Dancing girls at Cairo illustration by David Roberts (1796-1864).
I was reminiscing about skills in Das Schwarze Auge again the last few days, mostly while trying to think about ways of including the parts I really liked into my own DnDish houserule-monster of a ruleset.
Skills haven’t been part of DSA from the beginning. The original boxed set did not come with a proper skill system. Like DnD before some classes had special powers (e.g. the dwarf class had a “dwarf nose” that allowed them to find gold), but the first attempt at a skill system came with the Abenteuer-Ausbau Spiel (the extension set) in ’85. This was quite a basic system, although it did contain interesting bits that were left out of the system with the second edition. Others were developed later, out of other parts of the rules.
Minnekünste (the arts of courtly love) was one that got lost rather quickly. It referred to the more general way to present themselves and was a catch-all term for doing all the stuff that might be expected from a knight in society. Minne (courtly love) is a big part of medieval German literature, and it’s both a sign of Ulrich Kiesow’s academic background, and the whole background of the setting (the whole name Aventuria was based on the medieval idea of Âventiure, the trials a hero had to complete in a heroic story). This was a game about knights doing knight stuff. You might not have thought so from the adventures, but that’s what it was.
Zwergennase (dwarf nose): This one was part of the class features of the dwarf class in 1st edition, became a skill in 2nd, was removed in 3rd, then came back as an advantage in DSA4. It refers to a skill of detecting hidden spaces and other oddities in the architecture that could lead to secret compartments/doors. Not unlike what elves could do in B/X.
Dancing: introduced in 2nd edition (which didn’t have courtly arts anymore) this is one of the most useful of skills there is. It covers both a way to make some extra money in the early game (dancing in the pubs or on markets), and impress people in the later one (at a court, or maybe a witches’ sabbath).
Gaukeln: this is one where we hit the difference between German and English. There is no single good translation of this one. Gaukeln is entertainment, not in the society sense, but in the juggling/fools kind of way. Playing tricks, performing feats with panache. Gauklers can be fools, jugglers, clowns, illusionists, stage magicians, mountebanks, or maybe even the modern professional wrestler. Originally the translation would have been minstrel, but that became mostly limited to musicians around the 16th century. This also a very good skill to have in the game, where it can provide some easy money, distraction, or just a reason to get invited into a noble’s fortress.
Zechen (Carousing): I don’t know how to say this, but this is one of THE most useful skills in DSA. DSA after all is a German game. This governs how well you can drink, how you can hold your liquor, and how well you can handle yourself even under the influence. This comes up a surprising lot in scenarios in 2nd and 3rd edition, and for good reason. This allows you to keep a cool head during social events, might win you a drinking competition, or might help you against the effects of some potions. I think like the courtly love above this also is one of influenced by German folk tales, as there is at least one famous story where the drinking skills of a mayor saved a town from Swedish invaders.
Garhelt: we are outfitting an expedition up the river…
Tronde: Mother…
Garhelt: we need the best of our warriors, the best equipment, the best of our scholars, and we are going to discover the Orkland!
Tronde: Mother *sigh* Mother I am the hetman now.
Gerhalt *not listening*: I think we will need 4 dozen horses!
Tronde: you can get a mule.
Gerhalt: And I need the Giant’s Thumb!
Tronde: … tell you what mother, I will let Olaf put up some posters when he’s in Havena next week, deal?
Gerhalt: I knew I could put my trust in you! (exit to right)
Aide: Tronde, is that really wise?
Tronde: I don’t care. Let Olaf put some posters up. Either we get some foolhardy idiots who actually do the trip, or some scammers that are gonna turn back immediately. We can suffer the loss of a mule and some equipment if it gets me the chance to get rid of that disgusting thumb. I’ve wanted to kick it into the sea since I was a kid.
So let’s go through Das Schwarze Auge scenario B15 Im Spinnenwald (In Spiderwood), part of the 3-part campaign Die Entdeckung des Orklandes (The Discovery of Orkland) from 1986.
This should be the first we have from that year.
The Discovery series his is a small starter campaign written by Ulrich Kiesow (again…) and unlike the previous attempts at starter adventures this one wants to be a wilderness adventure.
Now when I say a wilderness adventure you might expect a hex crawl, but this is DSA and it was written for a German-speaking audience, so we instead are dealing with squares.
Kiesow did this already with B13. There already was an actual hex map in Werner Fuchs’ B8, but obviously they didn’t like that. So squares it is.
Also: considering this is supposed to be the discovery of the previously undiscovered wilderness, there are quite a lot of roads on that map.
Anyway, the heroes get hired by the former leader of the Thorwal Pirates (and mother of the current leader) Garhelt. After finding a public notice on a wall somewhere in their hometown.
Garhelt wants to leave a collection of maps of the known world for her country, but one part is missing: the Orkland.
Which is just up the river from Thorwal. You gotta wonder why they have maps of every other part of the continent but are missing their own neighbourhood.
Ok, there’s orks, but still.
The whole expedition has a homespun pet project feel to it. Oh sure, you are working for the former leader of Thorwal. But not the current one. So you get a mule. And a few life-saving pills.
And the thumb of a giant.
Have fun.
…
Thumb of a giant?
Yes, some ancient hero of the Thorwalians once brought home a thumb he cut off from a giant and it has been in their hoard ever since.
That sounds like Garhelt just took off with whatever nobody wanted.
Anyway, the fun thing about this thumb is this: it works.
Orcs have a justified phobia of giants, and showing them this thumb will make them run away.
That is until you meet that one village who thinks giants are just ancient superstition.
Har Har.
So we get our characters dropped off as far up the river as the dragon boats can go, and then we and the mule have to make our way to the other side of the country.
Ok, that’s not quite true, we do get whatever we want in equipment. but no ranged weapons except bows, or heavy armor. I guess that would be a bit too much for some people about to die miserably in orc territory. And as I said, only a mule. And this is a starter scenario, maybe if you pool your money you might get a second one.
Fair enough. The giant thumb actually leads to the odd feeling that despite exploring the “Ork”land, there’s not actually that many orcs to be seen. After the first few encounters with them word spreads and they leave us alone. What we have instead are lizardmen, spiders, three-headed dragons, and lots of wildlife.
Now I have to say I actually like this adventure, but despite being a squarecrawl it also is… uhm… heavily railroaded. Or maybe the word is gated. The simplest way is to follow along the roads (well, paths I guess) that already exist. If you try to cross open plains you are bound to get accosted by a bunch of narmy Lindwurms (three-headed dragons) that you have no chance in fighting.
The adventure has both random encounters and necessary encounters for woods, plains (well, the lindwurms), hills, cliffs (huh), and swamp.
