German AD&D superfan and podcast host Settembrini (who already had me on his show a couple-three years back) recently completed a two-year-long run through the famous/infamous Temple of Elemental Evil module and in celebration of that invited me back onto the show for a long (too long?) discursive conversation about all things TOEE - its history, its merits and flaws, and both of of experienced playing through it. I had fun recording it but cant vouch for how entertaining listening to it will be for anyone not as deeply into the weeds of this stuff as the two of us. But hey, all you have to lose by listening is a few hours of your life! Check it out here: https://pesa-nexus.de/2025/09/02/episode-63-english-the-temple-of-elemental-evil-w-trent-smith/
Showing posts with label T1-4. Show all posts
Showing posts with label T1-4. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
Thursday, April 14, 2022
I was interviewed for a Podcast!
This is sort of old news now (since it was posted on three days ago) but in case anyone hasn't already heard, German AD&D (and other old-school wargames) uberfan Settembrini did a 3 hour interview with me for his podcast, which is now available for your listening pleasure. I've heard from people who've listened to the whole thing (or at least claim to have) that it's not totally boring and incomprehensible, so yay!
I haven't listened to it (because I don't think I could stand to listen to my own voice for 3+ hours) but from memory we talked about (in no particular order and tending to ramble back and forth between topics) why we like AD&D better than BX D&D, my inspirations and methods for creating The Heroic Legendarium (and the bootleg "AD&D Companion" that preceded it), what makes for good adventures and why Temple of Elemental Evil isn't one, my games with Gary in the 80s playtesting Necropolis (and my attempts at leveraging that experience to create an accurate AD&D conversion of it), using miniatures vs theater of the mind, why I like wargames but am not actually very good at them, why and how OSRIC needs to be updated, whether it's possible to make the Upper Outer Planes a location for interesting adventures, and probably some other stuff that I'm forgetting.
It was fun having a nice long conversation with someone who shares my enthusiasm for this stuff. Maybe it will also be fun to listen in on that conversation...
Friday, May 19, 2017
[D&D] Reclaiming the Temple of Elemental Evil (part 2)
OK, so when we left off we were talking about Frank Mentzer, Gary Gygax's 80s-era right hand man and Official AD&D Rules Guru who took Gary's 300 page Temple of Elemental Evil manuscript and turned it into the T1-4 module that was ultimately published in August 1985, six years after it was originally announced.
Frank, at least in that era, was a rules guy. In both the profile of him as winner of the "Best DM" title in Dragon #43 (Nov. 1980) and the preface to his module R1: To the Aid of Falx he touts how he runs a strictly "by the book" game that eschews rule variations or additions and feels that is the superior approach. That attitude can be seen in his other adventures, and in the two rules-oriented columns ("Dispel Confusion" and "Spelling Bee") that he regularly wrote for Polyhedron. To Frank the rules were a fixed system, and were effectively the physics of the imaginary game-world. This led him, in my opinion, to extend the "logic" of the game-engine beyond where it was intended to go and draw some rules-conclusions and extrapolations that I don't agree with and feel shift the tone of the game away from its fantasy roots into a more sci-fi-flavored direction. The key to success in Frank's adventures is often having sufficient mastery of the rules to recognize when to use a particular spell or magic item in a novel way in order to save the day. That sort of literal-minded, system-hacking approach feels, to me, like it diminishes and cheapens the spirit of the game.
Gary was certainly impressed with Frank's rules acumen. But my guess is that a big part of what he liked about Frank's rules-centric approach was that it was so different than, and he presumably felt complementary to, his own more situational, descriptive, and instinctive approach to rules-design. That's pretty much exactly what Gary says in his dedication to Frank in Unearthed Arcana: "To stalwart Frank Mentzer for always spurring me on and making me be more precise and logical."
And that, to finally circle back after a very long detour to the ostensible point of this post, is where most of the trouble lies for me in the published T1-4: that too much of it feels more to me like a Frank Mentzer adventure than a Gary Gygax one.
Now on the one hand, we know that Gary delivered approx. 300 manuscript pages to Frank, so there must be a lot of Gary in the final product. But we also know that Frank is credited as co-author on that product, which we can surmise means he did more than just edit and polish Gary's work. In an interview on the Random Wizard blog Frank describes his process on turning Gary's T2 manuscript into T1-4 like so:
And yet, it's also the part of the adventure that I like least. Not just because the Nodes are unfinished and are a boring slog (both times I've run the adventure we've ended up severely shortening that phase), but because making everything center around the Orb - finding it, then destroying it - makes the whole thing feels very tidy and mundane. T1 hinted at a large scale conspiracy of layers-within-layers, and T1-4 doesn't really deliver on that - instead it just presents a grindy dungeon-crawl with way too many similar encounters (endless bugbears!) that becomes a formulaic macguffin-hunt.
Probably just about all of us have played this adventure, and probably just about all of us ended up being disappointed by it and felt it didn't live up to its initial promise. I'd like to think at this point we have the capability (experience and understanding of the game) to rectify that. I think the best route towards that is to remove Frank's additions, go back towards something like what Gary delivered to him in 1984, and devise an alternate resolution. So the Orb is gone and Falrinth is gone (possibly to resurface in an expanded S4). I'm not sure if Iuz's involvement was one of Frank's contributions or not, but either way it's so firmly entrenched in the canon by way of Artifact of Evil that it stays. In order to try to make this all hang together and not just seem like a random dungeon-crawl, we need a new (or at least modified) backstory. I propose this:
The cult of elemental evil was born on the shores of Nyr Dyv as worshipers of the sleeping Elder Elemental God - that very same mysterious deity venerated by the Eilservs in the Giant-Drow series. In one or more post-TSR interviews Gary mentioned how his original plans for both that series and the Temple of Elemental Evil centered around this eldritch figure and attempts to cause (or prevent) his awakening, which is why he mentioned in the introduction to module Q1 that he handed it off to David Sutherland because his own ideas for it were too similar to what he was doing with T2, but the irony is that he ended up eventually handing off T2 as well, so the idea was dropped from the published versions of both adventures. Gary never got to write his Elder Elemental God adventure, which means it's up to us to do it in his place.
