgia for old video and computer games, if only because of their greater popularity and reach. In recent years, quite a few publishers have made their older games available once again, after making small updates so that they'll run on modern hardware. That's when the idea struck me: why don't I play one of those older games – go right back to "the source," so to speak? Surely that would help me over my feeling of letdown after completing Legend of Grimrock.

So, I picked up a copy of Pool of Radiance, a computer game for which I have fond memories. Not only was this the first computer game to make use of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, it came out during my time away at college. I never owned the game myself – I didn't yet have a computer, this being 1988 – but a friend of mine did. He kindly let me play it when he was in class and I recall enjoying myself. I never completed the game, so buying it now would give me the opportunity to do so, albeit thirty-six years after the fact.

Regrettably, it looks like I'll probably never finish Pool of Radiance.

The truth is that, for me, the game is too old, both in terms of its content and presentation, for me to enjoy. I suspected this might be the case, since, when I wrote my Retrospective piece back in October 2022, I had the chance to look at lots of screenshots and even the original manual. They reminded me that just how primitive the game is. Now, as an enjoyer of OD&D, there's nothing inherently wrong with primitive and, in fact, there can often be something very enjoyable about it. When it comes to technology, though, the matter is a bit more complicated, since it can be difficult to unlearn what you have already learned.

In the case of Pool of Radiance, its user interface is awkward and clunky, designed for use with computer hardware that no longer exists. Likewise, the graphics are often difficult to read/recognize on a modern computer monitor. That made doing almost anything in the game slow and unintuitive, thereby detracting from my enjoyment. Further, the game design is very tedious and grindy – almost as if the stereotype of old school tabletop RPGs were true! Rather than challenging my wits, the game challenged my patience and I soon found I was unable to play it with any pleasure.

It's a great shame, because I was looking forward to playing Pool of Radiance to its conclusion, after all these years. I wonder if the problems are really with the game itself or with me. It may simply be the case that I've grown so accustomed to the way modern games work that I can't get myself back into the headspace to appreciate older ones. If so, that makes me wonder if something similar might be going on with people who claim they can no longer play older tabletop RPGs. Is this a case where "technology," broadly defined, so alters our mental frames that it inhibits or even impedes our ability to make use of earlier versions of itself? I don't know if this is true, but it's a fascinating thought.

Regardless, I still don't have a good replacement for Legend of Grimrock. Any suggestions?

Retrospective: The Throne of Bloodstone

While I unqualifiedly count myself as a fan of the articles Ed Greenwood wrote about his home campaign, the Forgotten Realms, in the pages of Dragon, my feelings about TSR's version of it are decidedly more mixed. For the most part, the original boxed campaign setting developed by Jeff Grubb and published in 1987 is quite good, retaining most of the elements that, I think, made the Realms unique, or at least distinct from previous TSR AD&D settings, like The World of Greyhawk or Krynn. However, a lot of the products later released under the Forgotten Realms banner did not, in my opinion, jibe well with Greenwood's vision for his setting, no doubt because TSR saw the Realms as a "kitchen sink" setting where anything that was possible under the AD&D could be found somewhere. 

This desire to reshape the Forgotten Realms into something more generic (or perhaps utilitarian) was obvious from the very beginning, even in the '87 boxed set. In his introduction from that set, Jeff Grubb points out the various ways Greenwood's Realms were changed to accommodate the ideas of others, such as the fact that "the land that is now Vaasa and Damara was only recently (in game design terms) covered by an unnatural glacier." Vaasa and Damara, you may recall, made their first appearance before the publication of the Forgotten Realms boxed set, in 1985's Bloodstone Pass. That module, written by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson, was itself intended to support the Battle System miniatures rules, as were its two immediate sequels, The Mines of Bloodstone (1986) and The Bloodstone Wars (1987). 

By design, the setting presented in Bloodstone Pass is vanilla fantasy that could easily be dropped into any campaign setting. That's not a criticism and, from a sales point of view, was probably a point in its favor, broadening its pool of potential customers. With the publication of the Forgotten Realms in 1987, though, TSR found a way to cram a lot of stuff into it, in the process diluting its uniqueness. That's why the campaign box set pushes back the Great Glacier and plops Vaasa and Damara into the ice-free real estate so revealed. This change struck me then, as it does now, as utterly unnecessary, since there was nothing about the Bloodstone Lands that felt as if they could be part of the Realms. But commerce pays no heed to esthetics and I doubt anyone at TSR at the time worried about such trivial concerns.