Of interest is maybe the Firun priest who might counter aggressive PCs with a hail storm miracle and dies that way.
Awkward.
Also there’s a unicorn that just looks at them and then goes away (dare I say it? sequel hoooook)
Trolls are quite nice and give valuable information, but if the PCs talk too long with them they get the idea to rob them.
Swamps also have ork gadflies on basically every field, in addition to monsters, nicely keeping the PCs off those as much as possible. and the rest of the denizens (besides the lizardmen) are not much better.
And Kiesow clearly states this is exactly how it is intended: the heroes after all are supposed to reach the Spiderwood and not trot around along the river.
Sigh.
Anyway, lizardmen. Or lizard folk. Achaz in DSA parlance. By 4th edition they ended up as playable character races (the same as orcs and goblins). But in 1st edition so far we encountered them in some of the earlier scenarios (B1 and B4) on the side of the antagonists.
You most likely read over me mentioning them and assumed that we’d be set to murder our way across a tribe of poor scaled folk living there off the land.
Nothing could be further from the truth, the lizard people are actually quite friendly.
Unless the PCs really fuck up the encounters this is a purely social challenge, with the biggest threat being one of them getting married to a (presumably very attractive) lizard princess.
Actually no, there’s also the feast they are served as guests of the Achaz. Not that their hosts intend to hurt, but their cooking is of such a quality one might gain or lose permanent hp.
It seems orkland Achaz cooking is… interesting.
Anyway, it’s not necessary that one of the PCs gets married, but king Azl Azzl is very intent on getting his daughter Tili Tiki hitched.
This is presented as a roleplaying challenge to get out of this predicament, but Kiesow does acknowledge that some players might be totally ok with getting married to a lizardgirl.
For what it’s worth Tili Tiki is deadly afraid of violence, and living in a swamp in the orkland that’s not a good condition. I guess it does make sense the king wants to get her to a place where not every day is a struggle to survive.
I don’t know if this is what was intended, but it’s quite heartwarming
After this and a bit of overland travel we need to get the heroes into the Spiderwood, so there’s two encounters to do that. Technically there are roads that lead around the forest, but to the west is a giant called Orkeater who will also branch out into eating foolhardy adventurers, to the east are the lindwurms Skyflame and Skysparkling, who refuse any attempts of characters to cross the plains. Skyflame is presented as a helicopter parent who doesn’t like humans (or other small folk).
Both encounters are of course much more powerful than the heroes, leaving the forest as the only option.
Sigh. as I said, gated
I mean of course it’s called Im Spinnenwald, so we have to go to the Spiderwood at one point. But it’s kind of pointless to start a wilderness exploration adventure and then railroad people into going where you want them to.
anyway, the main part of the scenario:
The Spiderwood.
Guess what’s all over the place?
If you were thinking “spiders” you’d be wrong. what actually is the most annoying part is a kind of plant (the so called Basilamine) that has nice red flowers and exploding seed pods which destroy equipment and give tenths of damage points and oh my god there’s a whole page of rules for these fucking things I think I need a spreadsheet to track all this garbage. DON’T GO INTO THE FLOWER FIELDS IS WHAT I’M SAYING!
Effectively every part of the forest that’s full of those flowers is impassible, coincidentally making the forest into a… you guessed it… open air dungeon.
Sigh.
There’s another encounter table here, containing mammoths and boars and wolves… and horny big bugs that fight rival bugs by bumping into them. hmm… Also red dwarves. which are dwarves with red caps that don’t talk and might go berserk if interacted with. huh. These are still canon by the way. I just saw them in the 4e book about dwarves. One might assume they are supposed to be redcaps, but they more seem to be some variation of wood-dwelling gnomes and dwarves in Germanic mythologies. But that all isn’t quite clear, and unlike everything else besides animals, these guys cannot be talked to. So we don’t really learn what they are about at all.
Considering this is in the middle of the “undiscovered orkland” this forest turns out to be much more human-inhabited than expected. there’s multiple log cabins, one of which can give you a free dog and has a magic artifact that just says “if you can read this you can read’
(it grants you the ability to read if you don’t have it yet, which is necessary later)
we also can meet an invisible human mage (ok, debatable, but the heroes can’t know her current physical form), a bunch of trolls, at least some poor ork villages, and at least one more whole abandoned human village, now full of goblins (and the question what a Nivese tribe was doing that far south to begin with, living in otherwise very standard medieval buildings).
So what about the spiders the forest is named after?
They will kidnap one of the characters at one point. So now we hopefully will try to find that character again. Lets hope the group doesn’t have issues with each other and just decides to leave the character to his fate.
As a replacement for the player who just lost their character we get Grisbart, a dwarf, who just shows up and is very greedy. That’s his character.
This is the first time the negative attributes are introduced. Grisbart is a dwarf with a Greed for Gold attribute of 8, meaning whenever he sees gold and wins an attribute check HE NEEDS IT RIGHT NOW.
I guess the idea was popular enough to become a standard for 2nd edition DSA. The later editions introduced a rather specific set of negative attributes like this, one of which always was Greed for Gold. Only 4th edition changed this and made this an optional drawback to buy in a point buy system.
He will join us rescuing the other character. well, if the heroes want to. who knows.
Anyway, how about having at least a single Orc NPC?!
I know I can just introduce some, but I might be mentioning it a bit much, this is supposed to be an expedition through a region where orcs are the predominant people.
Lets cut this short. The spiders that kidnapped the PC are not technically a bad sort: They are a colony of intelligent telepathic spiders who discovered that people reading to them gives them interesting telepathic pictures in their head. so they kidnap people, let them read, and then lose them to scurvy.
They aren’t evil, they just don’t understand that this is no way to deal with humans. After a few scenarios by Kiesow I recognize his streak of dark humor again. The spiders just don’t have a clue how humans really work, they just know that they can read to them. And they feed them and try to keep them alive, but humans just can’t survive on a diet of nothing but fish and water. So multiple people have been kidnapped (some maybe from that Nivese village, and some others), used as a reader for the female spiders (the males only know enough to know that the females like those humans for some reason), and then they died of scurvy.
There’s opportunity for some roleplaying here, or just a simple dungeon crawl. It’s not a big dungeon, and Kiesow presents it appropriately alien. In one room we find a couple of spiders post-copulation, the female trying to eat the male one. As one does I guess.
I actually like this adventure. There are some bizarre setpieces in there which I think could be fun. In fact there is a nice actual play by the current publishers of the system which is quite fun and which I enjoyed listening to. I want to play it with people. But damn does it have issues. It is certainly full of interesting ideas and roleplaying challenges. I think outside some random encounters it doesn’t demand fights anywhere. but it also wastes the possibilities of both the exploration section and the forest section by gating like crazy. This would have to be reworked.