So my version of the story is that instead of inventing the cult of elemental evil as a "false flag" cover for her true ambitions, Zuggtmoy instead co-opted the real existing cult, or at least this particular branch of it. Her initial reason for doing so was presumably the same as that of the Eilservs - as a check against her rival demoness, Lolth. But gradually Zuggtmoy fell under the spell of the Elder Elemental God, and dedicated herself to awakening it. In pursuit of that effort, she built the temple, and deep within its dungeons opened gates to isolated pocket areas within the four elemental planes where she learned that keys to awakening the Elder Elemental God were hidden. These are the iron pyramid representing earth, the silver sphere representing air, the bronze eight-pointed star representing fire, and the pale blue crystal cube representing water. However, to her chagrin, Zuggtmoy realized that these keys alone are not enough to accomplish her task and two more sets are required: one of which is in the possession of Lolth herself (see module D3) and the other of which is currently unknown (and will form the heart of an eventual remake of Q1 if I ever get around to it).
Iuz in this conception plays the same role as in the published adventure - he opportunistically attached himself to Zuggtmoy but shares none of her interest in the Elder Elemental God and is not privy to, or interested in, the secrets surrounding it. Because, with Zuggtmoy imprisoned, Iuz has been directing most of the cult's activities, they have mostly floundered since the kidnapping of Prince Thrommel. Lolth, however, takes a more active role. She has learned that the temple is connected to the same trouble she is facing among her drow followers and is thus desirous of obtaining the second set of keys for herself, to keep them out of the hands of the Eilservs. Therefore, since the original temple fell she has tried to infiltrate her own agents into its resurgent hierarchy, most successfully to date her protege Lareth the Beautiful.
The Elemental Nodes thus are not separate mini-sized demi-planes, but isolated pockets within the actual elemental planes. Theoretically they could be reached by other means, but the gates within the temple dungeons provide the easiest and most direct access. The gems of power are replaced with the key-tokens as described above. The gates on dungeon level four that send traffic to the Nodes (areas 421, 424, 427, and 431) send to these areas. The gates that previously sent traffic to the elemental planes (areas 422, 425, 428, and 432) instead become receiving portals: anyone in possession of the appropriate key can transport from the plane to the corresponding location at will, or a being from that plane (including, theoretically, a character) can be summoned by means of the cult's rituals.
When the temple was active, there was a place for each key in the altar of the respective temple (areas 145, 201, 212, and 213), which are now empty depressions of the corresponding shape. If the appropriate key is inserted into the altar it transports the party to area 339. None of the current temple hierarchy are aware of this function. The gates in area 339 also allow transport to the planes as in the published version. These depressions should be a sufficient lure to cause players to start searching for items of the appropriate size and shape. Once they find one (or more) of the keys and place it in the appropriate altar, they will be transported to Zuggtmoy's lair (assuming they haven't been there already).
And, of course, since rooms 335-338 have been deleted, the secret tunnel from the Broken Tower just leads straight to room 313.
It's entirely possible that a group of players might "defeat" the temple (by decimating the forces of the Greater Temple on dungeon level four) and leave the area without solving this mystery, leaving Zuggtmoy still bound and forgotten. Potentially that same group could later find the second set of keys within the Vault of the Drow and then return here to employ them. If so, they're likely to find the results a bit disappointing (since any party capable of reaching the Vault of the Drow and defeating Lolth isn't likely to have much trouble defeating Zuggtmoy too) - though perhaps if Zuggtmoy, once freed, summons her allies Iuz and Iggwilv things might become more interesting :)
And that, at long last, is my large-scale modification to Temple of Elemental Evil, to make it feel more "Gygaxian" and of a piece with his other adventures and the larger World of Greyhawk setting. I have further, smaller-scale thoughts on how to make the dungeons themselves feel more dynamic and less grindy (by reducing the number of humanoids milling about the dungeons and moving more of the human cultists out of the dungeons and into Nulb) that I'd intended to also cover, and which may still form an eventual part three of this series, but probably not anytime soon. This adventure is so oversized that even just writing about it is exhausting!
Frank, at least in that era, was a rules guy. In both the profile of him as winner of the "Best DM" title in Dragon #43 (Nov. 1980) and the preface to his module R1: To the Aid of Falx he touts how he runs a strictly "by the book" game that eschews rule variations or additions and feels that is the superior approach. That attitude can be seen in his other adventures, and in the two rules-oriented columns ("Dispel Confusion" and "Spelling Bee") that he regularly wrote for Polyhedron. To Frank the rules were a fixed system, and were effectively the physics of the imaginary game-world. This led him, in my opinion, to extend the "logic" of the game-engine beyond where it was intended to go and draw some rules-conclusions and extrapolations that I don't agree with and feel shift the tone of the game away from its fantasy roots into a more sci-fi-flavored direction. The key to success in Frank's adventures is often having sufficient mastery of the rules to recognize when to use a particular spell or magic item in a novel way in order to save the day. That sort of literal-minded, system-hacking approach feels, to me, like it diminishes and cheapens the spirit of the game.
