D&D Timeline

I started playing D&D sometime during 1981, but I've never been sure exactly when. I knew it was on or near my friend Kenny's birthday, because his mom gave him the Holmes Basic set (with B2) as a present.

I'm pretty sure it was the day of, because I was there when he opened it and we were both blown away to finally have our paws on the game we'd been hearing about. We spent that entire weekend sitting on his bedroom floor, diving into the rules and playing B2 like a violent version of Monopoly.

I lost contact with Kenny over the years but reconnected with him on social media. We don't live near each other and have unfortunately failed to catch up online. A few days ago, I happened to see that it was his birthday in my notifications and the light bulb went off. I now have an approximate date (mid-August) and perhaps even an exact date (August 18) for the start of my long journey into this hobby. Great memories!

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 7: The Village of Saltmarsh

Seeing as how I wrote this series of posts in a disorganized manner, it is only fitting that I end it with the starting point—the village of Saltmarsh, the party's home base while they tackle the series of modules U1–U3. Curiously, though the module describes the "little town" as playing a "pivotal role" in the series, with a "web of intrigue" that affects the party's progress, the village is given short shrift in the module's manuscript.

Instead of presenting the village and its inhabitants, the module hands the task of designing the entire thing to the DM, with advice to draw a map, establish the local businesses, and set up the town's council (and its conspirators). Some may see the omission of these details as a flexible advantage for homebrew campaigns, allowing the DM to put his stamp on the adventure; others may see it as a failure of the adventure designer to do their job. It's why you paid money for the module, right?

Interestingly, the basic "plot" of Saltmarsh is similar to the Sample Dungeon's "plot" of Portown (smugglers using nearby sea caves to run their operation, in collusion with local bribed officials), so those two pieces clicked together very well, along with new details from Zach Howard's Forgotten Smugglers' Cave adjunct. I took the background information from those three sources and crafted my own background "plot" to account for the various adventure areas of the site. 

I started the campaign without a map of the village. Instead, I gave the party a handout list of the main buildings in town along with a brief description and details about what can be acquired/accomplished in each place. This was my tabletop group's first experience with playing early-edition D&D (Advanced Labyrinth Lord in this case), so I explained that town wasn't really a place for adventure but more of an abstract base for their characters to rest and reset between sessions.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 6: The Naga's Lair

 

 

This penultimate post represents the final piece of the kilodungeon site. It uses the dungeon portion of the original AD&D adventure: N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile Gods. I'm actually not a big fan of the module as published. It's very railroady, and the cult activities in the village of Orlane are meh. The actual naga's lair with the troglodytes is pretty well done, however, and it snaps perfectly into the overall site concept. 

Its inclusion also gives me a third "faction boss" to use as a counterweight to the two magic-users competing over the site. She is gathering her forces to first take over the Sea Caves level and expel the pirates, then take control of the Dungeon level to capture its wealth and power. Once she accomplishes all that, she will send her enthralled human minions to subvert and undermine local authorities, and take over the human settlements in this desolate region on the periphery of civilization.

The entrance to this site is down in the swamp below the manor bluff, but anyone looking off the cliff can potentially catch a glimpse of the berm. The entrance can be reached either by sea or by scaling down the steep slope to the NE. There is also a back way into the dungeon via the Sea Caves level. In fact, several of the naga's minions are enthralled pirates who were captured in those caves by her troglodyte agents.

I got rid of everything in the module up to the naga's lair, though I kept some of the swamp description and its wandering encounter table. I added two other entries—a mud viper and 1–3 giant lizards—to make for an even six encounters, and I renamed the module's 1 HD "giant leech" (AD&D) to a "huge leech" instead (Labyrinth Lord's giant leeches are 6 HD creatures).

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 5: The Estate Grounds

Although this is Part 5, the following material is actually the third section of my dungeon notes. I had no real plan going into this series of posts so I didn't consider a logical order of information before diving in with the manor house in Part 1. In my writeup, section 1 is the Intro and Background, section 2 is the Village of Saltmarsh, section 3 is the Estate Grounds and Manor House, section 4 is the Dungeon level, section 5 is the Sea Caves level, section 6 is the Forgotten Caves level, and section 7 is the Naga Lair.