One certainly could introduce something about orc culture here instead of basically everything else.
It occurs to me that there is a good business reason for this particular campaign: up to now most releases have followed along with the levels that could be expected for a normal group. I.e. if you started with B1 and played maybe one official scenario a month you’d end up around the level range for the advanced line of adventures by now. So how do you sell more? Start over again and tell people this adventure is for experienced players with new characters.
In a way this is the true end of the first phase of DSA adventures. Previous adventures were already mentioning some of the advanced classes, this is the first that places the events on the map from the advanced box. The world soon would start to get filled in with detail.
Both here in the B series and soon in the A series exploration adventures would become more common, with much more social roleplay challenges and less dungeon crawling.
This also received a French version, from what I can see only in the Schmidt trade dress though. No Gallimard version from what I can see for this one.
I might need to point it out, but this and all the other adventures I have been talking about lately recently have been reissued, so they currently can be found in shops again. During my last visit back at my parents’ place I found a whole shelf of them in the local comic store. They are generally near faithful replicas, with only the Schmidt logo replaced.
Let’s go through Das Schwarze Auge adventure B13 Der Streuner Soll Sterben (The Vagrant Shall Die)
It has the secondary title Das Blutgericht von Thalusa (The Blood Court of Thalusa) which is one of the few times when both titles are equally evocative.
Ok, let me preface this: I utterly adore this scenario, even though it has it’s problems (dare I say it? some parts are quite racist). But I would say this is where Ulrich Kiesow shows real promise.
Now at this point MOST (but not all) of the DSA scenarios were written by him, or in cooperation with him. This included A1 which I really liked, and A2 which I found at least ok. But it also included the whole rest of the scenarios which contain some bad railroads, even if their premise might be good. But this one is one where I really see what he is going for. This is intentionally pulpy, in the way that 19th ct. adventure stories were.
Unfortunately this includes some rather unfortunate tropes that come with such stories. For one the setting is quasi-oriental. And of course it involves arranged marriages, beheadings at the drop of a stone, and an evil looking coal black executioner.
On the other there really aren’t any really bad people involved. The executioner just happens to be coal black from a magical accident and is otherwise doing his job, and the one actual antagonist is coded as German, and even he has reasons to behave like he does.
Lots of bad decisions that come with the choice of setting and NPCs. I guess for the 80s it was fair for its day, but even in the 90s I remember this module as being discussed as “the racist one”.
But anyway, the plot concerns Prince Selo of Khunchom who had the really bad idea to have just a small peek at his fiancée Shenny of Thalusa. [that name tho…]
You see it’s tradition in their culture that enfianced people are not to see each other until the marriage rites are concluded. Which is all fine for Selo, except he HAS seen her parents and now fears his future wife might take after either of them. So he makes the plan of… sneaking into the palace of Thalusa and having a look at her.
And if it’s really bad, can a life as a vagrant on the roads of Aventuria be quite so bad?
Yes, Prince Selo is an idiot.
In any case he even is successful in sneaking in, and quite enamored with Princess Shenny. And Princess Shenny for her side is quite enamored with that handsome stranger she just encountered.
Unfortunately while they are both very enthusiastically consenting with each other (at least that discussion we don’t have to touch), he is captured by the guards and immediately sentenced to death by his prospective father in law.
Your mission now, if you choose to accept it…
Well, you should accept it, the Prince’s father promises you riches if you manage to make it to Thalusa in time with a document of his hand that can rescue his son. Unfortunately Thalusa is about 300km away, easily a 10 day trip over land, and the execution is set for in 14 days.
And even if you get there on time with the document (which is not a given), and hand it to the wrong person, then you are back at square one. Well, square whatever Thalusa is in.
The heroes are given the choice of going by sea, which might shorten the journey to three days, but has a problem: it’s a the stormy season right now, and it might make things worse. A single ship is willing to make the passage on the off-chance of arriving in one part at their destination to make a killing selling hard liquor.
(I realized afterwards that I am not quite sure which season it is supposed to be, the text is talking about Frühjahr being a storm season in that part, so the early year. In our world this commonly would be spring. But in Aventuria the early year is autumn. But was this already established at that point? When does this actually take place?)
Despite Kiesow’s known fondness for railroads he does not actually go for them here. With a bit luck of the dice the PCs can indeed reach the halfway point, after which the storms become no problem anymore. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.
Then they are attacked by pirates though. Which also can be circumnavigated with proper care (the scenario contains a specifically designed boardgame here), and even if they board your ship they only will steal the document.
(they are not actually real pirates)
If luck is not with them, or if they decide to go there from the beginning, they end up having to go by land. But at least they might have gained a day or two.
This would be the place where a DnD scenario would pull out the hexmap. And we saw a hexmap in B8 already. Kiesow instead decides to use squares, for a squarecrawl, basically. There are also no permanently keyed encounters, all the encounters are on random tables.
This includes meadows which have an encounter on a roll of 7 on a d6.
Oh yes, did you see! Did you see?! He made a joke!
What’s interesting about the encounters is how… stock medieval fantasy they all are. One would assume that with a setting where he uses all kinds of orientalist tropes he would do the same for the wilderness section. Instead it seems like he just took the monster descriptions from the rulebook: wolves, trolls, boars, a tatzelwurm. The closest to the Arabian Nights scenario you might be expecting is an Earth Spirit that can give you some healing.
(I guess no budget for illustrations…)
But it’s really the city adventure part where this scenario shines. For one: there is an actual city adventure part with an actual map of Thalusa. For the second: you are given free reign how to actually deal with the situation. Now you were supposed to deliver a document, but you likely lost it either on the sea journey or over land. If you didn’t you most likely handed it to the wrong person at the palace and he lost it for you instead.
in the meantime the prince is in his prison in the middle of the market square of Thalusa and the players are left free reign in how to deal with the situation.
Springing the prince might not be easy, but can be possible. Sneaking into the palace is possible (it’s worked out), but finding the right person there is difficult. Dealing with the executioner and his tools is also another option (the tools need to be in top order according to tradition).
Here is when the bog standard fantasy scenario all of a sudden turns into a heist. most likely the heroes will have to do something to save the prince, but what and how is their own choice. The scenario gives some valid ideas, but I bet some players would have more.
You could have an infiltration/dungeon crawl through the palace, but you don’t have to.
For what it’s worth if you are breaking into the palace you might encounter a scribe you can blackmail by threatening his favorite calligraphy.
And if you break into the executioners house you might encounter a Ulmenknecht, which seems to be a treant kind of being? I don’t think this being is still canon in DSA. It’s not the proper treant equivalent (that would be a Waldschrat), more like a wood golem?