Gary was certainly impressed with Frank's rules acumen. But my guess is that a big part of what he liked about Frank's rules-centric approach was that it was so different than, and he presumably felt complementary to, his own more situational, descriptive, and instinctive approach to rules-design. That's pretty much exactly what Gary says in his dedication to Frank in Unearthed Arcana: "To stalwart Frank Mentzer for always spurring me on and making me be more precise and logical."
And that, to finally circle back after a very long detour to the ostensible point of this post, is where most of the trouble lies for me in the published T1-4: that too much of it feels more to me like a Frank Mentzer adventure than a Gary Gygax one.
Now on the one hand, we know that Gary delivered approx. 300 manuscript pages to Frank, so there must be a lot of Gary in the final product. But we also know that Frank is credited as co-author on that product, which we can surmise means he did more than just edit and polish Gary's work. In an interview on the Random Wizard blog Frank describes his process on turning Gary's T2 manuscript into T1-4 like so:
[O]ne day he dropped off what he had typed (he didn't use a computer until the later NIPI days), and I rewrote it as I entered it into TSR's mainframe computer, thereby becoming proficient in High Gygaxian and able to finish the lower levels in his style.This explains why it feels (at least to me) like there are "Mentzerisms" (places where the text feels more like Frank's authorial style than Gary's) scattered throughout almost the entire text, while also confirming that Frank actually wrote, not just edited, some parts. Based on my subjective gut feelings (based on the style of the encounters and also, for instance, the fact that those are the only two sections of the adventure that include content from Unearthed Arcana), the two sections I'm most confident were written by Frank are Falrinth's lair (rooms 335-338, pp. 86-90) and the entire Elemental Nodes section (pp. 107-119). This seems to suggest Frank likely also created the Orb of Golden Death (pp. 127-128) and the whole plot surrounding it, as summarized on pp. 29 and 44 (since the Orb is found in the former section and the keys to destroying it are found in the latter). The Orb is, of course, the linchpin that ties the entire adventure-as-published together. If Frank contributed the whole idea of the Orb of Golden Death and the Elemental Nodes then he absolutely deserved his co-writer credit because that's a very large and significant part of the published adventure - the difference between something TSR was able to release and something that probably never would have made it out of Gary's desk-drawer.
And yet, it's also the part of the adventure that I like least. Not just because the Nodes are unfinished and are a boring slog (both times I've run the adventure we've ended up severely shortening that phase), but because making everything center around the Orb - finding it, then destroying it - makes the whole thing feels very tidy and mundane. T1 hinted at a large scale conspiracy of layers-within-layers, and T1-4 doesn't really deliver on that - instead it just presents a grindy dungeon-crawl with way too many similar encounters (endless bugbears!) that becomes a formulaic macguffin-hunt.
Probably just about all of us have played this adventure, and probably just about all of us ended up being disappointed by it and felt it didn't live up to its initial promise. I'd like to think at this point we have the capability (experience and understanding of the game) to rectify that. I think the best route towards that is to remove Frank's additions, go back towards something like what Gary delivered to him in 1984, and devise an alternate resolution. So the Orb is gone and Falrinth is gone (possibly to resurface in an expanded S4). I'm not sure if Iuz's involvement was one of Frank's contributions or not, but either way it's so firmly entrenched in the canon by way of Artifact of Evil that it stays. In order to try to make this all hang together and not just seem like a random dungeon-crawl, we need a new (or at least modified) backstory. I propose this:
The cult of elemental evil was born on the shores of Nyr Dyv as worshipers of the sleeping Elder Elemental God - that very same mysterious deity venerated by the Eilservs in the Giant-Drow series. In one or more post-TSR interviews Gary mentioned how his original plans for both that series and the Temple of Elemental Evil centered around this eldritch figure and attempts to cause (or prevent) his awakening, which is why he mentioned in the introduction to module Q1 that he handed it off to David Sutherland because his own ideas for it were too similar to what he was doing with T2, but the irony is that he ended up eventually handing off T2 as well, so the idea was dropped from the published versions of both adventures. Gary never got to write his Elder Elemental God adventure, which means it's up to us to do it in his place.
So my version of the story is that instead of inventing the cult of elemental evil as a "false flag" cover for her true ambitions, Zuggtmoy instead co-opted the real existing cult, or at least this particular branch of it. Her initial reason for doing so was presumably the same as that of the Eilservs - as a check against her rival demoness, Lolth. But gradually Zuggtmoy fell under the spell of the Elder Elemental God, and dedicated herself to awakening it. In pursuit of that effort, she built the temple, and deep within its dungeons opened gates to isolated pocket areas within the four elemental planes where she learned that keys to awakening the Elder Elemental God were hidden. These are the iron pyramid representing earth, the silver sphere representing air, the bronze eight-pointed star representing fire, and the pale blue crystal cube representing water. However, to her chagrin, Zuggtmoy realized that these keys alone are not enough to accomplish her task and two more sets are required: one of which is in the possession of Lolth herself (see module D3) and the other of which is currently unknown (and will form the heart of an eventual remake of Q1 if I ever get around to it).
Iuz in this conception plays the same role as in the published adventure - he opportunistically attached himself to Zuggtmoy but shares none of her interest in the Elder Elemental God and is not privy to, or interested in, the secrets surrounding it. Because, with Zuggtmoy imprisoned, Iuz has been directing most of the cult's activities, they have mostly floundered since the kidnapping of Prince Thrommel. Lolth, however, takes a more active role. She has learned that the temple is connected to the same trouble she is facing among her drow followers and is thus desirous of obtaining the second set of keys for herself, to keep them out of the hands of the Eilservs. Therefore, since the original temple fell she has tried to infiltrate her own agents into its resurgent hierarchy, most successfully to date her protege Lareth the Beautiful.
