In 1984, the writers of TSR UK were also writing adventures for the D&D Expert line. Drums on Fire Mountain is designed for a party of five to eight characters of levels 5-8, and… oh, my God! What’s up with the cover?

Yes, they actually managed to misspell Graeme Morris’s name on it. And the back cover. It appeared as “Grame”.

Oh wait, you meant the cover art? Oh yeah, it’s not great, is it?

I opened the adventure expecting a full-on colonial era treatment of the material, but – to my surprise – it’s not really that. The basic plot is these island people have taken up piracy, mainly due to the influence of a devil swine from the mainland who has set himself up as a god. (They revere pigs). The adventurers have to go to the island during a great celebration, sneak past the distracted island people, and detain – I mean kill – the devil swine, so the plundering of ships ends.

(What’s a devil swine? It’s a lycanthrope that can turn into a pig – not a creature that was in the AD&D 1E Monster Manuals, instead being, like thouls, something for the Basic/Expert D&D line).

There’s some adventure in the wilderness of the island, but most of the action occurs in the tunnels below, remnants of an older civilisation. For the most part, you should avoid the island people (chaotic though they are), fight the undead the devil swine has created, and try to negotiate the magical locks that separate the different sections of the tunnels while you look for the hiding place of the devil swine, who, for some reason, doesn’t want to be killed.

All of this will probably provide a perfectly enjoyable day or two of gaming for your party. The problem is that little of it excites me. Everything’s competent enough, and there are a few nice moments. The devil swine has a human daughter who could conceivably be reasoned with and turned against her father. Not much of that is laid out in the adventure, just the possibility. So, it comes down to how you approach it in play. (Fair enough!) The entrances to the dungeons have some nice puzzles to solve – I particularly like that one requires a character to dance. (Good/cruel DMs will make the player dance).

But apart from that, I get worn down by “it’s another room with a monster to kill.”

I’m being somewhat unfair on the adventure. It has its fair share of interesting encounters and places to explore. But when exploring the underground tunnels dug by the mysterious “Ancestors”, they just feel like a set of dungeon rooms. There’s one reference to “the strange and decadent tastes of this long-vanished race”, but that description isn’t backed up by the contents of the tunnels. They are just tunnels with odd things in them that don’t connect that well, certainly not enough to get any idea as to what the “Ancestors” were like.

Then you have three human adventurers that were charmed by the devil swine and fight the party. Break the charm? They still fight you!

The Kara-Kara – the island humanoids distantly related to orcs – have a surprisingly minor part to play in the adventure. They came to the island long ago, helping get rid of the decadent race that was here before them, then settled down to a life of worshipping their gods and occasionally plundering ships wrecked by the Kal-muru, creatures from the Elemental Plane of Air that congregate around the island. Once the devil swine arrived, he gained control of the Kal-muru and sent them to wreck ships and sent the Kara-Kara to plunder them afterwards. Most of the characters’ interactions with them should be to avoid them, the one exception is when they reach the volcano temple to the Kara-Kara’s god. That’s potentially a larger battle, but even then, it seems like it’s meant for the characters to quickly escape the wrath of the massed Kara-Kara.

There is also a distinct lack of sacrifices during the ceremony. I don’t think the designers quite got the memo about how this sort of thing is “meant” to work!

Some interest is added with a “ticking clock” – you have five days before your ship home leaves – and also there’s a limited time before the Kara-Kara stop celebrating and become harder to avoid. As I’ve noted, I’m a bit wary of time-sensitive adventures, but it doesn’t seem so bad here (though the wilderness exploration speed may cause problems).

As I said, this adventure doesn’t excite me, but neither is it particularly poor. Get a DM in a better mood than me as I write this, and I’m sure that you’ll have fun. One of the classics? Not to my taste, no. There are good things about it, which I’m sure many players will enjoy.