With the Estate Grounds, my intention was to create areas of interest in the property around the Manor House, mainly to provide a more organic entrance into the overall site and to facilitate multiple entrances into the various dungeon levels. The map of the grounds started as a "sketch" in my head that I transferred straight onto the battlemat during the opening session. (Ignore the compass rose in this image; I flipped the site's orientation after this point.)

Original Estate Map (scale = ~50' hexes)

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 4: The Forgotten Caves

Finally getting back to this series after reviewing thirty submissions for Ben Gibson's Adventure Site Contest 2, including my own submission. No winner(s) have been announced yet as the final reviews continue to trickle in, but I'll certainly post the big announcement when it happens (should be soon).

In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series, I described several of the major pieces of a kilodungeon I smashed together from various old adventures: specifically the Manor House and Sea Caves from U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and the Sample Dungeon from the Holmes Basic Rulebook. Part of the Sea Caves level borrowed a few rooms from a third dungeon—Zach Howard's excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Caves. This post will cover the remainder of that dungeon, which is situated between the Zenopus Dungeon level and the Sea Caves.

Since Zach has already written up this entire thing on his own blog, I don't want to repeat too much here if I can help it. Instead, I have received the author's permission to reference his material so I'll simply cover the things I changed or added to suit my own purposes. I didn't change very much of the content, as the adventure is already well-designed; I simply reworked the map to fit the other levels, and integrated the material into my backstory of the site, tweaking a few things here and there to make it better fit the overall dungeon concept.

The original Forgotten Smugglers' Caves (FSC) is an add-on to Holmes' Sample Dungeon, taking the details of the smugglers' cave and imagining a whole hideout, abandoned long ago due to a curse perhaps laid upon the caves by Zenopus himself. The Sample Dungeon sits below the seaside village of Portown in the original writeup, and characters can find info about the FSC there.

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: The Grand Retreat of the Great Sage Tellah

The Grand Retreat of the Great Sage Tellah

Author: thanateros777
System: BX
Party Size: ?
Level Range: ? ("mid-level")

Beneath a ruined resort is an underground complex created by a bygone sage for his personal amusement and examination, accessible only by a small outbuilding long overgrown and ruined. Deep inside may be fortunes and perils alike, as the Great Sage was an eccentric, if not abnormal man. What mysteries and riches may the eccentric wizard’s sanctum hold?

So when I opened this PDF, I was nearly blinded by the Moiré pattern on the page—a font so compressed as to remove all but a sliver of white between the characters. Waves of interference made my brain shut down for a second time in this contest. See for yourself...

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: Arena Æmilia

Arena Æmilia

Author: Zed
System: BX
Party Size: ?
Level Range: 4-6

Spectacle! at the Arena Æmilia[.] Every Ides new performances. History and legends, classics and new,
thrill and laughter, reenactments and hunts. Entry a silver sesterce, tours upon agreement.

The above notice "hang[s] in ever (sic) town of the region, and every 15th of the month plebeians and nobles alike from all over the frontier province flock to the amphitheater, for some well earned distraction from the toils of imperial expansion."

The site is located in a settlement—any large town or city with an Imperial Rome theme—and its run by Titus, a 7th-level fighter and, variously, a champion, decorated war veteran, and former slave raider. He lives here with his 3rd-level magic-user daughter and her pet smilodon, along with their 100-year old housekeeper, a 4th-level elf who has served Titus's wife's family "for generations" (for some reason).

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: Tower in the Lake

The Tower in the Lake

Author: Matthew Lake
System: BX
Party Size: 4-7
Level Range: 3-5

From the surface it’s just a crumbling ruin. But beneath the waves lies the arcane lair of the great wizard Thassalius. Can you unlock the wizard’s fabled library? Dare you plunder his flooded treasure vault? Will you prove yourself against his mutated creations? There’s only one way to find out…

A water-obsessed wizard has built an elaborate tower in the middle of the lake that goes all the way to the bottom. There, he conducted arcane experiments to transform himself into a merfolk like his beloved—a "freshwater" mermaid named Adeline. Then he disappeared mysteriously. Now, twenty years later, only the top floor of his tower stands above the surface, while the submerged levels remain mostly air-filled. The place is leaking badly, however, and the lower level is flooded.

