Chronal Shift: TSR

A Chronological Survey of DND's Official Modules (and some contemporaries, for funsies)

[chronotsr]

Purpose & Index

This blog is a project for me, and maybe you, to walk through DND's modules in release order. So this blog has basically 3 goals:

Show off some weird interesting ideas from older modules

Shine light on obscure modules

Look at how modules grew as an art-form

Isn't that's fun and interesting?

Index

I will try to keep this up to date, bug me if it goes untouched for too long..

Pre-G1, part 1: Temple of the Frog, Dave Arneson (1975)

Pre-G1, part 2: Palace of the Vampire Queen, The Dwarven Glory, and The Misty Isles, Wee Warriors (1976-1977)

Pre-G1, part 3: Lost Caverns of Tosjconth, WinterCon Ver. (1976)

Pre-G1, part 4a: City-State of the Invincible Overlord, Tegel Manor, Modron, Judge's Guild (1976-1978)

Pre-G1, part 4b: The Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor, GenCon IX Dungeons, Citadel of Fire, Judge's Guild (1978)

Pre-G1, part 5: The Tower of Zenopus, Eric Holmes, (1977)

G1, The Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, Gary Gygax (Jul 1978)

G2, The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, Gary Gygax (Jul 1978)

G3, The Hall of the Fire Giant King, Gary Gygax (Jul 1978)

D1, The Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Gary Gygax (Aug 1978)

D2, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, Gary Gygax (Aug 1978)

D3, Vault of the Drow, Gary Gygax (Aug 1978)

S1, Tomb of Horrors, Gary Gygax (Oct 1978) 7.5. 1978 Reflections, and the Halls of Mystery (Dec 1978)

B1, In Search of Adventure, Mike Carr (January 1979)

T1, The Village of Hommlet, Gary Gygax (August 1979)

[chronotsr]

Very hard to get writing for ChronoTSR when I know that I'm probably going to have to move everything to another platform eventually. Tumblr's recent self-inflicted wounds will probably mean that I'm going to move everything to a blog-blog someday. I'll keep you all posted.

[cryptotheism]

In the Eberron setting of D&D any individual can theoretically ascend into godhood if enough people believe them to be gods. Similarly in both Warhammer and Chainsaw Man, demons (and the Chaos Gods) exist as direct manifestations of humanities fears and their strength is proportional to that fear. As far as you are aware, are these ideas rooted in any real world theologies or did someone come up with it in fiction and other people have adapted on them?

The idea that "gods are whatever people agree gods are" is a big part of secular humanism. Both Warhammer and Discworld have that as a huge part of their worlds, because they were both written by secular humanists who knew about Chaos magic and shit. it was all the rage in the early 80s now it's in every sci fi fantasy property.

[prokopetz]

This is broadly true, but there's also a much more specific vector when it comes to tabletop RPGs in particular. A lot of folks who were in the the tabletop roleplaying biz at the time that the trope was popularised have cited Harlan Ellison's 1975 short short collection Deathbird Stories as a direct inspiration for how faith and gods work in their original settings, and Gygax et al. were almost certainly aware of it. It's not the ultimate source of the idea by any means, but it's arguably the single most influential proximate source through with the idea entered tabletop RPG culture, so it's definitely worth checking out if you're interested in tracing the trope's antecedents.

(Of course, it's not just RPGs where this specific work's influence is felt; it's anecdotally reported that Terry Pratchett cited Deathbird Stories as one of his inspirations for how the gods of Discworld work, as exemplified in his 1992 novel Small Gods, while Neil Gaiman – yes, I know, but Sandman and American Gods played an enormous role in popularising this particular trope outside of tabletop RPG circles, so it's relevant even if the author is a shit – cited both Deathbird Stories and Richard Garnett's 1888 collection The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales. The latter is an especially interesting case because it clearly represents a transitional state between the secular humanist idea of gods' power being directly proportionate to the strength of their worshippers' faith, and older notions of gods deriving physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their names.)

[chronotsr]

No. 9 - T1, The Village of Hommlet (August 1979)

Author(s): Gary Gygax Artist(s): David A. Trampier (Cover), David C. Sutherland III Level range: 1 Theme: Tutorial dungeon Major re-releases: T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil, The Village of Hommlet (2009), Original Adventures Reincarnated #6.

CW: Discussion of Antisemitism. I didn't see that coming.

Possibly the end of the hiatus curse? Since then, I had further brainworms and acquired (and read) the fiend folio, the MM2, several Jon Petersen histories on TSR and the industry, and more. Will this reflect in the review itself? Maybe!

...Wait, there's a 4e version? 4e had a really weird habit of random 1e remakes didn't it? It was a reward for WOTC's organized play DMs, I have not read it in its entirety but it is very revisionist in a bad way. It's jarring, it mashes up 4e-style art with the original black and white pen-drawn art of 1e and also greyscale realistic maps? It's a mess of a release and there's some truly weird retcons in it. Anyway, we're here for 1e, not 4e.

Actually, one more aside. There is an adventure sequence called The Great Greyhawk Campaign. It was never officially announced or released as one product, but the idea goes that you start in Hommlet, you go to the Temple of Elemental Evil, you do the Slavelords campaign, then the Giants sequence, then the Drow sequence, and finally wrap in Q1. That's a hell of a ride, and it would probably comfortably get you to level cap for most characters. I really wanna try it some day, but I can't imagine it ever happening (that is SO long!)

So. T1. How do you start with T1?

I think you can seriously argue that T1 is the single most reviewed module of all time. It honestly feels a little excessive to cover it. And yet, I felt obligated to do my dues to T1. Why?

