Original Scenarios Resurrected VIII: The Devil's Quagmire (1980, Andrew Ravenscroft)

Welcome to the eighth entry in the series Original Scenarios Resurrected, wherein D&D scenarios from the 70s and early 80s are republished with the permission of the authors, usually together with extra contemporaneous material. Today is the turn of The Devil's Quagmire by Andrew Ravenscroft, with illustrations by Quentin Manley. For all entries in the series see here.

The Devil's Quagmire, published in The Beholder #16 in July 1980, was the last of Andy Ravenscroft's three published D&D scenarios, all illustrated by his friend Quentin Manley. Thanks to Andy I've already republished Clearwater Caverns and The Temple of Psaan, but in this third effort he really raised his game both in the quality of the content and the scope of the adventure. 

There is perhaps no better way to introduce The Devil's Quagmire than to quote a recent review at Prince Of Nothing of the adventure:

"Throw this in your campaign RIGHT NOW."

Read on to find out more and download it...

Warkworth Castle - 10' squares turn out to be more historically accurate than we all thought

From the very earliest days of D&D people have criticized dungeons and castles that conform to 10' x 10' squares: that it's unrealistic that any castle or dungeon would be built to conform to a grid. Indeed my extensive visits to many Medieval Castles in the UK seemed to confirm that they were all anything-but designed to a grid.

Last summer whilst on holiday in Northumberland we visited Warkworth Castle, a fantastic medieval castle dating from the 1200s. It is fairly ruinous, but the late 14th century "Great Tower" only fell into disrepair in the 17th century and was restored less than 200 years later so is in remarkably good condition.

Warkworth Castle

At first glance Warkworth Castle appears to be as irregular any other castle, and there is certainly no regularity in the layout of the curtain walls.

As always I purchased a guidebook, as since childhood I have collected maps of all the castles we visit. Many of these maps are disappointing affairs, often very small and lacking detail such as the different floors. The Warkworth guidebook has a reasonable foldout map at the back (and a larger "pretty" isometric map inside which clarifies how the stairs connect) - but what attracted my attention was a note and a diagram in the margins that shows that Warkworth Castle was drawn to a grid, just not a 10' x 10' one, and not at all for the reasons you'd expect...

Original Scenarios Resurrected VII: Kandroc Keep (1979, Brian K. Asbury)

Welcome to the seventh entry in the series Original Scenarios Resurrected, wherein D&D scenarios from the 70s and early 80s are republished with the permission of the authors, usually together with extra contemporaneous material. Today is the turn of Kandroc Keep by Brian K. Asbury. For all entries in the series see here.

In my Complete Timeline of 1970s scenarios, Brian Asbury's 1979 scenario Kandroc Keep was literally a closed book to me. It was one of only two scenarios that I hadn't seen any of the contents of, only having ever seen its cover. As I wrote - "In the case of Kandroc Keep, I have located two people who owned copies - but one has mislaid theirs, and the other had donated theirs to a museum!". 

In the end I managed to get in contact with the author, Brian Asbury, and he generously agreed not just to let me have a copy but also to republish it along with several other scenarios of his for this series - I'm still on the lookout for an original copy though (donations welcome!)

So, now I've seen it at long last, what's it like?

"Have a look at Kandroc Keep (1979) by Brian Asbury. It was written as a solo dungeon but is easy to convert. It's a blast" - online review of KK

Read on to find out more...

Original Scenarios Resurrected VI: Clearwater Caverns (1979, Andrew Ravenscroft)

Welcome to the sixth entry in the series Original Scenarios Resurrected: D&D scenarios from the 70s and early 80s republished with the permission of the authors, usually together with extra contemporaneous material. Today we turn to Clearwater Caverns by Andrew Ravenscroft, illustrated by Quentin Manley. For all earlier installments see here.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with Andy Ravenscroft, in particular his previously featured scenario The Temple of Psaan. Today we jump back a year to September 1979, and Clearwater Caverns. Clearwater Caverns are a natural occuring cave occupied by a tribe of Troglodytes and a variety of nasty cave-dwelling critters. It is a short low-level standalone exploration adventure, and was just one of three adventures featured in Demonsblood #4, but while short it has quite a few interesting features worth pointing out.

The adventure is part of a recurring sub-zine, Andy Ravenscroft's "The Raven Croaks". In the downloadable pdf I've included the entire sub-zine, and since one of the illustrations in the 'zine depicts a monster not given a name or stats until Demonsblood #6, I've included that as well.

Original Scenarios Resurrected V: P'teth Tower - the individual parts (1978/79, Brian K. Asbury)

Welcome to the fifth entry in the series Original Scenarios Resurrected, wherein D&D scenarios from the 70s and early 80s are republished with the permission of the authors, usually together with extra contemporaneous material. Today we return to P'teth Tower by Brian K. Asbury. For all entries in the series see here.

Today we're taking a second look at Brian K. Asbury's solitaire P'teth Tower. In the last post I presented the complete omnibus edition, but P'teth Tower was originally written in three parts, and any presentation of it would not be complete without a reproduction of it in its original form.

Of particular interest is the fact that Part I contains a very early use of ability checks. I've also included some parts of the subzine Aryxia with Part II which lends some context to the adventure.

Part I was originally published in  Trollcrusher 13 (Sept '78), part II in Trollcrusher 17 (June '79), and then there was also the unpublished Part III. I only own a copy of Trollcrusher 17 (that's my copy on the right), thanks go to Guy Fullerton for providing high quality scans of Part I, and to Brian not only for writing it, and allowing it to be shared, but also for hunting down his unpublished manuscript for Part III. 

