I finished my first play through of Final Fantasy XVI on the weekend. 65 hours, or thereabouts, it took me. I did most of the side quests, and all the main story. I had an absolute blast.

The next day, The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg arrived. This was the product of a Kickstarter I was quite looking forward to – a reproduction of Greg Svenson’s 1973-era dungeon – a spin-off of the original Blackmoor campaign.

What’s Blackmoor, you ask? It was the campaign run by Dave Arneson – the very first fantasy RPG campaign. The rules for that campaign were the progenitor of Dungeons & Dragons – once Gary Gygax was done editing and revising them and adding his own ideas.

I don’t think it’s the second dungeon ever designed – the notes indicate Greg had a copy of the D&D rule proofs – but it’s incredibly early. This is a dungeon designed by someone was there for the very first expedition into the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor, at the very beginning of the RPG phenomenon.

Final Fantasy XVI was not the first Final Fantasy game I played. In the month before it was released, I played through the first three Final Fantasy games to get a feeling for where it came from. The first was released in 1987, incredibly early in the annals of computer games. The Bard’s Tale was 1985. Ultima I was 1982. These games all owed a great debt to Dungeons & Dragons and the Blackmoor campaign.

It’s worth noting that the early days of D&D had very little guidance on how to present an adventure. Indeed, the very idea of a story-driven adventure wasn’t there. And you can see this in Tonisborg. It’s a collection of pages with maps and very brief keys, primarily just a list of monsters and treasure.

The adventure came in the exploration of this dangerous place, seeing if your character could survive with treasure and experience.

And dangerous it is. A room on the first level contains 21 kobolds! How many characters did you have in your party? There tended to be more back then, and the notes here suggest players controlling more than one character. That’s easier using the older style rules – most of the character complexity is absent. Complexity came from how you role-played them, not the mechanics.

Another note says that expeditions into the dungeons had a 10-20% lethality rate.

This is a peek back into a different era of the game. You can see that level of lethality in the early fantasy computer role-playing games as well. Ultima. Wizardry. Final Fantasy. Rogue. Moria. It was easy to die. But there was a major difference for most of these games: save game files.

This isn’t to say that the lethality isn’t still present in the modern day. Consider the success of Mork Borg, which trumpets how lethal it is to characters. (I feel the GM who ran our game was too kind!) In 4E, there were special Organised Play events that set the characters against incredibly dangerous dungeons, with the intention that you play again and again with different builds until you can defeat them.

And I’ve seen a lot of deaths in the early parts of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. (Funnily enough, the one time a DM friend of mine told his players it was really difficult and he expected to kill their characters, everyone survived. That wasn’t the case at my table!)

But one thing that distinguishes every computer game I’ve mentioned from Tonisborg is this: Tonisborg lacks a story. The computer games don’t.

Even if you spend most of Final Fantasy I wandering dungeons being attacked by random monsters (much the same as the other early computer games, when I think about it), there are always story elements guiding you where to go next.

Tonisborg has goals – a series of magical artefacts in the depths that you can discover. But it doesn’t have a plot. It doesn’t have a lot of things you need to accomplish before moving off to the next storyline. Those things would come to D&D, but they’re not present here.

(When would they come to D&D? Well, you can see them in the very first published adventures from TSR. There are definite plot elements in the Giant/Drow modules of 1978, although much lesser than what would come later).

Sadly, something that is absent from the book is Greg Svenson to run the adventure. The fact is that the keys are incredibly brief. Griffith Morgan and D.H. Boggs have helped flesh them out a bit in an expansion of the adventure that follows the reproduction of the original pages, but it’s still painfully apparent that the dungeon is mostly bare of traps, tricks and evocative descriptions. But those sorts of things would have been provided by Svenson during play, likely enough.

Aside from the dungeons, the product also contains a lot of notes on how adventures were run at the time (in the style of Dave Arneson, Greg Svenson and others), and a set of RPG rules you can use to run the dungeon, describe as “ZED” rules (Zeroeth Edition) – that is, rules inspired by the original D&D rules and the rules that preceded that. There are some very interesting ideas here, which give a lot of insights into early play.

Does the bare nature of the dungeon disappoint me? It does not. I bought it for the historical insights it would give me. It’s not that far from the very first separately published adventure of Palace of the Vampire Queen, which is similarly bare of anything else than maps, monsters and treasures.

And it isn’t like Greg Svenson designed the dungeon for publication. Published adventures are a separate breed from those designed for home play. You could see the struggle Gary Gygax had getting out the original notes for Castle Greyhawk, something he was never able to do. For Gygax, a published dungeon was a far more polished and reworked affair. This product shows the raw reality of dungeons at the time.

Yes, even Final Fantasy I is far more polished!

It does get at why published adventures are so damn wordy. It’s because the designer isn’t there to run them. A published adventure tries to give you as much of the designer’s intent as possible, so that you can run the adventure well. And they make assumptions about shared play styles. I’m sure you’ve seen what happens when those assumptions aren’t correct for a group!

Final Fantasy XVI was awesome. It had incredible action sequences, great world-building, and acting performances that are brilliant. But it’s a creation that comes from a lineage that includes Final Fantasy I and The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg. These games may differ in content and presentation, but they’re a part of a continuum and history of fantasy adventure games.

I know that I also very much enjoyed my time playing Fighting Fantasy I. At some point, I hope to get to run Tonisborg, infusing it with some of my own imagination, and see how my players deal with it. (And, yes, I’d use something approaching the original rules).

For now, I need to do some more design for my long-standing World of Greyhawk game. Until later!