Because T1 is, more than any previous module, the most influential module ever made. Lots of early modules are influential. G1 is important for being the first standalone module. D2 is important for being an early module to not assume hostilities. B1 is the first tutorial dungeon. But the thing about all of those is that in 2025, those types of modules have dramatically moved on. T1 remains the same. T1 is the granddaddy of all starter towns in every video game and every ttrpg. Every starter town is being compared against T1, it is the baseline.

Now this is not to say that T1 is perfect, or that T1 has aged like fine wine. But T1 tapped into something elemental about D&D that it needed to progress. Prior to T1, many parties simply...didn't play out the out-of-the-dungeon part. Characters poofed into the dungeon entrance and poofed out because the game was about dungeoncrawling. T1 represents a wildly different vision for the game, one that Gary and friends had been doing for a while and many people had independently dreamed up, but T1 made it standard that there was a nearby town that you actually went to and played things out, that was your home base. D3 was still, ultimately, a hostile environment. Like look at this:

That's just what DND towns look like. This basic structure (a town with a mayor and farmers and shopkeeps and blacksmiths and the local wizard and a dungeon nearby) is ubiquitous in DND now. You can basically describe any given dnd starting town as Hommlet And BLANK. Orlane is Hommlet And Kidnappings. Phandelin is Hommlet And Miners. Shadowdale is Hommlet And Wizards. Saltmarsh is Hommlet And Smugglers. It's hard to even get across how little has fundamentally changed between T1 and the 2014 Starter Set. Really if one thing has "changed" between T1 and then, it's the belief that adventures SHOULD have narrative hooks and SHOULD have an overarching plot. Even then they sometimes skip those.

Despite it's influence, T1 is weird in that it feels less like a module and more like a game aid. At its core, Hommlet is a town that has nothing to do with the nearby dungeon, and a dungeon that has nothing to do with the town. The town is keyed like a dungeon, and the dungeon is keyed like...a dungeon. The connective tissue is that the Temple of Elemental Evil is lurking as a threat behind everything, but T4 won't be released for QUITE some time, so it feels vague and distant. We get an actually surprisingly sophisticated history lesson: Hommlet was founded as a travel inn, a blacksmithy, and some farms. It grew into a proper town. Things got bad when their neighbors in Evil Town decided to Worship Evil and did Evil Stuff to them. The forces of good rallied and killed the bad guys, sieging the Temple of Elemental Evil and locking the evil inside. Adventurers slowly dried up as the area ran out of adventure to adventure at. So now evil returns and you lot will bumble into it.

Let us, then, get into the town part of the key.

One of the cliches of old TSR towns, to me, is that item #1 is always a farm. The game always presumes you enter town and you find a farm and the family is there and they wave at you. Orlane inverts this a bit by having the farmers NOT happy to see you, which is one of the many reasons I consider Orlane to be the most interesting starter village ever.

At this point time, thieves are a class now, and so (conspicuously) everything is marked for how the players could rob it.

There are a lot of what you might call "empty hooks" lying around town. For example, the son of a local farmer is actually a spy for Verbabonc (SUCH a TSR name) that will help you if paid to, and if he dies his brother will demand restitution. Why? That's left to a later module! Which wouldn't come out for another 6 years! Oops!

The wealth amounts in this town are genuinely unhinged, as usual. Inside a crock in some cowshit is, for some reason, nearly 700gp of treasure. Would you go digging around in cowshit for 70 dollars? Maybe if I had gloves. The placements are all nefariously difficult here: "sewn inside a horsecollar" do kids even know what horsecollars are anymore? Do they know who Horace Horsecaller is? How old are we!

A frankly annoying quality here is that these buildings are keyed with the first appearance in ALLCAPS followed by the actual building title in the body paragraph -- The Inn of the Welcome Wench is buried 3 lines into its text. You're not gonna skim that. You have to know in advance where it is, basically. The inn itself is, inexplicably, keyed separately without calling out that the actual room-by-room is elsewhere. If you scroll forward to page 9 (possibly looking for the map, which is also housed elsewhere), The contents of the inn itself is fairly ho-hum, it's a normal inn with many normal recruitment opportunity and the obligatory gygaxian traitor henchmen (who are unfailingly higher levels than their non-traitor peers). A few specialties are here though: a secret room from the old resistance, a spy from the temple of elemental evil, a secret ceiling compartment where druids can spy on suspicious guests).

A cavalcade of repetitive cottagers follow, emphasizing why in the future we stopped keying every single house. Many are not named, with that classic "so you customize it" excuse that people love trotting out. It does serve the purpose of making sure you have an answer to exactly who is with which faction: The Cuthbertites, the newbie; The Grove, part of the old alliance; the Temple, Verbabonc, the big supporter of the alliance; or one of the few neutrals.

The trader's establishment is also lovingly given a map and keys. Curiously, it is for lack of a better phrase "sub keyed", where the main room has every single item in it given a location. The map is here mainly because the players might discover the traders are also spies and want to kill them. They probably won't succeed, it's a Lv10 thief and a Lv7 assassin, they will at best cause them to flee and at worse die in the process.

I always find it funny how "moneychanger" is a perpetual occupation in DND. I have no idea how common historical moneychangers were, but if DND is to be believed, there's one in every podunk town. What do they do for the majority of the year when it's not market day?

For reasons I cannot fathom, they finally call out the separate map and key for the church after skipping every other keyed location. It's a standard fantasy church, styled after a catholic one, with the bit that Cuthbert is a brute and likes beating his worshippers into compliance. It's trying very hard to be funny but I'm not sure how funny it'd be to any table I've run. Why precisely this needed a room by room map is unclear to me, I can't foresee why you'd fight there. The walled manor is not keyed, despite being the official holdout if the temple attacks.

A half-built castle is underway for the town's old heroes, Burne and Rufus, who are mid level adventurers who have settled down. They live next door in the tower, which gets its own key, though there's not much to report beyond "it's a guard tower." Really, the main advantage of T1 as a document is that it has maps for your default buildings: a town, an inn, a trader's shop, a guard tower, and a dungeon. The maps are probably worth more than the keying for the purposes of the neophyte GM.