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: The Bridge of Ptelemegesser

The Bridge of Ptelemegesser

Author: Peter McDevitt
System: BX/OSE
Party Size: ?
Level Range: ?

Whoops, this one's missing a couple of pages. Wait, no... it's only one page long. That's a bold strategy, Cotton. But hey, you can do a lot with one page, so let's see if it pays off.

Adventure Site Contest 2 REVIEW: The Herbalist's Son

The Herbalist's Son

Author: Jacob72
System: "Classic D&D" (actually BECMI)
Party Size: 4-7
Level Range: 3-5

[T]he lost tomb of the elvish prince Calithilben is said to be close to the tiny ruined druid chapel in the village of Sorn, a sorry place of some two dozen low stone and turf windowless huts.

This adventure assumes the party wants to come here, having arrived at the village via a map or legend related to the tomb. Why they would be interested in plundering the tomb of an elf noble (money, magic, glory, enmity against the elves, etc.) is up to the DM to contrive.

The text dives right into a description of the druid's chapel. It's not clear whether the chapel is a building or a standing stone. No building interior is ever described, so the word "chapel" here may be substituting as a blanket term for a shrine or sacred spot (like a menhir). It's a small quibble, but I was confused and had to re-read the paragraph a few times (and I'm still not certain).

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 3: The Sea Caves

In Part 1, I reconfigured the Manor House from U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In Part 2, I adapted the Sample Dungeon from Holmes Basic. Next, I took the excised map sections from both and created a Sea Caves level. Part of this level (the explored part) serves as the pirate base. Another dungeon level—derived from Zach Howard's excellent Forgotten Smugglers' Caves—exists between the Dungeon level and the Sea Caves, and I incorporated several areas from that into the Sea Caves level as well. I'll cover the full FSC level in an upcoming post.

By this point in the campaign, I had a pretty solid sketch map of the bluff's macro-area, showing the exterior orientations/positions of the house, the tower, the gardens and estate wall, and the not-so-obvious areas such as the sea cave entrances and a "muddy mound" in the salt swamp below the bluff. 

More importantly, by the time I got to mapping out the Sea Caves level, I had already shared the sketch map with the players, who did a really good job scouting out the whole area before delving too deep. This locked in the positions of certain sea cave entrances that had to connect with the finished Dungeon level map.

To start with, I took the bluff coastline from my sketch map and aligned it to the 4:1" grid on a blank Photoshop canvas (24" x 24", 7200 x 7200px). Then I took the sea cave segments I carved out of U1, the Sample Dungeon, and FSC, and aligned their grids to my map grid. I then reoriented and repositioned the segments to fit the bluff layout. 

I wanted the U1 sea caves to point west, to match the repositioned west wing of the manor from which the pirates signal their ship and guide the longboats into shore. I also increased the map scale for the U1 piece from the original 5' per square to 10', same as with the manor maps, to open the spaces up a bit. Green arrows indicate where the original sea caves will connect with the sea.

The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower – Part 2: The Dungeon Level

In Part 1, I rearranged the old manor house from U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh to serve as the anchor point for the rest of the other adventure maps. Next, I took the original map from the Sample Dungeon in Holmes basic and sized it to the same 4:1" grid I used for the manor map. The grid in the Sample Dungeon map is hand-drawn and inaccurate, so I aligned the central vault (area A) to the accurate grid and adjusted all the passages and rooms that branch out from it. Then I placed an overlay of the manor outline over area A.

Original Sample Dungeon Map with Manor Overlay (scale = 10')

To fit the geographic location in my campaign world chosen for this site, the Sea Caves need to face south instead of west. To make that change and keep the basic flow of the dungeon, I also need to reposition rooms H, I, K, L, and M, as well as the connection from room J.