Original Scenarios Resurrected IV: The Complete P'teth Tower (1978/79, Brian K. Asbury)

Welcome to the fourth entry in the series Original Scenarios Resurrected, wherein D&D scenarios from the 70s and early 80s are republished with the permission of the authors, usually together with extra contemporaneous material. Today we turn to P'teth Tower by Brian K. Asbury. For all entries in the series see here.

Today I am very proud to return to Brian Asbury (see The Complete Barbarian) and present his 1978/79 solitaire adventure P'teth Tower - finally published in its completed form after 43 years. I had great fun playing through it - my favourite bit being how it handles being chased through the dungeon pursued by a monster.

In contrast to the more usual "Choose Your Own Adventure" or "Fighting Fantasy" style, P'teth Tower is a free-range dungeoncrawl where you take a party through an old-school dungeon, mapping as you go, with choices attempting to be the many choices you could make as a player. In addition, since it was written in the late 70s, it's an authentic attempt to recreate a dungeoncrawl 1970s style - and you're experiencing it just as it was at the time without any special interpretation or divination required.

There is complex publication history to this scenario - in brief this previously unpublished version is much improved as well as having an extra level and maps - so you may wish to skip this and go straight to the adventure; if so, break out your dice and get rolling up some characters, grab some graph paper for mapping, and dive straight in...

Original Scenarios Resurrected III: The Temple of Psaan (1980, Andrew Ravenscroft)

Welcome to the third entry in the series Original Scenarios Resurrected, wherein D&D scenarios from the 70s and early 80s are republished with the permission of the authors, usually together with extra contemporaneous material. Today we look to The Temple of Psaan by Andrew Ravenscroft. For parts I and II see here and here.

Today we move on to The Temple of Psaan by Andy Ravenscroft, originally published January 1980 in The Beholder issue 11. Andy started out writing for Shire Talk, a small print run local D&D fanzine, but he soon moved onto more mainstream D&D fanzines, where his contributions were often illustrated by his friend Quentin Manley. Andy stopped writing for role playing games in the mid 80s, but more recently he is the author and publisher of Dark Streets, a science fiction noir set in near-future London. He is well known to regular readers of this blog for his contributions to the Complete History of Early D&D Scenarios, providing much of the info on scenarios in fanzines.

Andy published three D&D scenarios in this period, the second of which is the focus of today's post - Temple of Psaan. Originally titled The Temple of Psaan, it lost the "The" when it was published for reasons unknown. It is a short scenario inspired by the introductory chapters of L. Sprague de Camp's novel "The Fallible Fiend", a story about a demon servant whose literal mindedness causes him to fail one master after another.

Fanzine submissions were not usually returned to the author, so Andy no longer owns copies of the originals. In the case of Demonsblood, which was more akin to an APA, the articles were included exactly as typed. For The Beholder, however, Guy Duke retyped submissions. It is quite unusual, therefore, that Andy retains the original manuscript for The Temple of Psaan, which we present here for the first time, along with the published version of the adventure.

You will notice that the scan of the published scenario includes pencil marks where the original owner recorded hit points lost during combat. I've not removed these as they're a nice touch as they show that published adventure were played, not just read

It is immediately obvious that the printed scenario is far more developed than the handwritten original, and the most likely explanation for its surival is that the published version derives from a revised version Andy prepared for publication. In particular, many details in the original are explained in the published version.

As two simple examples, in the original there are 5 war-dogs in a room by the entrance - in the published version it details "Maldivius' guard dogs - he keeps 5 dogs in here to deter intruders. Attack without fear; no subdual." In the original for Andy's eyes only this was unnecessary detail, but it is needed for the published version to make it clear for others. Similarly in one room it simply states a Gnoll has for treasure 1GP, and for the published version this becomes "He is in possession of the princely sum of 1GP" which makes it clear that the treasure isn't just pathetic, it's intentionally humorously pathetic.

These details are what make the existence of the manuscript interesting - we can see here how a dungeon for personal use gets altered into one intended for publication and use by others. We cannot infer from the terse 1-line descriptions of early scenarios whether it was just a monster in a room to be killed, or if the DM was to improvise the detail, and how much information was in the DM's head who didn't see any need to write it down for themselves.

For my own scenarios I favour an extremely terse style where all the info is noted on the map in the blank spaces with lots of arrows. This is a style I developed in the mid 80s and it means I can not only see information at a glance, it's easy to ammend as you develop. There is never a formal key, and I hate to think what others would make of my (often rather illegible) scrawl!

Finally here's a short Bibliography of Andy's work.

Bibiliography

July '79 - Demonsblood # 3: The Raven Croaks 1 (inc. falling damge rules)

Sept '79 - Demonsblood # 4: The Raven Croaks 2 (inc. Clearwater Caverns, a D&D scenario)

Nov '79 - Demonsblood # 5: The Raven Croaks 3 (inc. background skills)

Dec '79 - The Beholder #10: The Archer (a new character class) & a D&D crossword

Jan '80 - Demonsblood # 6: Reviews

Jan '80 - The Beholder #11: (The) Temple of Psaan

Mar '80 - Demonsblood # 7: The Raven Croaks 4 (inc. poisons & Cerberus Class scoutship for Traveller)

July '80 - The Beholder #16: The Devil's Quagmire - co-authored with Quentin Manley. A 14-page scenario

2014 - Dark Streets, a science fiction noir set in near-future London

Also contributed to Shire Talk, a local fanzine.

Thanks to Andy Ravenscroft for allowing me to publish this, and also to Guy Fullerton for his help.