It is truly the town-est town ever to have town'd. Its genericity means you really could just put it in any faux medieval fantasy setting anywhere.

Nothing's really driving you to the main dungeon, that moathouse, in fact it never directs you to mention the moathouse from any specific NPC. You either work it in or the players need to wander around and explore it for simply being there -- like you're playing a TES game. In fact, not much of this book's setups really fire off anything else. There are a few people who will tail you into the dungeon or betray you if you hire them to go in with you, but that's pretty much it. All the actual secret going on in this town is immaterial to T1, setting up for T4? But let's talk about the moathouse.

First of all, I just adore the bad guy's name. "Lareth the Beautiful." They really don't make NPC names like they used to. A good title after a first name -- even just a place of origin name (Bridgette of Freeport) starts implying things about the world that are far more interesting that Jane Silvercat. A pox on noun-noun names! It's almost a shame Lareth will probably die here because he begs to be put to greater use! In any event, the Moathouse is a shithole. Just look at this mess:

Your first instinct when you're reading about the new castle is "why don't they just repair the moathouse?" and you see this mess and you go "oh yeah that makes sense." There's not much to say: it's a moathouse the Temple of Elemental Evil built as an outpost. It got destroyed when the Temple got shut down by the big alliance, and now it's despised and destroyed. It's faintly defiled land. Really the weird thing is that it's a full hour away in a marsh. I will spare you the Monty Python bit.

Going into the keying now:

The random table is interesting in that half of the encounters are actually not encounters at all, but rather random happenings. It's a messed up castle so it's echo-y and there's rats and it's still in the process of falling down.

There's something so simple about being jumped by frogs at the front gate. I always love the "drag the player by the frog's tongue" moment and I use it often in my own games.

This dungeon is working hard to communicate how messed up it is. Even the floor will give in on your mount, laming them. Mercifully, there's a chance of discovering bootprints to confirm you're not alone.

The bandits inside have a solid escape plan, and will use it if you look scary: bar the door and run through the hole in the wall into the marsh. It's nice to see clever bandits sometimes.

Not unlike Saltmarsh later, the top level is mostly deserted. It exists to get you off guard for the actual danger in the dungeon level. Physically accessing the basement is fairly easy, there is 1 access that you simply walk into from the big room, although a sister staircase gives you further reason to look for it.

The bottom level, by comparison, is just very stereotypically dungeon-y. There's torture chambers, miscellaneous monsters there through hiring or chance, torture chambers, et c.

The false door trap is so beautifully simple that I'm a little surprised it hasn't made more returns. Essentially a common door that, when opened, closes a portcullis behind the door and reveals a dead end on the other side. It's basically just a loud cage snapping shut. So many traps make no sense but this one is surprisingly simple: it's a gravity powered trap, controlled by a disguised winch elsewhere.

Tragically, Lareth's ambitious do not get much detail. He's the new hope of the Elemental cult but how or why he does this is not clear, just that he's underhanded and clever.

A strange and gross final note to end on: one of his pieces of loot is a phylactery, but not in the Lich sense -- it's an amulet-amulet. That you wrap around a cleric's arm. In fact, Lareth is specifically wearing it on his left arm, which strongly implies he's right-handed. I think this because, when Jewish folks wear real-life phylacteries, they wrap them around their non-dominant arm, and another around their head. Wait, so we have an evil cleric leading a secret cabal that is opposing a catholic saint by spying and infiltrating a community and leading monsters against them, and he is explicitly duplicitous and a talker and underhanded and greedy and in league with a demoness. The fact that Laerth is wearing the phylactery correctly implies that Gary knew exactly what it was. Gary, why did you strongly imply the evil cleric in charge of the evil cult of demon worshippers was Jewish? Gary, what the actual fuck? In hindsight, the bad jokes about Cuthbert scan as an inquisition joke, I was imagining a nun smacking a student with a ruler...

That's...a really bummer note to end on. I'm sorry. Next time, uh...White Plume Mountain, the funhouse dungeon? At least it'll be lighter...

[chronotsr]

I'm not dead, but I have noticed something curious. I've been reading the Icelandic sagas (as one does) and I've noticed the description of the moathouse and its residents sound suspiciously similar to the description of Thorolf Darkskin and his fortress in The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal. It's got the same escape route, it's in the same kind of marsh, they've been doing the same kind of local crimes, he's a mighty man and sorcerer like Lareth. He's not coded jewish though, nor is he especially demonic, though the various sorcerers in the previous parts of the saga are very much demonic (the episode immediately before this one has evil enchanted cats).

[chronotsr]

🥳🥳

Celebrating coming back to ChronoTSR by forgetting to put the cut in. At some point it's just tradition!

[chronotsr]

No. 9 - T1, The Village of Hommlet (August 1979)

Author(s): Gary Gygax Artist(s): David A. Trampier (Cover), David C. Sutherland III Level range: 1 Theme: Tutorial dungeon Major re-releases: T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil, The Village of Hommlet (2009), Original Adventures Reincarnated #6.

CW: Discussion of Antisemitism. I didn't see that coming.

Possibly the end of the hiatus curse? Since then, I had further brainworms and acquired (and read) the fiend folio, the MM2, several Jon Petersen histories on TSR and the industry, and more. Will this reflect in the review itself? Maybe!

...Wait, there's a 4e version? 4e had a really weird habit of random 1e remakes didn't it? It was a reward for WOTC's organized play DMs, I have not read it in its entirety but it is very revisionist in a bad way. It's jarring, it mashes up 4e-style art with the original black and white pen-drawn art of 1e and also greyscale realistic maps? It's a mess of a release and there's some truly weird retcons in it. Anyway, we're here for 1e, not 4e.