Which brings us to the fourth and final module in the H-series: The Throne of Bloodstone. Written, like all its predecessors, by Niles and Dobson, and published in 1988, module H4 was, then and now, notorious among AD&D fans, for its stated level range – 18–100. You read that correctly; this adventure was explicitly presented as a challenge for 100th-level characters. There are even sample characters of this level provided at the end of the book, in addition to a few pages of advice to the Dungeon Master on running characters of such stratospheric levels of experience.

Why, you might ask, did the module do this? What sort of challenge could possibly justify the need for such potent characters? To start, the characters are tasked with defeating the Witch-King Zhengyi of Vaasa, a 30th-level magic-using lich who, it is revealed, is a devotee of the demon lord Orcus. In the course of this task, the characters discover a gate that leads to the Abyss, the outer planar home not only of the Lord of the Undead but of all the demon lords and princes. Traveling there to do battle with the forces of Chaotic Evil might well be a task worthy of 100th-level characters, but why go there at all, especially if the threat of Zhengyi were already eliminated?

That's where Throne of Bloodstone takes a very odd turn. Not long after discovering the gate, "a short, stocky little man with huge angel's wings wearing white robes" appears. Did I mention he also "calmly puffs on a cigar?" This is St. Sollars, a minor deity introduced all the way back in Bloodstone Pass. He speaks to the characters – in a strange Bugs Bunny-style Brooklyn accent – and explains that "the big boss, ol' Bahamut, don't much like Orcus," whom he calls "the meanest dude this side o' the Pecos." The Platinum Dragon would like the characters to help him deal with Orcus by "corral[ing] that big skull stick o' his," which is to say, he wants them to steal the wand of Orcus. 

The whole thing is beyond bizarre – especially St. Sollars, who feels like he's walked in from a completely different roleplaying game (or maybe Dave Trampier's Wormy). I honestly have no idea how to take all of this. Is it meant tongue in cheek, a kind of verbal winking at the players and the DM, since the very idea of 100th-level adventure is already somewhat absurd? Is this some sort of cryptic allusion that simply escapes me? I just don't know, but then my sense of humor is notoriously lacking. Whatever it means, the task St. Sollars offers the characters sets up the remainder of the module, which is vast in its scope.

The characters pass through the gate and arrive in Pazunia, the first layer of the Abyss. From there, they must make their way – somehow – to the layer ruled by Orcus. Doing so is, naturally, a very dangerous endeavor, since they must pass through many, many other layers to reach their final destination. The result is a kind of tour of the Abyss, with stops at the realms of Demogorgon, Yeenoghu, Lolth, Juiblex, Baphomet, Graz'zt, and so many more. What's interesting is that, while the characters can do battle with many of these fiendish AD&D luminaries, they can also parley with some of them, perhaps even ally with them, since they, too, have bones to pick with Orcus. 

As I said, Throne of Bloodstone is vast in scope. The characters, even 100th-level ones, could spend an immense amount of time traveling, exploring, fighting, and negotiating on the various levels of the Abyss that are lightly detailed in this module. It's practically a campaign in itself – and it all happens before the characters even reach the plane of Orcus. Once there, the challenges are immense, with undead beings everywhere, in addition to the requisite demons and, of course, Orcus himself. It's genuinely awe-inspiring, the kind of thing that many an AD&D no doubt dreamed of one day doing with his high-level character. 

The problems with Throne of Bloodstone are many, starting most obviously with whether it's even possible to run a game at this level. I'm not saying it isn't, only that I do not know and I suspect that neither do Douglas Niles or Michael Dobson – or indeed anyone else. That's one of the other problems: was this ever playtested? Does that even matter? Sometimes, the strength of a module's ideas are what matter and there's certainly a lot of interesting, or at least inspiring, ideas in this one. Of course, most of those ideas are barely detailed. Throne of Bloodstone is more of a sketch of a lengthy, high-level mini-campaign than an adventure module in the traditional sense.

That's why it's well nigh impossible to judge this thing. I have never played it and, for years, I scoffed at it, citing it as an example of just how much AD&D had lost its way by the late '80s. Nowadays, I am not so sure. Throne of Bloodstone is such a strange, wonderful, contradictory mess. Everything about it, from its premise to its contents is, on first blush, quite laughable and yet, having re-read it in preparation for this post, I can't simply dismiss it out of hand. Certainly, it'd require a lot work on the part of the DM to use effectively and, even then, I am not sure it could ever work in practice as well as I imagine it could – but it might be worth a try ... ?