And then there is Dolguruk, the executioner of Thalusa.
Who is black. Coal black even.
Which is the result of a rather sinister human sacrifice he and a druid wanted to perform on a magician who managed to hit back with a transformation spell. Which caused him to turn completely black.
For some reason this story is the longest of all the NPC bios, despite being otherwise a rather incidental character. And one who doesn’t actually do anything bad as such while the PCs are around.
I think Kiesow is very much going very much for the image of Der Schwarze Mann here, a “Kinderschreckfigur” (character to scare kids with? Man, we Germans have weird concepts sometimes) that is quite widespread. I still remember playing both the associated kids game and the card game based on it.
In a wider sense it was a depiction of (black) death and/or the devil.
But here it manages to keep all the bad connotations that made this game… inappropriate in polite society.
Dolguruk is I think still an active NPC in current DSA lore, he usurped Shenny’s father at one point and became ruler of Thalusa, and being an elf he also doesn’t seem to be easy to get rid of. He also had his backstory modified to have gained his look from a pact with a demon. Not sure if that’s better or worse.
So…what do I think about it?
I don’t think Kiesow intended for this to come across as it does, but he nevertheless managed to write some really unfortunate implications in here.
Which might explain why this adventure never got the re-releases that other adventures from him got, despite being, from a design standpoint alone, one of his best so far. There is considerable freedom of choice both in the wilderness and the city sections, and room for player creativity, all under time pressure. I really like this and I want to play this with people. I might need to prepare people that it was written 40 years ago.
Other languages
This gets into the times when the DSA adventures were no longer translated into many languages. The only translation I can find is the French one, in both the Schmidt and Gallimard version.
Still not sure why there were two versions. According to one commenter on dice.camp one was the Schmidt version, like in German, the other was the same format as the Gallimard gamebook translations and would have been sold in bookstores instead of toy stores.
In any case they used the secondary title for that, Le Bourreau de Thalussa. Not the worst choice.
Let’s read through Das Schwarze Auge adventure A2 Die Göttin der Amazonen (The Goddess of the Amazons) from 1985.
First I was a bit demotivated to do B12 Der Zug durch das Nebelmoor, now there is A2. It’s not actually bad. That would be better.
A2 is aggressively middle of the line. Rather a steep drop from the freeform madness that was A1, I don’t understand why this had to be in the A-line.
The author is, again, Ulrich Kiesow, illustrations are by Ina Kramer, cover by Claus Biswanger.
This time I really dig Biswanger’s cover. Amazing composition.
I would say that this is the adventure that introduces amazons to the setting, but that would be incorrect. Two of the NPCs, including amazon queen Yppolita, were already taking part in the tourney in A1. Which is a neat way to establish why the patron decides to deal with the player character as opposed to literally anyone else: they might have been seen on the tourney together with the queen and he can be sure that they know what the queen of Kurkum looks like.
That is of course assuming they learned of her identity on the tourney. If not it might be interesting for them to recognize their casual acquaintance as royalty.
There are a few small connections like that in those adventures. It’s clear that the authors expected the players to play the scenarios in order. Well, after all there were no others. (If one ignores the 3rd party ones that were already cropping up)
B10 allowed for the characters to become minor nobility in Warunk, A1 had them take part in the emperor’s tourney where they met Yppolita, A2 sends them south of Warunk to the area of Beilunk, B13 then sends them even further south and features a trap that only works if the players played A2.
Map of adventure area
So back to the scenario: the heroes are hired by the merchant Stoerrebrand to deliver a statue of the warrior goddess Rondra to the Amazon fortress Kurkum.
Adventurer looking at small statue
The amazons have stopped trading with the merchant (they were his source of curcuma (turmeric) natch) and he doesn’t have a clue why, but he tries to get back into their good graces with that gift.
The heroes first have to investigate in the city of Beilunk where the fortress even is, because as is appropriate for Amazons it is well hidden.
Hunting society
We get some random encounters during the wilderness sections, and some prophecies by local Rondra clergy. It turns out the amazons recently have started raiding the surrounding countryside.
The reason for this (which we will find out at the end) is the dark mage Xeeran who has created an idol of a goddess that has replaced Rondra for the amazons, and now he is using them as his private enforcers. The heroes now hopefully should infiltrate the fortress, free the imprisoned queen, and deal with the dark mage.
Sigh.
Oh where to begin?
This scenario is absolutely rife with unfortunate implications. This was obviously before DSA started becoming the game of near absolute gender equality it would be in the 90s, when I started playing.
one might think some parts of it might just be for… cheap titillation (hee hee)
Two amazons taking care of their gear
It also was written by a man. Well, yes, Ulrich Kiesow was male. But that’s not what I mean. Here we have a scenario all about powerful female warriors, and yet there is a man that has bedazzled all of them, and the strongest of them is kept locked up just waiting for rescue.
Blergh.
The worst part comes early, during the investigation in Beilunk, when the heroes are supposed to gain information from some drunk cart drivers that immediately start fighting with the PCs.
Adventurers being pelted by food
What’s the best solution here?
I will tell you the one no sane person should try, but which is the one non-violent one the scenario proposes: send a lone female character to the drunk cart drivers, because “none of them would be ungentlemanly enough to attack an unarmed woman“.
Are. You. Fucking. Serious?!
Closer to the palace we encounter Rondra clerics who were driven out of their temple in the town of Shamaham by the amazons that are now worshipping their false idol (later retcon established this as an effigy of one of the archdemons).
Abandoned temple
They are holed up in a conveniently abandoned Rondra temple nearby that houses… a Dark Eye.
The most powerful of the DSA magic items, and the only reason it’s available at all is because the clerics had to flee into this ruin.
Not contrived at all..
And it’s not even the only one, as there’s another dark eye in the nearby town ready to drop exposition.
Amazon queen in divination tool
I assume this was mandated by the publisher. The whole Dark Eye name was an idea an advertising agency came up with to make the game more marketable (I guess at least someone there read the Lord of the Rings…).
Then for 13 adventures there was no mention of it.
Most likely the publishers complained and Kiesow put in two at once.
Some other random stuff: Searching for the “Palace of Kurkum” the heroes might encounter a pair of beggars that will guide them to it.
Well, they will guide them to a thief den/pub called “Palace of Kurkum”.
Pub sign
That… feels a rather daring choice of name considering there’s a non-zero chance an actual amazon might come across the place and take offense. And amazons were known to be violent even before being enchanted by Xeraan.
If the heroes sneak into the fortress and go all the way up to the top of the belfry they are attacked by a pair of tree dragons. If they fight too long the amazons below will notice.