Actually, one more aside. There is an adventure sequence called The Great Greyhawk Campaign. It was never officially announced or released as one product, but the idea goes that you start in Hommlet, you go to the Temple of Elemental Evil, you do the Slavelords campaign, then the Giants sequence, then the Drow sequence, and finally wrap in Q1. That's a hell of a ride, and it would probably comfortably get you to level cap for most characters. I really wanna try it some day, but I can't imagine it ever happening (that is SO long!)

So. T1. How do you start with T1?

I think you can seriously argue that T1 is the single most reviewed module of all time. It honestly feels a little excessive to cover it. And yet, I felt obligated to do my dues to T1. Why?

Because T1 is, more than any previous module, the most influential module ever made. Lots of early modules are influential. G1 is important for being the first standalone module. D2 is important for being an early module to not assume hostilities. B1 is the first tutorial dungeon. But the thing about all of those is that in 2025, those types of modules have dramatically moved on. T1 remains the same. T1 is the granddaddy of all starter towns in every video game and every ttrpg. Every starter town is being compared against T1, it is the baseline.

Now this is not to say that T1 is perfect, or that T1 has aged like fine wine. But T1 tapped into something elemental about D&D that it needed to progress. Prior to T1, many parties simply...didn't play out the out-of-the-dungeon part. Characters poofed into the dungeon entrance and poofed out because the game was about dungeoncrawling. T1 represents a wildly different vision for the game, one that Gary and friends had been doing for a while and many people had independently dreamed up, but T1 made it standard that there was a nearby town that you actually went to and played things out, that was your home base. D3 was still, ultimately, a hostile environment. Like look at this:

That's just what DND towns look like. This basic structure (a town with a mayor and farmers and shopkeeps and blacksmiths and the local wizard and a dungeon nearby) is ubiquitous in DND now. You can basically describe any given dnd starting town as Hommlet And BLANK. Orlane is Hommlet And Kidnappings. Phandelin is Hommlet And Miners. Shadowdale is Hommlet And Wizards. Saltmarsh is Hommlet And Smugglers. It's hard to even get across how little has fundamentally changed between T1 and the 2014 Starter Set. Really if one thing has "changed" between T1 and then, it's the belief that adventures SHOULD have narrative hooks and SHOULD have an overarching plot. Even then they sometimes skip those.

Despite it's influence, T1 is weird in that it feels less like a module and more like a game aid. At its core, Hommlet is a town that has nothing to do with the nearby dungeon, and a dungeon that has nothing to do with the town. The town is keyed like a dungeon, and the dungeon is keyed like...a dungeon. The connective tissue is that the Temple of Elemental Evil is lurking as a threat behind everything, but T4 won't be released for QUITE some time, so it feels vague and distant. We get an actually surprisingly sophisticated history lesson: Hommlet was founded as a travel inn, a blacksmithy, and some farms. It grew into a proper town. Things got bad when their neighbors in Evil Town decided to Worship Evil and did Evil Stuff to them. The forces of good rallied and killed the bad guys, sieging the Temple of Elemental Evil and locking the evil inside. Adventurers slowly dried up as the area ran out of adventure to adventure at. So now evil returns and you lot will bumble into it.

Let us, then, get into the town part of the key.

One of the cliches of old TSR towns, to me, is that item #1 is always a farm. The game always presumes you enter town and you find a farm and the family is there and they wave at you. Orlane inverts this a bit by having the farmers NOT happy to see you, which is one of the many reasons I consider Orlane to be the most interesting starter village ever.

At this point time, thieves are a class now, and so (conspicuously) everything is marked for how the players could rob it.

There are a lot of what you might call "empty hooks" lying around town. For example, the son of a local farmer is actually a spy for Verbabonc (SUCH a TSR name) that will help you if paid to, and if he dies his brother will demand restitution. Why? That's left to a later module! Which wouldn't come out for another 6 years! Oops!

The wealth amounts in this town are genuinely unhinged, as usual. Inside a crock in some cowshit is, for some reason, nearly 700gp of treasure. Would you go digging around in cowshit for 70 dollars? Maybe if I had gloves. The placements are all nefariously difficult here: "sewn inside a horsecollar" do kids even know what horsecollars are anymore? Do they know who Horace Horsecaller is? How old are we!

A frankly annoying quality here is that these buildings are keyed with the first appearance in ALLCAPS followed by the actual building title in the body paragraph -- The Inn of the Welcome Wench is buried 3 lines into its text. You're not gonna skim that. You have to know in advance where it is, basically. The inn itself is, inexplicably, keyed separately without calling out that the actual room-by-room is elsewhere. If you scroll forward to page 9 (possibly looking for the map, which is also housed elsewhere), The contents of the inn itself is fairly ho-hum, it's a normal inn with many normal recruitment opportunity and the obligatory gygaxian traitor henchmen (who are unfailingly higher levels than their non-traitor peers). A few specialties are here though: a secret room from the old resistance, a spy from the temple of elemental evil, a secret ceiling compartment where druids can spy on suspicious guests).

A cavalcade of repetitive cottagers follow, emphasizing why in the future we stopped keying every single house. Many are not named, with that classic "so you customize it" excuse that people love trotting out. It does serve the purpose of making sure you have an answer to exactly who is with which faction: The Cuthbertites, the newbie; The Grove, part of the old alliance; the Temple, Verbabonc, the big supporter of the alliance; or one of the few neutrals.

The trader's establishment is also lovingly given a map and keys. Curiously, it is for lack of a better phrase "sub keyed", where the main room has every single item in it given a location. The map is here mainly because the players might discover the traders are also spies and want to kill them. They probably won't succeed, it's a Lv10 thief and a Lv7 assassin, they will at best cause them to flee and at worse die in the process.

