Imagine a second rate Robert E. Howard story and some fantasy by Clark Ashton Smith, blend them together, put them into your shisha and inhale.
You hear that bubbling, that beat? Like someone just put Kashmir on and your body just starts moving with it.
This is the good shit.
It’s old. And full of weird flavor. This whole scenario breathes the sort of innocent gonzo only the early hobby really did, and it does that by ripping off a second-rate Robert E. Howard story and the expanding on it in all directions.
It has a village description, a wilderness map, a 2+ level dungeon, multiple unique monster descriptions, three or four factions interacting with each other, an unnecessarily large encounter table, a murder mystery, and some Shakespearean madness.
And did I mention the page count?
Six pages.
Six incredibly terse pages that were published in White Dwarf #18 in 1980. I had it in my GM folder for over ten years until I had a good look at it last year and finally saw what was in there. I think it is utterly fantastic.
The PCs stop by in the small village of Cahli and need to cross the river, but the only ferry has closed up shop for the night, and everyone is locking themselves in before nightfall. It turns out the village has been stalked by shadowy dark figures that come during the night. We also haven’t heard anything from the local arch-mage just south of here, could you maybe check?
So they go south and likely encounter a dead body on the way. But when they reach the halls of the arch-mage Tizun Thane the iron golem there brings them to his master, and then leaves them there. And they are now in the middle of the dungeon, with the brainless cadaver of the wizard at their feet.
But somewhere in the walls something of Tizun Thane still lurks.
There’s no definite end goal here, this was all set up. They are left alone in this mess, and they now have to… actually, I don’t think they have to do anything. The beginning has been somewhat scripted, although never devolved into a proper railroad, and now it has left them in a situation.
The problem with the shadowy shapes does indeed start in the halls, and the halls themselves are about the biggest prize you could get at this level, the place they found the body in is also a hall of teleportation mirrors that go to a variety of interesting locations. But there also is a bit of a faction war about to happen, at least two factions are willing to battle it out soon, and there are troglodytes coming through the basement, monkeys chattering on the roof, and a huge thing skulking around muttering about old betrayals.
I love it. It’s completely bonkers. But it all fits in some weird fantasy sword and sorcery kind of way.
Just thinking about it makes me wonder how I’d run it, what the different factions would want to do, and what would happen after the PCs cleared the dungeon, if at all possible.
Because this is really a campaign hub. The text even tells the GM to connect the mirrors to all kinds of other locations they might find interesting, including the Lichway (from the same author) among others. You could just have them travel back and forth between this place and other dungeons, and at the same time deal with all kinds of other people who want to take over the famous hall of mirrors. It’s a fantastic concept.
Albie Fiore unfortunately did not write many more things, this and the Lichway were the only modules we know are from him, and we know that only because their reprint in The Best of White Dwarf credited them to him. Both adventures were uncredited originally.
Now, I love it, but it has some issues. Problematic issue number one: the slave girl. There’s exactly one female character in this, and it’s an abducted villager who has been forced to consort with her captors. Unfortunately not unrealistic, but kind of iffy. Sure, the terseness does not allow for the worst parts of it to shine through, but I doubt this was supposed to be an earnest exploration of the issues of sexual slavery, and more an attempt at cheap titillation.
The encounters are another issue. For an adventure module that delights in it’s conceptual terseness, it also tries to shuffle as many White Dwarf published monsters and classes in as possible. The encounter table has a chance for a houri (WD 13), there are blood hawks from White Dwarf 2, Berbalangs from issue 11, and giant frogs from the AD&D Monster Manual just outside, there is even a reference to a necromancer class in here that was most likely not even written yet (“a sub-class developed by Lew Pulsipher and as yet unpublished”, that one came in WD 35, 17 issues later)
And in addition there is that absolute monster of an encounter table. What exactly are we supposed to get out of a table that gives you 63 different possibilities, some of them with such a remote chance they basically never will be encountered? Half the Monster Manual seems to be on that encounter table. What’s the point even?
Ah, and then there’s the other issue… you know how I mentioned there were multiple new monsters in this 5 page article? You know how I mentioned there were strange shadowy figures stalking the village? Which is basically the adventure hook after all? Guess what monster is not actually properly detailed in the scenario. Just guess.
The monkeys get a proper monster entry, the shadow dancer get a single stat line.
Anyway. All in all this scenario is fantastic. I want more like it.
Note: The reason I started looking into it again was coming across Raven Woode’s dungeon synth album of the same name