Tree dragon attack
Oh yeah, the dragons just happen to pass by at that moment and have otherwise no bearing on the scenario.
Amusing: dark mage Xeraan with great effort teleported in two trolls and two sabre-toothed tigers to guard his lair.
Sabretoothed tigers
Unfortunately he soon figured out that was a mistake, as the trolls are mean and like to annoy the tigers, and the tigers crap everywhere, so now he needs to teleport in food and teleport out excrement.
Which means he hasn’t gotten around to actually get rid of either of them because he’s too busy with everything else. As DSA uses a spellpoint system that replenishes in a similar way to the HP system it can be inferred that he is permanently low on spell points because he has to clean the tiger droppings with magic.
Ok, altogether, despite my misgivings, it’s not bad. And considering what came before this easily ends up one of the better scenarios I have gone through. For now.
With a bit of work it could be a really memorable, if not epic experience.
This is about the time when they stopped translating the adventures into other languages. I guess unlike the German edition the other languages did not sell enough to justify the extra effort. A2 only received a French translation.
The events of the scenario were picked up in later publications. Xeraan became one of the prominent NPCs during the Borbarad campaign in the 90s (he became one of the heirs of the Demon Crown, and also was established as the person responsible for the events in B10), part of the subverted amazons kept being subverted and founded their own demonic amazon order, Kurkum fell in that campaign, and the backstory of queen Yppolita was worked out in a novel by Kiesow himself in 1987 (Die Gabe der Amazonen/en.: The Gift of the Amazons), and then picked up in his great epic novel Das Zerbrochene Rad (The Broken Wheel), published after is early death in 1997.
In other words: lorewise this scenario was like a butterfly spreading his wings and causing tornados
From what I have found there were exactly two scenarios for The Dark Eye in Casus Belli, and this is the second one. Le suppôt de Satan (The Devil’s Henchman) by Jacques Dalstein and Jérôme Bohbot from Casus Belli 34 (still 1986, the same year as the previous one). This was after the release of the extension set in French, which is referenced and immediately almost completely ignored by the scenario. The main antagonist is specifically not using the extension set rules.
Oh, yeah, the antagonist. You can see him in the illustration on the first page of the scenario.
Wait, you might say, but DSA doesn’t have black dark elves.
See, that’s where you are wrong. Number one in some of the earlier adventures there were actually black dark elves (which later got reskinned… see what I did there… into albino dark elves wearing black armor).
Number two is… the guy is not actually meant to be black, he is supposedly dark purple.
I am not sure I could play a serious game with players and manage not to laugh when the dreaded antagonist shows up and looks like an eggplant.
There is of course an actual reason for this. Purple in DSA is the color of the nameless god, and that is most likely why our dear purple elf is purple here. He is mentioned to have this color because of dark magic, but he also is established as a servant of the Nameless One. Someone read the extension set and extrapolated. The whole dark magic makes your skin go weird idea also came up in B13 Der Streuner soll sterben, which was translated to French in 1986, but in this case it was a very specific magic accident that turned an elf coal black from the environment he was in when the accident happened.
The scenario is maddeningly thin. There are some striking ideas in there though.
It all starts in a tiny nondescript village somewhere, which at night has ghostly riders pass by or even attack. There’s a small investigation into the situation, including an encounter with a witch and a bit of grave robbery, before going into the forest.
There is a black castle there which only shows up at night (I actually like this part), which is where the riders come from. Sneaking into the castle is acknowledged as a good idea that’s absolutely futile, because the bad guy knows everything that happens in the castle.
In any case the characters are invited in. We are supposed to have a nice dinner with the dark elf, although we can just show him an amulet which makes him lose all power. In the end we have to fight through the castle (there’s a pool with piranhas here for reasons), and find him trying to summon a demon. We have to fight that one as well. The end.
Maybe it’s an issue with the translation, but I really don’t know what either the PCs or the antagonist’s motivation for anything is besides “they are heroes, he’s a bad guy sorceror with dark skin”.
I guess it might work as a very short side trek, maybe for younger players. I would get rid of the whole purple skin angle and just make him a very unpleasant elf, although maybe I could find an elf sorceror mini and paint it purple? That at least would make for a memorable miniature.
Altogether the scenario is not great, but it might be good for a single evening of old school DSA play.
I was browsing stuff about Casus Belli and it’s Jarandell subsetting, when I came across some scenarios they published for L’Œil noir at the time it came out.
I actually never really had thought much about the stuff that appeared for DSA in other languages. Schmidt Spiele seemed to make it a thing for a year or so, but then stopped publishing new things. And I knew there was some nostalgia from people who played it back then, but soon after first the Italian, then the Dutch, and finally the French versions stopped getting new releases.
The Dark Eye’s first edition was translated into French in 1986, which is also when this scenario appeared in Casus Belli (in the same issue as a similar Dungeons and Dragons scenario): a very short solo penned by Jean Balczesak: La dernière nuit (The last night). This was in Casus Belli 32 (1986).
I do have to assume that this was an initiative of the French publisher of the game (Gallimard) to get the game some mindshare with French players. For what it’s worth they manage to misspell the name of the German publisher in this issue. And Gallimard otherwise was mostly doing gamebooks, e.g. the Fighting Fantasy series.
It’s… not good.
Actually it’s surprisingly engaging for such a short scenario, but it really is just four pages. The player character makes the mistake to talk to the wrong person (You thought he was a guard!) in the city of Agadinmar (where?!). It turns out you have been chosen as a sacrifice to the god of the city (who?!) and will be slowly tortured to death in the most excruciating manner, before being burned. Yeah, that’s not something to look forward to, so the whole scenario is about you trying to find your way out of this predicament.
The tone of the scenario is rather jovial, with a sometimes dry sense of humor. I find it interesting that of all things Balczesak decided to emulate the mode of speech employed in the starter set. But oh well.
Unless Agadinmar is the translation of a city I know under a German name this is not actually a place in DSA lore. The red-robed priests that do human sacrifice also don’t sound like anything I am aware of in the game. But that might easily be because at that early time of the game there simply was not enough lore to go against. Well, German-language areas had the the extension set already which contained a description of the setting, but that would be translated later in the year. The scenario does fit into the vibe of early DSA somewhat. Back then not much was established yet, and over time things would go different than those first few books would show the place as.
I have mentioned it in my previous article, Dungeon and Dragons did not manage to make a proper impression in the German roleplaying scene in when it finally was translated.