I always find it funny how "moneychanger" is a perpetual occupation in DND. I have no idea how common historical moneychangers were, but if DND is to be believed, there's one in every podunk town. What do they do for the majority of the year when it's not market day?

For reasons I cannot fathom, they finally call out the separate map and key for the church after skipping every other keyed location. It's a standard fantasy church, styled after a catholic one, with the bit that Cuthbert is a brute and likes beating his worshippers into compliance. It's trying very hard to be funny but I'm not sure how funny it'd be to any table I've run. Why precisely this needed a room by room map is unclear to me, I can't foresee why you'd fight there. The walled manor is not keyed, despite being the official holdout if the temple attacks.

A half-built castle is underway for the town's old heroes, Burne and Rufus, who are mid level adventurers who have settled down. They live next door in the tower, which gets its own key, though there's not much to report beyond "it's a guard tower." Really, the main advantage of T1 as a document is that it has maps for your default buildings: a town, an inn, a trader's shop, a guard tower, and a dungeon. The maps are probably worth more than the keying for the purposes of the neophyte GM.

It is truly the town-est town ever to have town'd. Its genericity means you really could just put it in any faux medieval fantasy setting anywhere.

Nothing's really driving you to the main dungeon, that moathouse, in fact it never directs you to mention the moathouse from any specific NPC. You either work it in or the players need to wander around and explore it for simply being there -- like you're playing a TES game. In fact, not much of this book's setups really fire off anything else. There are a few people who will tail you into the dungeon or betray you if you hire them to go in with you, but that's pretty much it. All the actual secret going on in this town is immaterial to T1, setting up for T4? But let's talk about the moathouse.

First of all, I just adore the bad guy's name. "Lareth the Beautiful." They really don't make NPC names like they used to. A good title after a first name -- even just a place of origin name (Bridgette of Freeport) starts implying things about the world that are far more interesting that Jane Silvercat. A pox on noun-noun names! It's almost a shame Lareth will probably die here because he begs to be put to greater use! In any event, the Moathouse is a shithole. Just look at this mess:

Your first instinct when you're reading about the new castle is "why don't they just repair the moathouse?" and you see this mess and you go "oh yeah that makes sense." There's not much to say: it's a moathouse the Temple of Elemental Evil built as an outpost. It got destroyed when the Temple got shut down by the big alliance, and now it's despised and destroyed. It's faintly defiled land. Really the weird thing is that it's a full hour away in a marsh. I will spare you the Monty Python bit.

Going into the keying now:

The random table is interesting in that half of the encounters are actually not encounters at all, but rather random happenings. It's a messed up castle so it's echo-y and there's rats and it's still in the process of falling down.

There's something so simple about being jumped by frogs at the front gate. I always love the "drag the player by the frog's tongue" moment and I use it often in my own games.

This dungeon is working hard to communicate how messed up it is. Even the floor will give in on your mount, laming them. Mercifully, there's a chance of discovering bootprints to confirm you're not alone.

The bandits inside have a solid escape plan, and will use it if you look scary: bar the door and run through the hole in the wall into the marsh. It's nice to see clever bandits sometimes.

Not unlike Saltmarsh later, the top level is mostly deserted. It exists to get you off guard for the actual danger in the dungeon level. Physically accessing the basement is fairly easy, there is 1 access that you simply walk into from the big room, although a sister staircase gives you further reason to look for it.

The bottom level, by comparison, is just very stereotypically dungeon-y. There's torture chambers, miscellaneous monsters there through hiring or chance, torture chambers, et c.

The false door trap is so beautifully simple that I'm a little surprised it hasn't made more returns. Essentially a common door that, when opened, closes a portcullis behind the door and reveals a dead end on the other side. It's basically just a loud cage snapping shut. So many traps make no sense but this one is surprisingly simple: it's a gravity powered trap, controlled by a disguised winch elsewhere.

Tragically, Lareth's ambitious do not get much detail. He's the new hope of the Elemental cult but how or why he does this is not clear, just that he's underhanded and clever.

A strange and gross final note to end on: one of his pieces of loot is a phylactery, but not in the Lich sense -- it's an amulet-amulet. That you wrap around a cleric's arm. In fact, Lareth is specifically wearing it on his left arm, which strongly implies he's right-handed. I think this because, when Jewish folks wear real-life phylacteries, they wrap them around their non-dominant arm, and another around their head. Wait, so we have an evil cleric leading a secret cabal that is opposing a catholic saint by spying and infiltrating a community and leading monsters against them, and he is explicitly duplicitous and a talker and underhanded and greedy and in league with a demoness. The fact that Laerth is wearing the phylactery correctly implies that Gary knew exactly what it was. Gary, why did you strongly imply the evil cleric in charge of the evil cult of demon worshippers was Jewish? Gary, what the actual fuck? In hindsight, the bad jokes about Cuthbert scan as an inquisition joke, I was imagining a nun smacking a student with a ruler...

That's...a really bummer note to end on. I'm sorry. Next time, uh...White Plume Mountain, the funhouse dungeon? At least it'll be lighter...

[chronotsr]

I think there's some kind of curse where when you commit to a public-facing project, you get bizarro delays. Car is totaled, suddenly I had a huge reading deadline that HAD to be fulfilled before finishing the DMG, and my sleeping disorder decided to flare up at the same time. Madness!

I have not forgotten. It will come, barring fate doing me in.

[chronotsr]

It's done! DMG read. As soon as my sudden reading homework was complete (I had to slam Imaro 1-3 in 17 days, if you're aware of the current availability of Imaro 3 and 4 you know why I couldn't pass up on it), it wasn't so bad. Once you get past the terribly laid out and weirdly specific rules of the first 150 or so, you get to cruise through like 50 magic item tables and a lot of appendices that are...more or less skippable. For reasons I cannot fathom Appendix E is a summary of the monster manual? But in any event, that means I will be able to look you in the eyes for a T1 Let's Read sometime soon. Ta ta for now!