The Elemental Nodes thus are not separate mini-sized demi-planes, but isolated pockets within the actual elemental planes. Theoretically they could be reached by other means, but the gates within the temple dungeons provide the easiest and most direct access. The gems of power are replaced with the key-tokens as described above. The gates on dungeon level four that send traffic to the Nodes (areas 421, 424, 427, and 431) send to these areas. The gates that previously sent traffic to the elemental planes (areas 422, 425, 428, and 432) instead become receiving portals: anyone in possession of the appropriate key can transport from the plane to the corresponding location at will, or a being from that plane (including, theoretically, a character) can be summoned by means of the cult's rituals.
When the temple was active, there was a place for each key in the altar of the respective temple (areas 145, 201, 212, and 213), which are now empty depressions of the corresponding shape. If the appropriate key is inserted into the altar it transports the party to area 339. None of the current temple hierarchy are aware of this function. The gates in area 339 also allow transport to the planes as in the published version. These depressions should be a sufficient lure to cause players to start searching for items of the appropriate size and shape. Once they find one (or more) of the keys and place it in the appropriate altar, they will be transported to Zuggtmoy's lair (assuming they haven't been there already).
And, of course, since rooms 335-338 have been deleted, the secret tunnel from the Broken Tower just leads straight to room 313.
It's entirely possible that a group of players might "defeat" the temple (by decimating the forces of the Greater Temple on dungeon level four) and leave the area without solving this mystery, leaving Zuggtmoy still bound and forgotten. Potentially that same group could later find the second set of keys within the Vault of the Drow and then return here to employ them. If so, they're likely to find the results a bit disappointing (since any party capable of reaching the Vault of the Drow and defeating Lolth isn't likely to have much trouble defeating Zuggtmoy too) - though perhaps if Zuggtmoy, once freed, summons her allies Iuz and Iggwilv things might become more interesting :)
And that, at long last, is my large-scale modification to Temple of Elemental Evil, to make it feel more "Gygaxian" and of a piece with his other adventures and the larger World of Greyhawk setting. I have further, smaller-scale thoughts on how to make the dungeons themselves feel more dynamic and less grindy (by reducing the number of humanoids milling about the dungeons and moving more of the human cultists out of the dungeons and into Nulb) that I'd intended to also cover, and which may still form an eventual part three of this series, but probably not anytime soon. This adventure is so oversized that even just writing about it is exhausting!
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
[D&D] Reclaiming the Temple of Elemental Evil (part 1)
AD&D module T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil, released in the summer of 1985, is one of the most famous of all D&D modules, for several reasons: (1) it was the largest module published by TSR up to that time (128 pages + a 16 page map booklet at a time when most modules were still 32 pages); (2) it was (mostly) written by Gary Gygax, who created the AD&D game and wrote the rulebooks and most of the early modules (including all of the best ones) but had been mostly-absent for a couple of years in Hollywood running Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corp., producing the D&D cartoon and trying to get a movie made; (3) it was the first/only starter-level adventure written by Gary for AD&D (all of his other AD&D modules were for mid- to high-level characters, and B2: The Keep on the Borderlands was for the Basic version of the game (though of course almost all of us ran it for AD&D anyway)); (4) it was the closest any TSR module had yet come to the "megadungeon" paradigm that defined the original game and was still implicit even in the AD&D rulebooks; and (5) last but not least because TSR had been promising it since the release of T1: The Village of Hommlet in 1979 - six years earlier. This was, by pretty much any measure, a major release for AD&D and of course it sold very well and went through many printings (stretching well into the 90s) and is, along with Unearthed Arcana, one of the products that provided enough cash-flow to get TSR out of debt and save the company. It was so popular and legendary that even in the 21st century Wizards of the Coast has released a novelization (2001), a sequel adventure (2001), a computer game (2003), and a boardgame (2015) all based on it.
And yet, for all of that, the adventure has always been very problematic because, frankly, it was a huge disappointment to almost everybody (especially people who'd been waiting since the 70s, who by and large seem to have a harsher opinion of it than I do - after all, I'd only been waiting a year) and in many ways actually kind of sucks.
In order to get into why that is, a short history lesson is first in order. Gary first set up the area c. 1975 as a place to introduce new characters (and players) to the Greyhawk Campaign, away from the more established environs of Greyhawk Castle. It's likely he also intended this area to serve as a testing place for new concepts he'd developed since the game had been published and was gradually solidifying into the shape of what would eventually become AD&D. Per the historical notes in the El Raja Key Archive the main players in that game were Ernie Gygax (Burne the magic-user), Cindy Gygax (Y'dey the cleric), Heidi Gygax (Murfles the elf fighter/thief), Luke Gygax (Otis the ranger), Skip Williams (Rufus the fighter), Tim Kask (Jaroo the druid), and Tim Jones (Terjon the cleric).
This group played for several months, but eventually their progress began to stagnate. One story I've heard is that the players found so much interesting stuff to do in Nulb that it distracted them from exploration of the dungeon. So, in an attempt to shake things up, Gary allowed his Greyhawk co-DM Rob Kuntz to take his high level PC Robilar into the dungeons. Over a long weekend of play (I can't remember if I read that Rob stayed over that weekend at Gary's house because they were snowed in or if I just imagined it) Robilar single-handedly decimated the inhabitants of the dungeon, freed the powerful demoness trapped within, and then fled the scene. In reaction, the other players sought out the aid of high-level good PCs (specifically Ernie Gygax's high-level character, Tenser) whose forces mobilized to mop up the remains and pursue Robilar back to his castle, and the sub-campaign was effectively over. At least some of the players and characters from it went on to further adventures battling against giants and the legendary drow,
Fast-forward a few years to 1978-79. AD&D has been released, and TSR has entered the business of publishing pre-written adventure modules (after, in the original D&D era, only publishing DM tools like the Dungeon Geomorph map sets and pre-rolled Monster and Treasure Assortments - they assumed no one would be interested in buying "someone else's dungeon," and it was only the success of Judges Guild's products that showed them there was an untapped market for such things). Their first module releases had been the aforementioned giant and drow campaign, as well as an expanded tournament dungeon from 1975, the infamous Tomb of Horrors. Simultaneous with that, Gary was busy expanding and polishing the setting of the Greyhawk Campaign for publication by TSR as The World of Greyhawk - a large-scale setting in which DMs could place their campaigns, and which would also be the setting for all of TSR's modules. Combining all of that, Gary went back to revisit the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign notes, and the result was the remarkable T1: The Village of Hommlet.