Now, that’s not to say there were no fans. People had been bringing over the game since the 70s, I have written about one game which might have been the earliest RPG played in Germany from around 1976 before, and there seem to have been games run by a few people all over (Western) Germany, or at least in the big cities, but there was no translation until 1984, about the same time that Das Schwarze Auge appeared and “blew DnD from the market”. I have recently come across an interesting thread on the Acaeum, a website mostly interested in DnD collecting, that had some interesting insights into the history of the German DnD publications from the 80s. (a few parts are synthesized from other sources)
now, the beginning is of course this: in the early 80s Werner Fuchs and his brother-in-law Ulrich Kiesow spent a rainy holiday in Denmark playing Dungeons and Dragons. They already were busy in the scene, but they decided that they could translate the game into German and bring it to the German-language market.
There was mention of a previous attempt to translate the game made by Gygax in an interview beforehand. This failed because his friend in Switzerland who was supposed to translate it didn’t have time.
Fuchs and Kiesow talked to TSR on the Nuremberg game fair, with the strong argument that they were fans AND spoke fluent English. Fuchs also was an editor for Droemer Knaur and brought them in. Droemer Knaur brought in Schmidt Spiele. For a while they were working and translating rules and modules for TSR.
At one point around the Nuremberg games fair in 1983 the whole business fell apart: TSR demanded royalties of 24%, which had Schmidt Spiele balk. According to Fuchs 24% was basically what Stephen King could demand, considering the additional translation work Schmidt Spiele wasn’t willing to go over 12%. Keep that in mind, it comes back later.
The TSR representative was later sued by TSR for embezzling money. It seems he sold the rights to the Japanese publisher with a clause that entitled him personally to a cut of the proceeds.
Schmidt Spiele decided to pay Kiesow and Fuchs to come up with a game system of their own. This of course soured their relationship with TSR. TSR instead went with ASS Altenburger Spielkarten, a traditional publisher for playing cards. I guess this also explains some of what happened later.
Get your mind out of the gutter, Ass in German simply means Ace.
ASS created the subsidiary FSV, the Fantasy Spiele Verlag GmbH, specifically to publish Dungeons and Dragons. They would initially use the already existing translations and later translate more.
FSV never reached the market penetration that Schmidt Spiele was able to achieve. They just did not have the standing in the market, and their products were more expensive. They did try though, publishing quite a lot of rules and adventures for the short time they were active, and also tried to build a community with a first small convention (marred by promises that Gary Gygax would make an appearance, which did not happen), and by publishing Drachen magazine, a German version of Dragon.
It seems one of the main issues with further products was the cost of translation. From the memories of one poster FSV did not figure the cost of translations into their initial cost calculations , which lead them to basically take on everyone they could as a translator. This included the poster, who was a 15 year old student (and who they tried to scam out of his pay) and famously in one case just someone who translated the equipment list by doing word for word substitutions via dictionary. (Torch translated as Taschenlampe/electric torch)
In the background the person who snatched DnD for ASS also was embezzling money from ASS and slowly hollowing out that company. ASS went bankrupt, and after a few years in limbo was sold to Schmidt Spiele, just before they went bankrupt.
The guy who seems to have been responsible for the demise of ASS also bears a bit of mention. It seems he was a German who studied in the USA, came back to Germany but kept wearing cowboy boots and hat, then later moved back to America, got himself adopted by the last scion of an extinct German noble house, and now is making money by doing commencement speeches as a German prince. I mean. Wow.
A while ago I decided to buy myself the reissue of the first Das Schwarze Auge rules that came out in 1984. The reissue was a kickstarter-backed luxury reissue published in 2018, and they decided to put in all the materials from the starter box (the Abenteuer-Basis-Spiel), and both editions of the GM tool box (Die Werkzeuge des Meisters, both 1984, both with completely different contents despite the same title). It also contains a copy of the first solo (B5 Nedime, die Tochter des Kalifen, also 1984), and a few other things that were at hand it seems.
The box is actually not the same as before. It certainly is bigger and more sturdy. The old Schmidt Spiele boxes never were that strong. Neither were had the books within the box such sturdy covers. At least I don’t assume they had, I never had my hands on an actual copy of the 1st edition, but I had enough other Schmidt Spiele books and boxes from later.
The infamous Mask of the (Game)Master
It does also contain the infamous Mask of the Master. This was an idea from the publishing house. Ostensibly it was for the GM to wear during the games to appear more mysterious. The picture does not quite show how tiny and flimsy this thing really is. Even my 7yo would have issues wearing this thing. Oh, did I mention that the first toolbox was absolutely hated by the authors? It seems it was all an idea from the board game publishing Schmidt Spiele who were uncomfortable with games that did only not contain books and not at least some counters or gimmicks. This would come back every few years.
Weapon section
There was not much choice in weapons and equipment. In comparison to the contemporary translation of Dungeons and Dragons… about the same. No big surprise, the authors also had already translated both Dungeons and Dragons and Tunnels and Trolls and were quite familiar with what was expected here.
The Book of Adventures The Book of Power (GM manual)
This contains both books that were contained in the two different toolbox sets. It does not say so on it, and it doesn’t mention the second book in the later part in the table of contents, but it’s there.
The first book was quite hated by both the creators of the game and the audience, which was why it was reissued with a complete makeover of the contents. It has strange riddle doors and other ideas that did not fit in with the general game design. It also has 9 more monsters to supplement the 6 in the starter box, bringing the number of available monsters up to 15 (16 with two different kinds of dragons). Well, there also were the ones in the adventure books, but the selection of monsters in DSA was thin.
Here are some interesting things about the monsters:
the cyclops has both stats for normal and if blinded.
the Krakenmolch has half a page of extra rules for cutting off tentacles
the sphinx has no stats at all
the basilisk is supposed to be the worst of monsters here, has nearly a page of special rules, and gives 500xp for just attempting to kill one. Making this into a nice xp mill.
The second book in the later part of the booklet has some more ideas on traps and magic items, 20 riddles, and descriptions of the paper minis and the monsters they depict. What it doesn’t have are actual stats for those monsters. I guess you were supposed to make them up as you went along.
I know it’s not really hard, but kind of badly thought out.
Nedime, daughter of the Caliph (adventure B5, solo)
I find it curious they decided to have Nedime in here as a pack-in instead of another group scenario. I know it’s a well-beloved title (it also was the first DSA mobile game when they started producing them), but I would have expected one or more of the original four scenarios in here. Those were reissued as well, but I think originally as Kickstarter rewards.
Retro-issue for Der Aventurische Bote (Reprint of old articles from the newsletter)
The Aventurischer Bote newsletter only started a bit later than the timeframe of this box was, so this is an interesting publication, also giving some additional background material and rules. This reprints the early contents of the newsletter, before it became that in-game periodical it is nowadays. Some of the entries here are also non-canonical in modern DSA, specifically the description of the city Phexcaer is so different it can’t be brought in line with later stuff.