[chronotsr]

I think there's some kind of curse where when you commit to a public-facing project, you get bizarro delays. Car is totaled, suddenly I had a huge reading deadline that HAD to be fulfilled before finishing the DMG, and my sleeping disorder decided to flare up at the same time. Madness!

I have not forgotten. It will come, barring fate doing me in.

[chronotsr]

No 8.5 - "A Sample Dungeon" from the ADND Dungeon Master's Guide

Author(s): Gary Gygax Level range: 1 Theme: Tutorial dungeon Major re-releases: None (though there's some fan edits out there

It's a real simple one folks. Gary provides this sample dungeon in the ADND DMG just to explain the basics of the game. It's not even complete, actually, only the first three rooms are keyed and then a fictionalized transcript of play for those rooms is provided.

Essentially we're looking at the cellars of a monastery as they become a secret crypt.

I am basically only mentioning it out of completeness. Its biggest legacy is that it was left incomplete, and many people have wanted to fill it in. For some reason, it inspires people to do this in a way that B1 didn't, despite B1 having intentional blanks and a more interesting concept.

Of note to us only is the presence of an odd little mechanic (attacking the water to catch a map as it floats away from a skeleton), the tease that room 29 is a treasure room, a spider ambush, and an example secret door. In traditional Gary style, in the advice section he again urges GMs to bully their players for not being the right amount of cautious. The example of play ends in the gnome getting kidnapped and ghouls ambushing the party. That's it.

Next time, it's Hommlet!

[chronotsr]

A quick PSA about old books

Please don't tape the spines of books. Common packing tape is acidic and degrades the finish, the print, and the structural integrity of the thing you're taping over very long periods of time. In fact, the act of taking the tape off (which you need to do because the tape is acidic and slowly eating away at the book) is going to mean paper loss in most circumstances. And this is not to mention the delicate task of removing residue from the removed tape.

If your book does not currently have any tears in the spine, please please please do not tape it "preventatively". Treat it carefully, with clean bare hands.

If it is damaged, then you need to make a judgement call between repairing it (there are good guides online on how to do basic hardback book repairs with minimal knowledge or resources -- UNCG has a good one) or perhaps simply leaving it alone. Sometimes simply leaving it alone is the smartest move -- if you treat the book gently, the tear will not increase. They do make book repair tapes that are meant for this and they are not acidic, if you're desperate.

If you really need a fix right now and don't want to spend money, at least use painter's tape? The kind that's supposed to not leave a mark or residue? Use as little as you can and preferably treat it as a temporary solution.

Sincerely, a person who had to spend an hour of their life removing someone's "preventative tape" and watched sadly as a potential B condition 1e MM was needlessly dropped down to C condition entirely because of "preventative tape".

[chronotsr]

Slow Updates?

Hoy y'all,

ChronoTSR has been slower than usual due to a slight logistical hurdle: I am not the kind of person who cannot read for comprehension off of a screen. That means reading PDF copies of the AD&D rules is nonviable. Consequently I have been hard at work acquiring physical copies of the AD&D corebooks.

To-date I've mostly been using OSRIC but I've always been uncomfortable doing this ostensibly historically-minded project with revisionist materials (which is not a knock on OSRIC, I am so very thankful to have AD&D in plain English). I do not have a lot of money lying around, so I've had to play the online sales game very carefully to end up with usable, cheap copies of original corebooks. I compromised and got Orange Spine editions, which is not preferable because again they contain revisions, but getting passable original editions is simply not in the budget. If such a day arises where I can afford such things (lol, imagine if this ever amounted to tips?), maybe I will revise the pre-orange spine edition modules with this in mind.

In any event, they are on the way to my grubby little hands, and I will pour over them as quickly as possible so that I can be less ignorant. I know full well as anyone that reading is not a replacement for running, but that is likewise not in the cards for quite a while. Maybe someday, if I meet the right players.

[chronotsr]

Hard at work reading them 😤

I really want Hommlet to get the fairest possible shake! To be clear, my understanding of Holmes basic is much better than my AD&D understanding, and my understanding of Moldvay & Mentzer basic is much better than that. We will have to do this whole dance of pause, get corebooks, read them when we eventually reach 1989 -- but that's a fair ways away.

[chronotsr]

Monster Manual & Player's Handbook down. The DMG is truly a beast. I have skimmed this book before but there are sections where you start to question Gary's sanity -- the procedure and rules to hire henchman is kind of unhinged it's many many pages. I am aware that very few people used every rule but I can only wonder what % of the rules the median table actually used in practice. How many tables actually rolled for hit placement every attack to see if you benefited from the greathelm AC adjustment? How many tables actually rolled to see how effective their handbill was at recruiting cobblers for their mining operation?

I usually think of 3.5 as the nadir of DND's design because it's the edition with the biggest focus on simulation at the expense of genre. But ADND really makes up for its short length by being labyrinthine in layout and being nonsystematic. OSRIC is completely indispensable for actually playing ADND close to TSR's stated intention, ironically.

[chronotsr]

Slow Updates?

Hoy y'all,

ChronoTSR has been slower than usual due to a slight logistical hurdle: I am not the kind of person who cannot read for comprehension off of a screen. That means reading PDF copies of the AD&D rules is nonviable. Consequently I have been hard at work acquiring physical copies of the AD&D corebooks.

To-date I've mostly been using OSRIC but I've always been uncomfortable doing this ostensibly historically-minded project with revisionist materials (which is not a knock on OSRIC, I am so very thankful to have AD&D in plain English). I do not have a lot of money lying around, so I've had to play the online sales game very carefully to end up with usable, cheap copies of original corebooks. I compromised and got Orange Spine editions, which is not preferable because again they contain revisions, but getting passable original editions is simply not in the budget. If such a day arises where I can afford such things (lol, imagine if this ever amounted to tips?), maybe I will revise the pre-orange spine edition modules with this in mind.