While the earlier modules had all been self-contained environments, The Village of Hommlet takes obvious inspiration from Gary's parallel work on The World of Greyhawk and is loaded to the gills with references to the larger campaign-world and feels completely different and much more ambitious than what had come before. The adventuring content of the module is actually pretty thin - a small village with only a handful of adventuring-relevant characters and locations, and a small, unspectacular mini-dungeon - but it's presented in such detail, with so much flavor in the descriptions and so many hints at what lies just outside the frame, that it was addictive. Hommlet felt not all that different than Tolkien's Shire (perhaps a more midwestern American version: Tolkien meets Norman Rockwell) - someplace you could vividly picture and imagine going to and living in. Surely the gorgeously detailed illustrations by David Trampier helped greatly to set that mood.
Anyhow, this module was released, and proved very popular among the fans, and Gary found himself in something of a bind. The module billed itself as a prelude to T2: The Temple of Elemental Evil, which people became very eager to see. However, several factors worked against that happening anytime soon. One was that the Temple dungeons had been created in Gary's usual quasi-improvisational style (and apparently made heavy use of a random dungeon generation system - presumably the same tables that later appeared as DMG Appendix A, and eventually formed the basis of the Dungeon Robber game) which Gary didn't feel was up to publishable standard and needed to be revised. Another is that, because of the way the playtest campaign had abruptly ended, the dungeons were unfinished, with lots of unresolved loose-ends that would need to be fleshed out and tied up for publication. A third is that T1 had been so popular and set expectations so high that Gary realized he couldn't put out some weak or half-hearted effort - that T2 needed to meet or exceed the standard set by its predecessor. And lastly, and I suspect most crucially, T1 was released almost simultaneously with D&D's explosion in popularity and Gary's need to take on many more business duties that cut severely into his time for creative writing - something he was already lamenting (and using as an excuse for the delayed completion of T2) in an editorial in the March 1980 issue of The Dragon magazine.
Promises that T2 would finally be completed and released as soon as possible were a regular feature of Gary's magazine column over the next couple of years, until in mid-1983 he disappeared from its pages altogether (because, we would later learn, he had been sent off to Hollywood). When he eventually re-appeared (in the October 1984 issue), as part of a long laundry-list of status updates on various TSR projects he mentioned that the T2 manuscript - approximately 300 pages in length - had been handed over to Frank Mentzer "to keep him amused during odd moments and fill in his spare time." And sure enough, when T2 (renamed T1-4, presumably to reflect both that it included the entire text of T1, but also that it was four times the length of a standard AD&D module) finally appeared the next summer it was credited to "Gary Gygax with Frank Mentzer."
Frank Mentzer is an interesting figure in the history of 80s-D&D. He was hired as an editor by TSR around the end of 1979, in their second big wave of personnel expansion. A few months later he won TSR's invitational "Best DM" contest, and a couple years after that became Gary Gygax's official right hand man and AD&D Rules Guru. He founded the RPGA, edited its newsletter Polyhedron, and completely reshaped how D&D tournaments were run. He was involved in the development of TSR's Endless Quest line of choose-your-own-adventure books for young readers. Presumably on the basis of that line's success was given the job of re-editing the D&D Basic Set to make it more approachable to younger audiences and people with no prior knowledge of fantasy or wargaming at all.
That set (along with a corresponding revision of the D&D Expert Set) was released in the summer of 1983 and was a huge seller - some credit for which I suspect also goes to the striking cover art by Larry Elmore (which is so iconic that Wizards of the Coast reused it exactly for their D&D Starter Set in 2010) and the fact that, at the height of the D&D fad-boom, the game was ubiquitous - it was sold in toy stores and drug stores, was featured in the Sears catalog, and was translated into something like a dozen different languages (and, of course, there was a D&D-branded cartoon and line of toys supporting it). Frank did a fine job of making the game understandable to young readers (personal note: it's actually the version I started with, at age 9) which is to his credit, but he was also very much in the right place at the right time. With its art and its huge marketing push and the great amount of public interest (which was beginning to wane, but was still near its peak), it's a fair bet this set was going to fly off the shelves no matter who the editor was.
Burnished by that success, Frank went on to extend the D&D line with several more boxed sets filled with his own ideas and rule expansions (the Companion (1984), Master (1985), and Immortals (1986) Sets), and in addition to being trusted with the T2 manuscript by Gary was also reportedly in line to edit the revision of the AD&D rules before Gary left the company and TSR's new management changed directions. He had Gary's total confidence and trust on matters of the AD&D rules. It was a common occurrence in Dragon magazine of the era that a rules addition would appear under Gary's byline that raised questions or complaints among the readership and then Frank would appear an issue or two later on Gary's behalf with an essay explaining and justifying the reasoning behind it.
