Of the classic Dungeons & Dragons campaigns of the early AD&D era, we talk about three: Temple of Elemental Evil, Scourge of the Slavelords, and Queen of the Spiders. All three were collected into three supermodules, and it had been our original plan to play through all of then and then go to the Bloodstone Pass series.

Now, we finally got to the second of these series. Of them, this is the adventure series that had the most problems in its original form.

The reason is that the Slavelords series was originally written as a series of seven tournament scenarios. Each team would play through one of the first five parts, then the semifinal would be part six, and the final used part seven. So, the initial adventures feel quite disjointed. At this point, I suspect that it was designed to be released as four individual adventures which were then cut up into the tournament modules, but I’m not entirely sure. But even with the four modules, they feel disjointed.

Most of the great material occurs in the final two adventures. The first two feel very much like “let’s throw weird shit at the players because they’re playing a competition scenario”, rather than “this is how slavers would set out their lair”. And the compilation adventure – which I note, at this point, is not available on the DMs Guild – then rewrites and reworks stuff to make it flow in the supermodule sort of way. Plus adds new material.

Do I prefer the original or the compilation? Honestly of the classic series, I don’t like this one that much. Neither of them, really!

The compilation, which is what we were playing, starts with one of things we are told never to do as designers. It has a forced capture of the party, who are set to work on a slave ship. Our DM took this opportunity to relieve me of my wand of fire. I think he had some idea of removing all of our gear, so we’d have to build up from scratch again, but I pointed out that that gear included my spell books, which I sort of needed to play an effective magic user. He wisely chose to not make me completely useless.

We broke free, and started hunting down the Slavelords in earnest, starting on the part of the adventure based on the original modules. While I know the adventures sort of well from both running and reviewing them, my memories of the first three adventures from this playthrough are almost completely blank. I know we had fun, because playing AD&D is fun, but none of the actual activities were enough to survive down the years.

I remember us coming to the first stronghold, and that we had no idea how to enter the place – wandering though the bushes outside, wondering if there was a way in.

And then it was defeating minion after minion, with the odd Slave Lord thrown in, until finally we had done enough to beard them in their lair… and then we had the SECOND forced capture of the supermodule. (This one was aways in the plot. But they added another one at the beginning of the adventure!)

This one felt really bad to me as a player. Because by now, it wasn’t just set-up, it was actually in the middle of us doing something proactive. Now we’re captured! Whee!

Thrown into a dungeon with limited equipment, we now needed to escape. This is the most memorable of the original adventures, and I do remember crawling through the dark tunnels under the Aerie of the Slavelords. I can’t remember exactly how my character participated – in the original adventure, magic users have a small selection of scrolls to use and little else. I do know that by this stage I didn’t have a wand of fire to fall back on. But my imagination was doing a great job of picturing the strange fungi and unusual creatures we faced.

Of my D&D experiences as a player, this was as tense and challenging as any I’ve had. Most of the frustrations have faded away in my memories, leaving only the feeling of crawling through near lightless tunnels, hoping that somewhere there would be the way out.

Of course, once we got out of the dungeons, we found that deus ex machina was in full flight: the Slave Lords had been defeated, not by us, but by the volcano they’d built their base on erupting. Yes, we got to fight a couple of them as we raced to the ships, but it’s an oddly anticlimactic ending to the series.

And this was also the ending of my first AD&D campaign set in Greyhawk. As I’ve noted repeatedly, my memory for these events that took place about 35 years ago aren’t crystal clear. Some of the events that occurred in my last post may have happened after this, but for all intents and purposes this is where things ended. The group broke up. I kept playing with my DM and new players – but other games. Star Wars (WEG d6) and Amber being the big two. And I started running my first big campaign at university, but that was in the Forgotten Realms, not Greyhawk.

But Greyhawk would draw me back. Though this was the start of my adventures there, it would certainly not be the last. Although this was the last time that I was a player. From now on, I’d be the DM!

A couple of notes.

How do you spell Slavelords? In the original adventure, it’s “Slave Lords”. In the compilation adventure, it’s “Slavelords”. I’ve used both in this post.

The compilation adventure Scourge of the Slavelords is not available as a pdf. The original adventures are, as is the compilation adventure Against the Slave Lords, which was one of the products that Wizards of the Coast produced in the gap between 4E and 5E. It introduces a new prequel adventure, A0 Danger at Darkshelf Quarry, as well as reprinting the original AD&D adventures.