Kaiser Retro Special
This is an odd bird of a thing. It’s not actually a proper reissue of something that came before. The largest part of this book is full-page filled character sheets, from what I see mostly of premade characters from the actual adventure modules. This strikes me as a waste of space. I guess it could be interesting for someone? The characters in that edition of DSA are not really so complicated that I think this would be needed.
The only actual thing of real interest is “Die Burg der Ungeheuer”, a technically a third adventure in this box, after the solo and the group scenario in the adventure booklet. Except… it’s not actually playable.
It turns out this scenario was a sort of solo/live action scenario that was played on the very first SPIEL trade fair in Essen, when they tried to present this new interesting game. Players were supposed to go through the leaflet this was on, Fighting Fantasy style, and go to actual places in the building that had hints. I had never heard about this before, and for good reason: it’s incomplete. It depends on RL notes that were spread around the building the trade fair was in. A building that itself is not there anymore. An interesting little artifact for sure, but of somewhat dubious usefulness.
Gm screen (front)
The GM screen is tiny as well. It’s serviceable on the back I guess, but it doesn’t hide much and feels like it’s made for ants. Or really small children.
GM screen (back)The Book of Rules
The main issue I have with the rules is that they really are not that great. They are serviceable, but DSA won the German market less by being thought out, and more by being available in every toy store that carried Schmidt Spiele games. Even in comparison to contemporary 1984 DnD this feels limited. It does feel a bit closer to Tunnels and Trolls maybe, which tried to have a more minimal ruleset than DnD.
Monster section
There are not actually many monsters in the game. The ones you see on the page… are basically what is there. Different scenarios and the toolbox would introduce more monsters later on, but if you just had the original box to deal with you had the whole of 6 monsters.
Not that it was hard to make more, just look at the monster stats.
Cardboard standees
The cardboard standees were a part of the first, the bad toolbox, but they are included because some people had fond memories of them. They are way too big and don’t fit the art of the rest of DSA.
Tiles and paper minis
These paper minis, tiles, and doors were part of the second edition of the toolbox. Much more useful than the standees from the first box they maybe are a bit flimsy. In comparison to the huge cardboard standees from before they are maybe even a bit too small. Still faithfully reproduced.
Documents
And here we have a few of the contained documents.
Well. I do see how this game could become such a success, there is a lot of stuff in there that captures the imagination. And the whole ruleset is rather minimal, but it also is easy to grok and play.
Note: By the way, the name is a pun. The first emperor in the setting was Emperor Hal, the previous one was established to have been Reto. So this box is metaphorically going back to the time before the setting was established properly.
And I don’t mean bizarre as in subject matter (although some parts are), but mostly in how it approaches the structure of a DSA adventure, how it rewards the characters, and how it transitions between parts. Oh, and how it utterly fails to give a proper resolution.
In fact from style and design to me this does not look like a DSA adventure, this looks more like a contemporary ADnD module, and not TSR either.
This has the feel of a Mayfair Games’ Role Aids scenario. Which easily could have been the model considering the time frame.
Also: treasure in this scenario is insane. Easily the biggest haul of game-breaking artifacts ever in a DSA scenario. A single of which (a harp that causes winds and storms) the GM is told not to leave in player hands at the end. Nothing like this is said about the lamp that can destroy any undead it shines on, the heart stone of a dragon, the “dragonslayer“, or a bow made from a demon horn. Those are all pretty campaign ruining artifacts that often received their own adventures in later years. Here they are just a bit of loot.
The adventure has three parts, the first is a cursed garden, the second your typical underground dungeon, the last an old tower with the titular demon on top. You can only proceed in all of them, you cannot go back after you move to the next part.
The beginning of the adventure is rather quaint: We are introduced to Throndwig of Warunk, who has the rather pacifist hobby of gardening and collecting plants. Unfortunately something has kidnapped his Ladifaahri, a plant-seeking flying kobold who recently found the crown jewel of his garden for him: the jaguar lily.
Much hay is made about the pacifism of the Warunkers and their lord here: “you might think the Warunkers are Swiss people that had mislaid their mountains” the author starts the introduction and then goes on about how they hire other people to fight for them if necessary.
I’m sorry? Swiss people?! The country with the 2nd highest rate of gun ownership in the world? Which has all entries to their country mined and ready to blow?
I think we have different views on how combat ready the Swiss are.
There’s only one entrance into the enchanted garden. Well. The author acknowledges you also could just go over the wall but that it’s “unhealthy” because a cursed plant is shooting at everything that’s climbing down the wall.
The whole book has a conversational style that feels like the author is just coming up with stuff on the fly.
After a short venture we find that whoever kidnapped the Ladi…fff…ehm… kobold took it into a hole in the ground. and so we have to follow.
It’s never quite clear why it was taken down there, and how the PCs are supposed to know that, but that’s where we go because the scenario tells us so.
Of course right after going down we get blocked from returning, so we better are fully equipped.
How would the heroes know it’s a one way path?
Beats me.
The dungeon is not that big, it’s the lair of an evil wizard, and it of course fails all kinds of logic checks you could apply to it: Where do the orcs come from? Where do they get food? The only paths in and out we can find lead to either the botanic garden on the city fortress, or out into the river. In fact how does the wizard even get in and out of there? He’s level 7, that’s hardly enough to just teleport.
There’s also a lack of conceptual reason: We just came in from the garden, why are there three portals here? Who is expected to get through them? Also they directly lead to the treasure chamber with the best loot.Why would you put the biggest doors in the whole dungeon, leading from the local palace, directly into your treasure chambers? Ugh.
In some parts this stuff is clearly just intended to be played around with. There is a “Banner of the Undead Lords” that summons friendly undead who will try to join your party (and later backstab you). That’s… an interesting interaction at least.
By the way the “Lords” in the text is in English for no obvious reasons, and it feels rather grating. Later on we will meet more undead that will join the party, then later try to backstab the PCs. A rather slow moving trap.
There is a teleporter here that transports people who know how to use it anywhere they know. That explains how the wizard gets out of there, but not how he gets in.
Of course nobody except the GM knows that it IS in fact a teleporter.
Maybe the wizard found some old teleporter and co-opted the place? Then there might be a second dungeon somewhere else. Hmmm…
One room has a lamp that starts to glow when people are near. At the same time a gigantic demon that is sleeping under the city awakens and causes the earth to shake until they either all die or just walk past it. A bunch of graves has both another undead that wants to join them and lead them to the boat he and his men arrived in (to backstab them, you can’t trust undead), the aforementioned demon bow, but also a scroll with an elvish spell formula. The latter is something that doesn’t really happen that much in DSA where the use of scrolls is not as codified, but here we have it.
