News — AD&D Modules

The 1980 release of the colorized cover edition of T1 The Village of Hommlet is certainly a foundation of the RPG industry and an iconic piece for almost any role-player brought into the game from the late 1970s all the way up to 1990.Truly, it is an incredible piece of work, penned by Gary Gygax and established as ‘the’ introductory module for the new Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system. Now certainly, B2 Keep on the Borderlands and X1 Isle of Dread might be more popular because they were included in the Basic and Expert boxed sets respectively, but again, that...

In 1986, the market for TSR products was cooling. The company was in a spiritual tailspin after the dismissal of Gary Gygax, and shifting technology was a barbarian at the gate with Nintendo’s release of their NES that propelled Super Mario Brothers to the bestselling video game of all time.It was also a period when the bread and butter modules of the early 1980s were slipping, either to players having ‘grown up’ into DMs that preferred to run their own homebrews or just market share loss taking its inevitable toll. That said, TSR was still producing modules in their now...

I’m sure several thousand words have been written concerning the D&D Expert Set module X1: The Isle of Dread.  Certainly it’s one of the two most popular adventures ever published simply because of its inclusion in the D&D Expert Boxed Set [much like Keep on the Borderlands for Basic], so I’m sure I don’t have to go into great detail concerning it. Simply put, it was written by David Cook and Tom Moldvay back in 1981 and takes a group of adventures over the waves of the Sea of Dread to a lost island setting adventure.  It’s a classic, but...

Good old Merle M. Rasmussen did manage a few very inspired modules in the 1980s, and X6: Quagmire! absolutely makes that list. This adventure, for characters 4-10, is a nice little romp through exotic climbs to a mythic ‘spiral city’.  Its purpose seems to be to expand on the D&D Expert set and show exactly how to run a true wilderness adventure.  To this end, it does a great job, and the mass of charts and encounters in the back will help any DM if they are looking to flesh out the travel aspect of a D&D campaign. The artwork,...

I’m going to be honest here, I’ve never played any of the A series of modules, and for that I feel horrible.  I've owned these modules for twenty-two years, and begged my DM Mark to run them on several occasion, but since he doesn't own them, it just never happened.Truly, I feel sick over that, especially when digging through A1: Slave Pits of the Undercity this week for AotG.  I mean, just start out with the title, ‘Slave Pits of the Undercity’!  It is yet another example of a Robert E. Howard theft, or perhaps Fritz Leiber.  I’m seriously freaking...