Retrospective: Pool of Radiance

My late childhood and early teen years coincided not just with the ascent of fantasy and science fiction in popular media but with the (likely related) ascents of RPGs and video/computer games. By the time I first encountered roleplaying games, there were already serious efforts to combine these two hobbies – and my friends and I were very interested in seeing what they had to offer. That's why we greedily snapped up Wizardry and Telengard and Adventure and many more, all of which we enjoyed but none of which fulfilled our dreams of an electronic entertainment that truly brought the fun of a fantasy RPG to a console or desktop.

There were many reasons why we felt this way, most of them related to the technical limitations of computers in the early to mid-1980s. Another reason was that none of the computer or video games at the time made use of a rules system as complex as that of most pen-and-paper RPGs, which had a negative impact on their depth of play. Wizardry was a solid step in this direction, which is why I loved it, but it was still sufficiently primitive in the scope of its rules that it couldn't hold a candle to Dungeons & Dragons or any other tabletop roleplaying game.

This largely remained the state of affairs until the late 1980s, when advances in both computer technology and program design saw the rise of increasingly sophisticated offerings. By this time, I was away at college and, while I didn't have a desktop computer of my own, many of my friends did so. It was through one of them that, in the Fall of 1988, I was first laid eyes on Pool of Radiance. Produced by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), Pool of Radiance was the first official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons computer game. Unlike the AD&D-branded Intellivision games of earlier in the decade, this one made use of the actual AD&D rules available at the time. This was a huge selling point to me, since all previous fantasy computer games used their own rules systems, which, as I noted above, were much less robust. 

The other thing that caught my attention was that Pool of Radiance was not a generic fantasy game. Instead, it made use of the then-new official AD&D setting of the Forgotten Realms. I'd been a fan of the Realms since I first encountered Ed Greenwood's articles in the pages of Dragon, so the use of the setting in Pool of Radiance was also a point in its favor. Further, the overall scenario of the game was designed not by the staff of SSI but by a team of RPG designers working at TSR, among them James Ward, David Cook, and Steve Winter. TSR fanboy that I was, this last fact assured me that, with Pool of Radiance, we were finally getting the goods: an honest to Crom digital adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons rather than a knock-off.

As one might expect, the centerpiece of Pool of Radiance was its character generator. The player is given the ability to generate up to six characters for use as his party of adventurers in the game. Ability scores are generated randomly, though the player possesses some capacity to alter them according to his preferences. Characters can belong to any of six races (human, dwarf, elf, gnome, half-elf, and halfling) and any of four classes (cleric, fighter, magic-user, thief, with demihumans given the opportunity to multiclass). Though representing only a portion of AD&D's full possibilities – there are no sub-classes or half-orcs, for instance – everything included in Pool of Radiance works the way it ought to in the tabletop version of the game. This was not a version of the game simplified for computers but the Real Deal™.

The game assumes the characters have come to the city of New Phlan and entered into the service of its council to reclaim the Old City, which has fallen into ruin and is now inhabited by a variety of monsters and evil humanoids. As the characters venture into these ruins, they gain experience and treasure, which enables them to explore ever more dangerous – and lucrative – areas. In time, they become sufficiently powerful and accomplished to move beyond Phlan and explore other locales that likewise would benefit from their presence. In short, Pool of Radiance is a good translation of the structure of most D&D campaigns into computerized form. 

The game's scenario is not groundbreaking or revolutionary in any real way, but it is nonetheless quite enjoyable, precisely because it is so similar to many people's experiences of playing AD&D. This similarity is buttressed by the inclusion of myriads of little rules and game elements, like saving throws, spell selection, magic items, and even demihuman level limits. To play Pool of Radiance is to play AD&D, albeit one that lacks the social interactivity that is, in my opinion, the foundation of why roleplaying is such a fun hobby. Even so, the game had a lot to offer and my friends and I spent far more time playing it than we probably ought to have.

In the decades since its release, computer RPGs have become vastly more sophisticated and immersive than was Pool of Radiance. Everything from their graphics, scenario design, and rules implementation have advanced by leaps and bounds, strengthened by improvements in technology and years of experience. Because of this, I doubt I could go back and play Pool of Radiance (or any of the many SSI AD&D computer games that followed in its wake) with any enjoyment. Yet, there's no question that this game was an important milestone in the development of the CRPG genre and for introducing a wider audience to Dungeons & Dragons – quite the legacy, if you ask me.