All of that is well and good - it's understandable that Gary felt the need to delegate a lot of his former design-oriented duties once he took on other corporate responsibilities, and it's good that he found someone he was willing to trust and work closely with. If it wasn't for Frank's involvement, it seems likely that most if not all of Gary's 80s-era AD&D output would have remained unfinished and unpublished. He needed an editor/partner/assistant - somebody who could speak for him, who he could bounce ideas off of, and who could take his rough ideas and flesh them out and help get them into publishable shape - and Frank filled that role. The problem for me is that while Frank claimed that he and Gary were on the same stylistic and game-philosophical wavelength and spoke with a single voice (Gary's), a closer look at Frank's work and pronouncements shows that wasn't necessarily true.
Hmm, this is already really, really long and I'm still in the introduction. I'm going to insert a break here and continue - get into my actual specific critiques of the published module and suggestions to improve it - in a separate post.
And yet, for all of that, the adventure has always been very problematic because, frankly, it was a huge disappointment to almost everybody (especially people who'd been waiting since the 70s, who by and large seem to have a harsher opinion of it than I do - after all, I'd only been waiting a year) and in many ways actually kind of sucks.
In order to get into why that is, a short history lesson is first in order. Gary first set up the area c. 1975 as a place to introduce new characters (and players) to the Greyhawk Campaign, away from the more established environs of Greyhawk Castle. It's likely he also intended this area to serve as a testing place for new concepts he'd developed since the game had been published and was gradually solidifying into the shape of what would eventually become AD&D. Per the historical notes in the El Raja Key Archive the main players in that game were Ernie Gygax (Burne the magic-user), Cindy Gygax (Y'dey the cleric), Heidi Gygax (Murfles the elf fighter/thief), Luke Gygax (Otis the ranger), Skip Williams (Rufus the fighter), Tim Kask (Jaroo the druid), and Tim Jones (Terjon the cleric).
This group played for several months, but eventually their progress began to stagnate. One story I've heard is that the players found so much interesting stuff to do in Nulb that it distracted them from exploration of the dungeon. So, in an attempt to shake things up, Gary allowed his Greyhawk co-DM Rob Kuntz to take his high level PC Robilar into the dungeons. Over a long weekend of play (I can't remember if I read that Rob stayed over that weekend at Gary's house because they were snowed in or if I just imagined it) Robilar single-handedly decimated the inhabitants of the dungeon, freed the powerful demoness trapped within, and then fled the scene. In reaction, the other players sought out the aid of high-level good PCs (specifically Ernie Gygax's high-level character, Tenser) whose forces mobilized to mop up the remains and pursue Robilar back to his castle, and the sub-campaign was effectively over. At least some of the players and characters from it went on to further adventures battling against giants and the legendary drow,
Fast-forward a few years to 1978-79. AD&D has been released, and TSR has entered the business of publishing pre-written adventure modules (after, in the original D&D era, only publishing DM tools like the Dungeon Geomorph map sets and pre-rolled Monster and Treasure Assortments - they assumed no one would be interested in buying "someone else's dungeon," and it was only the success of Judges Guild's products that showed them there was an untapped market for such things). Their first module releases had been the aforementioned giant and drow campaign, as well as an expanded tournament dungeon from 1975, the infamous Tomb of Horrors. Simultaneous with that, Gary was busy expanding and polishing the setting of the Greyhawk Campaign for publication by TSR as The World of Greyhawk - a large-scale setting in which DMs could place their campaigns, and which would also be the setting for all of TSR's modules. Combining all of that, Gary went back to revisit the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign notes, and the result was the remarkable T1: The Village of Hommlet.
While the earlier modules had all been self-contained environments, The Village of Hommlet takes obvious inspiration from Gary's parallel work on The World of Greyhawk and is loaded to the gills with references to the larger campaign-world and feels completely different and much more ambitious than what had come before. The adventuring content of the module is actually pretty thin - a small village with only a handful of adventuring-relevant characters and locations, and a small, unspectacular mini-dungeon - but it's presented in such detail, with so much flavor in the descriptions and so many hints at what lies just outside the frame, that it was addictive. Hommlet felt not all that different than Tolkien's Shire (perhaps a more midwestern American version: Tolkien meets Norman Rockwell) - someplace you could vividly picture and imagine going to and living in. Surely the gorgeously detailed illustrations by David Trampier helped greatly to set that mood.
Anyhow, this module was released, and proved very popular among the fans, and Gary found himself in something of a bind. The module billed itself as a prelude to T2: The Temple of Elemental Evil, which people became very eager to see. However, several factors worked against that happening anytime soon. One was that the Temple dungeons had been created in Gary's usual quasi-improvisational style (and apparently made heavy use of a random dungeon generation system - presumably the same tables that later appeared as DMG Appendix A, and eventually formed the basis of the Dungeon Robber game) which Gary didn't feel was up to publishable standard and needed to be revised. Another is that, because of the way the playtest campaign had abruptly ended, the dungeons were unfinished, with lots of unresolved loose-ends that would need to be fleshed out and tied up for publication. A third is that T1 had been so popular and set expectations so high that Gary realized he couldn't put out some weak or half-hearted effort - that T2 needed to meet or exceed the standard set by its predecessor. And lastly, and I suspect most crucially, T1 was released almost simultaneously with D&D's explosion in popularity and Gary's need to take on many more business duties that cut severely into his time for creative writing - something he was already lamenting (and using as an excuse for the delayed completion of T2) in an editorial in the March 1980 issue of The Dragon magazine.