In any event, they are on the way to my grubby little hands, and I will pour over them as quickly as possible so that I can be less ignorant. I know full well as anyone that reading is not a replacement for running, but that is likewise not in the cards for quite a while. Maybe someday, if I meet the right players.

[chronotsr]

Hard at work reading them 😤

I really want Hommlet to get the fairest possible shake! To be clear, my understanding of Holmes basic is much better than my AD&D understanding, and my understanding of Moldvay & Mentzer basic is much better than that. We will have to do this whole dance of pause, get corebooks, read them when we eventually reach 1989 -- but that's a fair ways away.

[chronotsr]

Slow Updates?

Hoy y'all,

ChronoTSR has been slower than usual due to a slight logistical hurdle: I am not the kind of person who cannot read for comprehension off of a screen. That means reading PDF copies of the AD&D rules is nonviable. Consequently I have been hard at work acquiring physical copies of the AD&D corebooks.

To-date I've mostly been using OSRIC but I've always been uncomfortable doing this ostensibly historically-minded project with revisionist materials (which is not a knock on OSRIC, I am so very thankful to have AD&D in plain English). I do not have a lot of money lying around, so I've had to play the online sales game very carefully to end up with usable, cheap copies of original corebooks. I compromised and got Orange Spine editions, which is not preferable because again they contain revisions, but getting passable original editions is simply not in the budget. If such a day arises where I can afford such things (lol, imagine if this ever amounted to tips?), maybe I will revise the pre-orange spine edition modules with this in mind.

In any event, they are on the way to my grubby little hands, and I will pour over them as quickly as possible so that I can be less ignorant. I know full well as anyone that reading is not a replacement for running, but that is likewise not in the cards for quite a while. Maybe someday, if I meet the right players.

[chronotsr]

I think I've said it before, but under no circumstances use the tumblr side blog feature. Make a new account. Tumblr is too crusty and dysfunctional to actually handle sideblogs, you will end up posting fungus pics on your rpg sideblog.

[chronotsr]

No. 8 - B1, In Search of the Unknown (1979)

Author(s): Mike Carr Artist(s): David C. Sutherland III (Cover), David Trampier (Original Cover) Level range: 1, preferably party size 4+ players Theme: Tutorial Dungeon Major re-releases: Original Adventures Reincarnated: Into the Borderlands

A quirk of early DND that people sometimes forget is that you had to learn how to play this game. The assumption, prior to the Holmes Basic set being released in 1977, was that you knew a guy who knew how to play, in a kind of 1970s & Gary Gygax version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Holmes had obviously made a big dent in this, but still there were complaints about the game being confusing and hard to learn. In steps Mike Carr who made the following bold proposal:

What if we made a paint-by-numbers DND module to train new GMs with?

In 2024 you might scoff at this, because it feels an awful lot like they just sold you half a module and told you to finish that. This is an unfair read, but this is a genuinely good habit to instill early into a GM. Too many times have I seen a new DM just, run books entirely stock and then be confused why it went badly. This breaks the back of that habit very, very early.

For those of you that remain unconvinced, in the OAR re-release of Into the Borderlands they included three stocked versions of B1 (I recommend Version A). But: keep in mind! You could not tune into Critical Role, there was not a DND club at every major school, and the discipline of TTRPG design itself did not exist yet. This was a stab at teaching DND entirely via text, so we will see in time how good a stab they took at it.

Oh, and before I exit the intro blurb, let's say it explicitly: this is the first standalone Basic Dungeons and Dragons module. It was a pack-in with the Holmes basic set (which means you got the Tower of Zenopus AND B1, a pretty tidy bargain), alongside some depressing little dice chits, a little blue rulebook, and a coupon for some dice that are bad-in-a-highly-charming way. We are spoiled for dice now, back then you had to ink your own in CRAYON.

ANYHOW, let's begin.

Firstly, Carr begins with explaining some broad principles to an aspiring new GM, like the concept of keying, minions, xp, difficulty, GM arts, et c. He also recommends narrating the party as having already arrived at the dungeon, a conceit I think more GMs should entertain -- we all know that "we meet in a tavern" is a little played out, but I think it's played out mainly because it's done badly - meeting in the tavern served no purpose because the GM ultimately wanted to just hurry up to the dungeon.

The adventure proper starts with a quick blurb about two famous characters who in the wayback times built a stronghold, did some adventurin', fought some wars, but are now long gone. A separate account of this is included in the player-facing section (whatever happened to player-facing sections?).

We are given ol' reliable, a rumors table, where we learn very little of interest: The dungeon is called Quasaqueton -- a real place in Iowa, apparently the duo were slavers, and apparently the dungeon itself talks. It's generally wet and miserable here, and wandering about are a variety of very standard enemies (orcs, kobolds, trogs, rats). That's, basically all we get on the dungeon itself, so let's enter the highlights reel:

The very first thing that happens in the dungeon is simply adorable. Two magic mouths demand the party to defend their treasure-hunting ways, and then promptly tell them they're going to die oooOoOOOOooOoo! in a sufficiently melodramatic way. It also bugs you every time you revisit, which will turn it into a comedy on revisit. There is also the grisly remains of a previous party, as if to imply that these newbies are about to get HAZED. Given that this was likely the new GM and players' first go, I'd call even odds on it being a slaughter.

It is at about room V where I realize why roman numerals died off, as trying to figure out where room 5 is when there's many, many rooms with a V marking. Letters are preferable to roman numerals but truly it was a good day when we switched to circled Arabic numerals.