Retrospective: The Northern Reaches

I mentioned, in last week's retrospective on The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, that I didn't own many modules in the D&D Gazetteer line, in part because of my disappointment with its inaugural release. Despite this, I did own the seventh in the series, The Northern Reaches, released in 1988 and written by Ken Rolston and Liz Danforth – and, to this day, I consider it one of the most interesting things ever published for the D&D game line. 

Like all the other entries in the Gazetteer line, The Northern Reaches is, first and foremost, a detailed examination of one of the regions of the Known World setting (soon to be known as Mystara). In this case, the region in question covers three realms, namely Ostland, Vestland, and the Soderfjord Jarldoms, all of whom share a culture that resembles that of the Norse peoples of medieval Europe. However, The Northern Reaches is more than that. In presenting these three nations, including their histories, societies, and major NPCs, the module also presents several new optional rules for use with D&D and it's these rules that, in my opinion, make the module so fascinating.

Co-author Ken Rolston was already a veteran RPG writer by the time this book appeared (as was Liz Danforth). Among the many games on which he worked was Chaosium's RuneQuest, for which he'd eventually serve as developer during the all-too-brief "RuneQuest renaissance" of the early 1990s. I mention this because, in my opinion, Rolston brings to bear many of the skills he no doubt learned working on the mythical world of Glorantha. The Northern Reaches is a remarkable product that takes inspiration from a real world historical culture to present a fantastical version of the same, without forgetting that this is a module for Dungeons & Dragons and should, therefore, be both accessible and fun. 

By and large, Rolston and Danforth succeed admirably in this. One of the ways they do so is through the use of four different NPCs whose viewpoints on various matters of interest can be found throughout the 32-page Players Book, which, along with the 64-page DM Book, makes up the product. These NPCs – three humans and dwarf – all have unique voices and areas of expertise. Consequently, when they describe aspects of the Northern Reaches, they do so with varying degrees of bias. While this means not everything they say is wholly reliable, it also gives players and DM alike a sense of how the people in this region view the world. It's also a terrific guide for playing Northmen either as player or non-player characters. 

The DM Book, though larger, is the least interesting of the two. This book is written in a matter-of-fact way, presenting the history, geography, society, and current events of each of the three realms, with emphasis placed on those that are most useful for adventuring in them. We also learn about the unique nature of certain nonhuman races here, such as the dwarves and trolls, which are based a bit more on their Norse mythological equivalents (though not too much, lest this run counter to the expectations of standard D&D). There are also extensive treatments of the major personalities of the three realms, in addition to multiple adventure ideas and campaign outlines. Interestingly, there are also brief guidelines for converting the module to AD&D and even making use of the material in campaigns set in either Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. 

The Players Book presents the three realms of Ostland, Vestland, and the Soderfjord Jarldoms as potential homelands for player characters. To that end, there is a section devoted to generating Northmen, starting with an optional personality traits system that's more or less identical to the one in Pendragon, albeit with slightly different sets of opposing traits (no "Chaste/Lustful," for example – this is a family-friendly game product!). There are also optional systems for determining a character's reputation, background, family status, past experiences, skills, and more. None of these systems is mechanically complex, but they're all sufficiently flavorful that I think they'd go some way toward marking a character from the Northern Reaches as distinctive.

There's also a section on the godar, as clerics are known in this region of the Known World. These Norse priests have different abilities and obligations based on the deity – I mean, immortal – they serve. These immortals should be familiar to anyone with knowledge of our world's Norse mythology. Odin, Thor, and Loki are all here, along with several others. Runes and rune magic also get their own treatments here. Again, the new systems associated with these things are fairly simple and don't deviate much from standard D&D, but they do so just enough that the end result is something flavorful and fun.

I'd be exaggerating if I called The North Reaches revolutionary or even groundbreaking. In many ways, it's a fairly ordinary transposition of the historical Norse to a fantasy setting, with almost no changes to differentiate them from their inspirations. Yet, in the context of late 1980s Dungeons & Dragons, that's more than enough to mark it as worthy of praise. That Rolston and Danforth do so in a way that simultaneously conveys the spirit of its inspirations while never losing sight of its purpose as a D&D supplement sets it apart from many similar products in the history of the hobby. That's probably why, even after all these years, I still retain a great fondness for The Northern Reaches and wish I'd paid more attention to the Gazetteer series at the time.