Promises that T2 would finally be completed and released as soon as possible were a regular feature of Gary's magazine column over the next couple of years, until in mid-1983 he disappeared from its pages altogether (because, we would later learn, he had been sent off to Hollywood). When he eventually re-appeared (in the October 1984 issue), as part of a long laundry-list of status updates on various TSR projects he mentioned that the T2 manuscript - approximately 300 pages in length - had been handed over to Frank Mentzer "to keep him amused during odd moments and fill in his spare time." And sure enough, when T2 (renamed T1-4, presumably to reflect both that it included the entire text of T1, but also that it was four times the length of a standard AD&D module) finally appeared the next summer it was credited to "Gary Gygax with Frank Mentzer."
Frank Mentzer is an interesting figure in the history of 80s-D&D. He was hired as an editor by TSR around the end of 1979, in their second big wave of personnel expansion. A few months later he won TSR's invitational "Best DM" contest, and a couple years after that became Gary Gygax's official right hand man and AD&D Rules Guru. He founded the RPGA, edited its newsletter Polyhedron, and completely reshaped how D&D tournaments were run. He was involved in the development of TSR's Endless Quest line of choose-your-own-adventure books for young readers. Presumably on the basis of that line's success was given the job of re-editing the D&D Basic Set to make it more approachable to younger audiences and people with no prior knowledge of fantasy or wargaming at all.
That set (along with a corresponding revision of the D&D Expert Set) was released in the summer of 1983 and was a huge seller - some credit for which I suspect also goes to the striking cover art by Larry Elmore (which is so iconic that Wizards of the Coast reused it exactly for their D&D Starter Set in 2010) and the fact that, at the height of the D&D fad-boom, the game was ubiquitous - it was sold in toy stores and drug stores, was featured in the Sears catalog, and was translated into something like a dozen different languages (and, of course, there was a D&D-branded cartoon and line of toys supporting it). Frank did a fine job of making the game understandable to young readers (personal note: it's actually the version I started with, at age 9) which is to his credit, but he was also very much in the right place at the right time. With its art and its huge marketing push and the great amount of public interest (which was beginning to wane, but was still near its peak), it's a fair bet this set was going to fly off the shelves no matter who the editor was.
Burnished by that success, Frank went on to extend the D&D line with several more boxed sets filled with his own ideas and rule expansions (the Companion (1984), Master (1985), and Immortals (1986) Sets), and in addition to being trusted with the T2 manuscript by Gary was also reportedly in line to edit the revision of the AD&D rules before Gary left the company and TSR's new management changed directions. He had Gary's total confidence and trust on matters of the AD&D rules. It was a common occurrence in Dragon magazine of the era that a rules addition would appear under Gary's byline that raised questions or complaints among the readership and then Frank would appear an issue or two later on Gary's behalf with an essay explaining and justifying the reasoning behind it.
All of that is well and good - it's understandable that Gary felt the need to delegate a lot of his former design-oriented duties once he took on other corporate responsibilities, and it's good that he found someone he was willing to trust and work closely with. If it wasn't for Frank's involvement, it seems likely that most if not all of Gary's 80s-era AD&D output would have remained unfinished and unpublished. He needed an editor/partner/assistant - somebody who could speak for him, who he could bounce ideas off of, and who could take his rough ideas and flesh them out and help get them into publishable shape - and Frank filled that role. The problem for me is that while Frank claimed that he and Gary were on the same stylistic and game-philosophical wavelength and spoke with a single voice (Gary's), a closer look at Frank's work and pronouncements shows that wasn't necessarily true.
Hmm, this is already really, really long and I'm still in the introduction. I'm going to insert a break here and continue - get into my actual specific critiques of the published module and suggestions to improve it - in a separate post.
Monday, April 10, 2017
[D&D] Activity Tables for The Village of Hommlet
The Village of Hommlet (as described in the AD&D module T1: The Village of Hommlet, later included as part of T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil) is probably the single most well-known location in all of AD&D-dom (with only The Keep of the Borderlands supplanting it if we include the non-Advanced versions). As everybody knows, it supposedly sees a significant volume of traffic passing through due to its location at a crossroads connecting Verbobonc, Dyvers, the Kron Hills, and the Wild Coast, which is how it supports a large inn, and why agents of the various Good and Evil organizations are able to pass unnoticed. Other than saying that, though, the module doesn't really give much detail about that traffic, leaving it to the individual DM to determine what types of traffic pass through, and how often. So, in order to aid in that effort and help me to visualize Hommlet as an active, "living" locale, I pulled together this table:
1 in 3 chance per day of a new arrival in town:
01-25 - Farmers from the local area (1-4 carts; 1-6 individuals per cart)
26-60 - Merchants (a)
61-75 - Patrol (b)
76-85 - Pilgrims (c)
86-90 - Rhennee/Attloi (d)
91-95 - Supplies & replacement workers for castle construction (1-3 wagons; 3-9 new workers)
96-00 - Other (e)
(a) Merchants:
Size of caravan:
