Now this one goes back to the early days of the hobby, and straight before the time when I got interested in the whole thing. Or rather: it fits in there in my first phase of fascination with the hobby.
Basically in the late 80s German publishing house Welt der Spiele and a few successors to that company (the whole history of the company is kind of a mystery for me, but there always seemed to be the same people involved), published a few universal modules. Often those were translations and adaptions of even earlier AD&D modules, some seem to have been original creations for the German market. One should not forget that D&D did not really take off in Germany until the end of the 90s (thanks to some really crappy translation and marketing) and there was not really a market for the whole thing. Then along come these nice adventures which have been written for AD&D, but fit in well somewhere else, and so they decide to make something out of that.
Partially it was a really shrewd move, and in a few cases this lead to some nice adventures. Adventures that did not sell out completely it seems.This might have been a factor in the demise of Welt der Spiele come to think of it…
In the middle of the 90s previous WDS employee Mario Truant had created his own publishing house: Truant. This one still is in business and even one of the more respected small game companies in Germany right now.
But in the middle 90s they noticed a bit of a problem with their heritage: there were still a lot of unsold modules taking up space in storage. And those grew harder and harder to sell the further roleplaying moved along. Still far from any renaissance of dungeon crawling, and slowly realizing that railroading might not be too good, these modules collected dust and aged.
And so someone came up with a nice way of cleaning up storage: selling them in compilations.
And that was how Troll-Welt came to be. The modules were either from the near forgotten Edition Troll imprint or from WDS itself, so they created this title (geddit? geddit? Edition Troll and Welt der Spiele!), made a cover for it (I saw that particular picture on at least two other products already), and then glued three random modules from storage into it. This gave nerds like me access to some old classics, and kept them from having to pulp the rest of them. So I guess it’s a win-win.
There is not really so much to say about Troll-Welt itself. According to the backtext the modules were chosen from stock at random (with 11 different modules possible), but so far I haven’t found any example of the thing that did not have exactly the same three modules than the one I have already. So it seems that either the advertisement was wrong (can you believe it?!), or they just had a lot more of these three modules than of others.
For reference, my copy has:
* Sternenhoeh – a translation of Mayfair Games’ Pinnacle
* Ruinen des Schreckens – a translation of Mayfair Games’ Evil Ruins
* Beowulfs Saga – a standalone railroad in a Scandinavia expy with lots of vikings
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