I sometimes have opinions about ttrpg stuff that don’t quite gel with the consensus. But that’s ok, lots of people have that, that’s how we are getting a vibrant hobby going over 50 years.
(50? Yeah, Blackmoor was played before Dungeons and Dragons came along, and Braunstein came even before. Fascinating stuff)
But here’s one that feels a bit of an outlier: I actually really like orange cover B3 Palace of the Silver Princess.
Way more than the green cover version they put out later.
Of course it might have something to do with how I encountered it: orange cover B3 was one of the first few modules I had access to, via the free download section on the old TSR website. They for a while had the idea to publish some of the quirky older modules of their catalogue on there, complete with comments as to the history of the module. They had Ravenloft 2: House on Gryphon Hill on there, Dungeonland, and The Land Behind the Magic Mirror. And the orange cover B3.
And you know what, after going through both orange cover and green cover version (and the DIY version some people put out a few years ago) the original orange cover holds up the best. It’s weird. It has flaws. But it also is fascinating, and it fits in with B1 In Search of the Unknown, and B2 Keep on the Borderlands, much more so than the later parts of the B-Series.
The B-Series was intended to showcase good DM techniques. And this was done by actively teaching people and having them get involved in making the module usable.
B1 was a single dungeon, a hidden fortress of two great heroes. There were things to play with, things to explore, and a sense of wonder. There was a room with pools of magic potions that you had to try to find out what they were, there were fire beetles used as illumination, and there was the fungal forest.
Clik here to view.
Most notably there were no actual monster and treasure stats in the text. Those were left free, to be filled with help of a table in the back of the book. I think B3 was the only other module that did something like that.
B2 had a small wilderness area, but the important thing actually was the titular keep. It gave people a home base, NPCs to interact with, and a place to recuperate and call home. The caves were an extension to that. Altogether they feel less important, but they do have some interesting situations. Unlike the dungeon in B1 the Caves of Chaos feel lived in. There are rivalries, there are alliances, and there are non-combatants to trigger the moral sensors of the players.
There also is the additional twist that it can be argued that none of the intelligent monsters and cultists in the caves are there by choice. They all might be mind-controlled. The traitor in the keep though, he seems to be doing it on his own volition.
B3 (the original orange one) shows even more of the same. There is an extensive wilderness with regional politics and everything. There are weird monsters that are clearly made up by the author. (Bubbles! and three-headed ubues! and bushes that shoot arrows!). They all aren’t quite that amazing, but they showcase what you can do with your own campaign. This, it basically states, is what you can do with DnD if you put your mind to it. And it would have been great to see what they would have taught in further modules.
Ok, maybe B4 The Lost City is about the same it would have been anyway, but the debacle of B3 killed that.
What happened?
It’s a good question, and one that never was really explained properly. For a long time the module had a reputation for just being bad (and one can still see that in a lot of places online). Later they claimed it was the illustration with the Illusion of the Decapus. That was a young maiden accosted by ten horrible dwarves, only if characters attacked they would find that it was really a tentacled monster.
Most likely it was Erol Otus’ illustration of the Ubues though. Those three-headed beings had three heads one of one gender and two of the other, and Otus decided to use the likenesses of TSR staff of the time for that. That included author Jean Wells. It also included the Blumes, the owners of TSR at the time.
According to legend on the evening of the publication of the module one executive found the art, determined it to be offensive, and decided to pull the whole publication. All remaining copies were the copies that people in the office had received and took home. It is said they even went through people’s drawers in the office to get all the copies of the offensive module.
B3 was republished heavily modified (neutered one might say) by Tom Moldvay, and it was a much more tame affair, with a proper backstory, a plot, and more conventional monsters. Most people who know B3 know the second green covered version, but I feel like something got lost in that process. The Wilderness section was gone as well, starting the adventure right in front of the castle gate. It did clean up a few mistakes though that made it in the first version.
I think it’s a shame. Tom Moldvay created B4 The Lost City as well, so I assume that this module would have been the same. B5 Horror on the Hill felt like a complete change in style though. It was now a starter dungeon, yes, and it was supposed to replace the Keep on the Borderlands, but it didn’t have the same style of teaching. It was… just a normal dungeon. And I wonder what wonderful stuff we could have had if B3 had shipped properly.
Of course it might just as well be that the B series had ended early, maybe after B5 or so.
As it went on it became increasingly bland, then atrocious. B10 Nights Dark Terror is a late highlight, B11 King’s Festival and B12 Queens’s Harvest are terrible wastes of paper and money.