There is just something inherently funny about going into a wizard's closet and discovering that said wizard was a boring person with normal clothes and a bunch of mundane books about weather and plants. We also find out Zelligar has been absent for 30+ years from his closet-bookkeeping.

Teaching the kids early that wizards are assholes, in Zelligar's practice room there's a permanent illusion of treasure. It doesn't kill you like a Gary treasure would, it just makes you sad.

There is a weirdly elaborate table of jars? And one of the jars is a living black cat in suspended animation? The purpose of this room is, and I quote, "to surprise and/or mystify the adventurers, as well as to provide some fun for the DM". There is no treasure or monsters pre-stocked in most any of these rooms (as per the conceit) but I think it would be GM malpractice to not put SOME kind of fucked up jarred magic item here. That there is no potions in this room feels particularly odd?

There's a riddle in the wizard's lab that, isn't actually a riddle? It's just talking funny. Large swaths of this dungeon feel like they should be a funhouse and have loot pinatas scattered around, this is one such room. Instead, it's…just kind of a self-aggrandizing sign, like a weird motivational poster.

I know the conceit of the dungeon is that this is someone's home and stronghold but it kind of just feels like someone's Minecraft fort? I really feel like we're going to walk into a room full of chests contain 94 doors and 4,000 grass seeds any minute now. And I guess that food is 30 years old? The inscrutable letter codes make me long for a dAlphabet.

It feels kinda weird that fire beetles fell out of use. "Magic lightning bugs that infinitely fuel lanterns without igniting in swamp gas" is a super handy conceit.

We have a super classic portcullis trap with a elegant twist: because the lever to lift the trap is strength-based (sum of strength scores), it almost definitionally separates the squishies from the tanks. The downside is, unfortunately, that it's functionally a save or die trap despite not instantly killing you?

It's also really interesting how the fantasy of bending the bars went away. That used to be such a big thing in the superman tv show era. I have yet to have a modern player even consider it. Not surprising it stopped being in rulebooks though.

There is one of the regulation early DND troll traps, where a mapping party is to be intentionally tricked and given false descriptions because a doorway is also a teleporter. It is explained somewhat poorly, which is particularly unfortunate for a tutorial dungeon, but the jist is that once they pass through the doorway you should rotate your map and act like you haven't started describing rooms turned 90 degrees. Because early DND kind-of assumes the party moves as a blob while in dungeoncrawl mode, you can't get split up by this, despite the fact that "realistically" it would totally do that. A weird quirk of this description is that, I have no idea when they bold words. You think they're bolding for emphasis but it's acting like they're bolding keywords, but prior to this they only bold spell names and the bar-lifting. Afterward it's mostly spells and a sole keyword.

I'm getting mixed messages here. I get why it's here, but come on.

The coverart is a reference to a specific garden room which has overgrown in the wizard's absence. It is, ultimately, just a pretty room with a slight hazard if a random encounter happens there. "The room on the cover is inexplicable and unrelated to the rest of the dungeon" is funhouse-y behavior IMO, but the rest of the dungeon is a series of vaguely plausible rooms assembled in a maze-y way. Which is as good a segue as any to briefly talk about the overall layout.

This is a bad layout. This is a layout you come up with when you are just procgenning maze dungeons over and over again. As we have demonstrated in previous posts, this is just kind of how it was in the 70s. This kind of works as a mapping challenge, but mostly it comes across as tedious for everyone involved. Who would make a living space like this? Even the most cooked adventurer on the planet would not install multiple maze corridors for…no reason? AND THE EXCESS OF SECRET DOORS. A friend described this as "a map you could almost make in Wolfenstein 3D", which is actually a great metric. If I can make your map in Wolf3D, it's bad.

There is a genre of dungeon room I like to call "gambler's traps", which is when the room contains like 10+ weird things that you can poke, and if you happen to poke the right ones you get some nice things, and if you poke the wrong ones you get pain. Invariably, you will have a player who tries to poke every one of them, offsetting the whole room. Pools of stuff are traditional, so we get pools. Tragically, every pool with a conceivably fun effect magically stops working outside the pool (come ON Carr!) and many are just pointless A few of them are totally devastating (one of them silences your voice for d6 hours), a few of them are slightly good. In what is a complete dick move, there is an acidic pool with a key at the bottom that does absolutely nothing.

Sigh you find the guy who advised the building of Quasqueton's room, with documents about the construction of it, but explicitly no information that could possibly help adventurers. One of the few magic items in this dungeon is locked in a drawer, but odds are it's nothing interesting (pray for your +1 Ring of Protection)

So the big maze corridor has a regulation spring-loaded trapdoor, which dumps you downstairs sans inventory into freezing cold water. Kinda mean but, sure. Traps are kind of an underrated artform, I feel like GMs as a group have just given up on them. That being said, traps like this one…do not sell me on traps as a concept.

Finally, we go to the lower level, which is not worth talking about in detail. Essentially, these egotists made a museum to themselves down here (for who?), there's a magic rock that if you eat it (??) has a d20 table of permanent effects skewing positive, and another pit trap. So, how to feel about B1 on the whole? It's not really remarkable. Really its most famous quality (you will key every single room) is its sole interesting quality. It's an early 70s dungeon that is starting to feel dated by 1979. I think that 5e-ers would benefit from a B1-like paint-by-numbers module, really. B1 is no Tower of Zenopus. I think we will all be much happier come B2, that (while far from perfect) has a strong identity and a comparative cohesiveness.

[chronotsr]

Small Update

The plan going forward is to take little breaks at the end of each year, to stave off burnout. We will see if I need to add half-years once they start really churning out modules. The next module, B1, will be out much later today (hopefully, it needs some revisions)). It kinda has Palace of the Vampire Queen energy? Cya then.

[juliettecousin]

Smells like spring 🍊🌼