Following the completion of the Temple of Elemental campaign, our characters were considered heroes. The players? We were transitioning. In my case, I was becoming a student at Melbourne University. (Our DM was already there). This puts an actual date on this campaign: I began my first year in 1990.

It’s worth mentioning that this was an incredibly erratically scheduled campaign. And my memory is incredibly unreliable about the dates. Did we begin in 1989 or 1988? Or earlier? It was some time in the period 1985-1989, I know. And I was at university before it ended.

As I write this, it may be Dungeons & Dragons 50^th Anniversary. We’re not sure of that date, either!

During this transition era, our group also began to break up. The player of Bardal disappeared for a bit. Which left three of us – my brother, me, and the DM. During this period, we played a couple more adventures.

Sabre River

One of them was Sabre River, which our DM converted to AD&D stats, possibly toning them down in the process. My memory of this Companion-set adventure, written for level 18-22 characters, is very spotty indeed.

I remember the set up: the Velverdyva River had become polluted and foul, and we – as heroes of Furyondy and Veluna – needed to head to its source to discover the cause. I remember giant – nay, gargantuan! – gargoyles that we had to fight. And, at its end, Scarlett leaping into the great polluted pool to battle the monster single-handed. (Looking at the adventure now, there was no monster. It was just a growth that needed to be cleared by some handy swordwork. Huh).

Little else of the adventure stuck in my memory.

The adventure came out in 1984, and so is on my list for review – sometime in February, I think! It will be interesting to revisit it!

Death in Tsojcanth

The other adventure we played in this era was The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. We were sent there to recover Daoud’s Wondrous Lanthorn, a significant artefact which was needed to foil some dire plot. (Yes, I can’t remember the reason we needed it! It wasn’t that important). With Bardal’s player still away, our DM recruited a friend who had never played D&D before to join us.

Playing your very first D&D game in Tsojcanth? Brave!

When I write my reviews, I tend not to like adventures that are just one combat after another. I want something more. (Tricks, NPCs, and Story). But here’s the thing: You can have a lot of really fun games that are just one combat after another. And Gygax did his best in Tsojcanth to put as many unusual combats within its covers as he could.

The map is a mapper’s nightmare, of course. Gygax had really good mappers in his group and loved confounding them. We would be happy just getting an idea of what the map looked like!

I remember getting very frustrated trying to work out which was the right way into the caverns. (There are a lot of gargoyle faces that give clues – bad clues – unless you say the right thing). And a few wrong turns were made. Of the monsters themselves, we fought and defeated them. The specifics of most battles fade into the years. But one encounter, oh one…

We wandered into a pitch-black room of absolute darkness. As we tried to grope through it, I was told to make a saving throw vs death. My character failed and died. Then Brunak needed to make the save, and he too perished. This left our new player as the only one still active.

Our DM later said it was meant to allow the player a moment to shine. What it gave him was an eternity of feeling very frustrated because he had no idea what to do. (Even years later, I’m not sure what I would have done in his place!) In retrospect, it was not a surprise that this was the only session we played with him.

Eventually, with much prompting from the DM, he managed to get us out of that dark, dark cave and to a place where we could be raised from the dead. For those wondering why we were just dying, it was because we were meeting the gaze of a Bodak. I have a lot of fondness for that monster, but not – admittedly – from this experience with it!

Midkemia Press’s Cities

It was about this time that I picked up a copy of Cities, a product of Midkemia Press that had been reprinted by Chaosium. It’s one I still use to this day. It consists of three sections: random city encounters, stocking a city with shops/services, and a section that allowed you to work out what your character did when not adventuring. Yes, downtime!

Given the current interest in providing mechanics for downtime, this was way, way ahead of its time.

I happily looked at the tables, and having heard from my DM that we had a few months before we’d adventure again, I went to work.

After spending a very enjoyable afternoon, I’d discovered that Meliander had made some incredibly effective investments and was now very rich and had fallen in love and married a noblewoman of the City of Greyhawk.

My DM was surprised by this.

It wasn’t going to affect much more of this particular campaign, but it would have a large influence on later games that I would run.

But after all this side material, we were finally going to get to play the next part of our big mega adventure campaign: Against the Slave Lords!