1-2 - individual peddler (1 cart)
3-6 - small caravan (1-3 wagons)
7-9 - medium caravan (4-6 wagons)
0 - large caravan (7-10 wagons)
Origin and destination:
1-5 - arriving from north (Verbobonc); headed: east (1-5), south (6-9), or west (0)
6-7 - arriving from east (Dyvers); headed north (1-7), west (8-9), or south (0)
8-9 - arriving from south (Wild Coast); headed north (1-7); west (8-9), or east (0)
0 - arriving from west (Kron Hills)*; headed north (1-4); east (5-7), or south (8-0)
*30% of merchants arriving from the west are gnomes
(b) Patrols:
1-3 - light patrol (representing the Viscount of Verbobonc)
4-7 - levied patrol (representing the Waldgraf of Ostverk)
8 - woodsmen (from the Gnarley Forest)
9-0 - mercenary company (determine number and type per DMG)
(c) Pilgrims:
1-2 - followers of Obad-hai (druidical)
3-6 - followers of St. Cuthbert
7-8 - followers of Fharlanghn
9 - followers of Olidammara
0 - followers of Ulaa (30% chance clerics are gnomes (1-3) or dwarfs (4-6))
Each group consists of 1 cleric/druid of level 3-6, 0-2 clerics/druids of level 1-3, 1-6 guards (men-at-arms led by a fighter level 2-4) and 5-30 pilgrims
(d) Rhennee (Attloi):
1 chief (Fighter (20%), Thief (30%) or Mountebank (50%) of level 4-7)
1 wisewoman (Thief (20%), Mountebank (50%), or Mystic (30%) of level 2-5)
1-6 wagons, each containing 1-2 guards, 2-8 folk, and 0-3 children
(e) Other travelers:
1-2 - Adventurers
3 - Traveling noble & retinue
4 - Elves
5-7 - Outlaws
8-10 - Beggars (3-18)
11-12 - Refugees (5-30)
This table determines "legitimate" traffic - at the DM's option almost any of the above may actually be disguised agents or cultists of the Temple of Elemental Evil
1 in 3 chance per day of a new arrival in town:
01-25 - Farmers from the local area (1-4 carts; 1-6 individuals per cart)
26-60 - Merchants (a)
61-75 - Patrol (b)
76-85 - Pilgrims (c)
86-90 - Rhennee/Attloi (d)
91-95 - Supplies & replacement workers for castle construction (1-3 wagons; 3-9 new workers)
96-00 - Other (e)
(a) Merchants:
Size of caravan:
1-2 - individual peddler (1 cart)
3-6 - small caravan (1-3 wagons)
7-9 - medium caravan (4-6 wagons)
0 - large caravan (7-10 wagons)
Origin and destination:
1-5 - arriving from north (Verbobonc); headed: east (1-5), south (6-9), or west (0)
6-7 - arriving from east (Dyvers); headed north (1-7), west (8-9), or south (0)
8-9 - arriving from south (Wild Coast); headed north (1-7); west (8-9), or east (0)
0 - arriving from west (Kron Hills)*; headed north (1-4); east (5-7), or south (8-0)
*30% of merchants arriving from the west are gnomes
(b) Patrols:
1-3 - light patrol (representing the Viscount of Verbobonc)
4-7 - levied patrol (representing the Waldgraf of Ostverk)
8 - woodsmen (from the Gnarley Forest)
9-0 - mercenary company (determine number and type per DMG)
(c) Pilgrims:
1-2 - followers of Obad-hai (druidical)
3-6 - followers of St. Cuthbert
7-8 - followers of Fharlanghn
9 - followers of Olidammara
0 - followers of Ulaa (30% chance clerics are gnomes (1-3) or dwarfs (4-6))
Each group consists of 1 cleric/druid of level 3-6, 0-2 clerics/druids of level 1-3, 1-6 guards (men-at-arms led by a fighter level 2-4) and 5-30 pilgrims
(d) Rhennee (Attloi):
1 chief (Fighter (20%), Thief (30%) or Mountebank (50%) of level 4-7)
1 wisewoman (Thief (20%), Mountebank (50%), or Mystic (30%) of level 2-5)
1-6 wagons, each containing 1-2 guards, 2-8 folk, and 0-3 children
(e) Other travelers:
1-2 - Adventurers
3 - Traveling noble & retinue
4 - Elves
5-7 - Outlaws
8-10 - Beggars (3-18)
11-12 - Refugees (5-30)
This table determines "legitimate" traffic - at the DM's option almost any of the above may actually be disguised agents or cultists of the Temple of Elemental Evil
In addition to new arrivals there might be other events or activities going on in town, which can be determined via a second table:
Roll (d%) daily:
01-80 - No event of note
81-83 - Good news: Someone is announcing a birth (1-2), wedding (3-5), or other similarly fortuitous event (6). Free round of drinks for everyone at the Inn!
84-86 - Celebration time: There's a party going on in honor of a birth, wedding, birthday, barn-raising, religious event, or just about anything else
87-89 - Unexpected arrival: either rolled on the Traffic Table (which may result in two arrivals on the same day) or some other miscellaneous visitor (e.g. relatives visiting someone in town, a messenger with news, a mysterious loner, etc.)
90-91 - Accident: A fire (1-2) or other significant injury (3-6) is suffered by someone in town (1-2) or on an outlying farm (3-6)
92-93 - Outbreak: contagious illness has affected 1-3 households in town (1-4) or among the outlying farms (5-6)
94 - Brawl at the Inn: self-explanatory
95-97 - Sudden change in the weather: sudden increase (1-2) or decrease (3-4) in temperature, or sudden heavy precipitation (5-6)
98 - Creature on the loose: a pack of feral dogs (1-6), an escaped horse (7-9), something from the marshes (snake, lizard, etc.) (10-11), or a monster rolled from the Wilderness Encounters table (12) is loose in town
99 - Attack: an outlying farm (1-2) or group of travelers (3-6) has been attacked by bandits (1-3), humanoids (4-5), or a monster (6)
00 - Strange, portentous occurrence: meteor shower, blood moon, solar eclipse, birth of two-headed calf, swarm of locusts, earthquake, etc. (each such event should only occur a single time)
These are the probabilities as of the start of the adventure. If the PCs make slow progress and the Temple of Elemental Evil gains power, some events (95-00) will become more likely, and others (81-86) less likely, and the table will need to be modified to reflect the changed circumstances.
Between these two tables, this classic locale starts to feel more like an active, "living" place where things happen whether or not the players instigate them, and everybody isn't a Quantum Ogre sitting around waiting for some PC to come along to talk to (or rob, or attack) them.
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