A golem starts attacking them in a hallway. It’s quite impervious to most weapons the PCs might have, but when it reaches the stairs it will stumble, fall, and shatter.
*rubs eyes* *exasperated sigh*
We meet the master of the labyrinth hiding behind the illusion of a tsunami.
He is literally called master of the labyrinth, no further name given. it seems he is a level 7 mage (seriously? The scenario is for level 5-10!) and he has a completely new spell that might make the fight difficult. (the Duplicatus, which creates illusionary duplicates of combatants).
In other words he is surprisingly weak sauce for the owner of this dungeon.
In the end we find the ship that can get us out, including the undead crew. well, unless their undead captain already tried to backstab us which causes them to turn to dust.
I mean, seriously. The only way out of the dungeon is this one boat, prepped ready to get out of the dungeon. Unless you figure out the teleporter and break the whole sequence.
Well, that is unless you fuck it up and break the boat and have to swim. Which means goodbye to loot and equipment and part 3 of the adventure. All a possibility.
Behind the area with the ship is a magic art gallery where pictures are either positive or negative, depending from which side you enter. I don’t see any point in this. The adventure even acknowledges that it doesn’t have a point and only shows that even evil mages can have a sense of humor.
But it fills 2 more pages.
Part three starts with the characters out on the river. The current is strong, so there’s no way to stop until we reach the last part of the adventure: an old tower in the mouth of the river.
With atrocious architecture.
I mean seriously.
On the top we can see the Ladifaahri tied to a wagon wheel, hanging from a gallows pole.
Because yes, we obviously just entered a video game.
The tower has three more levels. We meet a captured ogre (captured by who?!), a harpy that just wants them to piss off, and the night demon, a demon that hides in the form of a jaguar lily during day, but becomes the shape of a WINGED LEOPARD AT NIGHT!
*crickets chirping*
yeah. I expected that demon to be a bit more impressive.
So anyway. the PCs fight the demon until he feels sufficiently hit, then he flies off into the night for other people to deal with…
…so yes, after this whole mess we don’t even get to finish the boss off.
But we rescued the kobold, which might be reason enough for good amounts of money and maybe even a noble rank or two.
So… it’s a bizarre mess of a scenario. It basically strings three different smaller scenarios together, none of which is well thought out. There are some neat ideas in here, and I think this could be fun. As long as people don’t think too much about all the implications of it all
Maybe this could work if me and the players would already be drunk when playing it?
Or it might work with kids. Despite some heavy implications there is not actually anything too scary in here.
This… is not a good adventure. I know I say that a lot about the early adventures, but this one is grating in a way that is just… exasperating. I guess it can work as an adventure, but to me as a GM it feels lackluster and forced. We are not even given a proper payoff in the end, as the boss… just kind of disappears. It might be this was supposed to be a sequel hook, but canonically that didn’t happen. And I think one of the reasons this didn’t happen was because this adventure module blows.
Maybe this was supposed to be a tournament adventure. The structure would fit. But tournaments never really were a thing in the German-language hobby. I have the suspicion the author took a bit too much inspiration from that type of DnD module.
Still a better module than B4 though.
Notes
The stuff about the new spell with the mage surprised me. I had completely forgotten how limited the spell list of DSA in that time was, but yes, B6 previously had introduced spell 13 [sic!] and this one had the whole of two more spells.
The ending might have been a sequel hook, but this adventure was never really revisited. According to the later novels the demon was canonically defeated by NPCs: the sword king Raidri Conchobair (who will be introduced in A1) and the wizard Rakorium from B3/B4
in the end the heroes might end up enobled. Which never is really mentioned again, but ties in nicely with adventure A1 Die Verschwoerung von Gareth. Which also is like a quantum leap in adventure design. (but that one losely ties in with A2, which losely ties in with B13, which is why I don’t want to skip ahead too much
This adventure has versions in German, French, and Dutch. No Italian this time. Interestingly the Dutch version was published ten years after the others (in 1996), and features the trade dress of the 3rd edition.
I already talked about Black Boar in in the first entry of this series. Since then I have gone through 10 or so adventures for DSA and it turns out my view on this module has evolved. Not evolved enough to properly change my evaluation of the scenario, but I did realize what Werner Fuchs was trying to do with it. And I think he put more thought into it than I gave him credit for.
The adventure is a beginner scenario in every sense of the word. People who have been playing longer sometimes forget that, especially when they come across this legendary adventure (it is after all the first for DSA) and then notice that it is kind of meh.
But that’s ok, because what the adventure tries to do is getting people with NO ROLEPLAYING EXPERIENCE WHATSOEVER into experiencing the hobby.
And that’s why this actually is better than I thought.
Yes, the dungeon is bad.
Yes, the heroes get railroaded into the dungeon.
Yes, there is a weird assortment of enemies to deal with.
But that’s not the point. The point is to teach both players and GMs how this whole game works.
You start with basically a read aloud story. Then you get to the Inn. Only here you actually make your characters. Don’t worry about equipment because you are going to lose it immediately. You just need the stats and DSA1 chargen was simple enough for elementary schoolers.
Imprisoned in the cellar you are given an escape route through a dungeon. The game properly starts in the first dungeon room. What is the situation like?
Dark.
There’s no lights. You don’t have equipment. You can only use what they can find in the dark. How are You finding it? You have to narratively interrogate the environment with only touch, smell, and audio cues.
I don’t think this is an easy situation for the DM to deal with, after all instead of just presenting the situation as usual they are now forced to strip out all the visual cues. But it also might be good training for them.
That’s actually quite an interesting approach to the game. It makes this whole dungeon into a puzzle from the get go and allows people to learn how to deal with such a situation (a situation that might have been inspired by ADnD module A4 In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords from 1981, which starts in a similar way).
Once You get some lights and weapons there are the usual dungeon encounters, and those introduce you to some of the fantastic core concepts of the game (what are orcs? what are lizardmen? etc.), but they present players with another decision: how do they want to escape? There are multiple paths that lead to the outside, and some are harder and more rewarding (e.g. through the tower on top of the hill), some are easier but don’t have other rewards (e.g. through a cave chimney with no opposition). Players are supposed to learn to strategize here based on the information they have.
Unfortunately this flew over my head the first few times I read and ran the module, and only came to me when trying to vocalize why exactly this module felt much better than B4 (which I loathe).
Does it make the module better? Marginally so. I have been thinking of that the last few months, so the tally I have been doing at the end of my retrospectives actually reflected that. It’s still not a good module, but it’s serviceable. I think I MIGHT use it if I was introducing kids into the hobby. But I still would have to put some more thought into it.
so, #shadowrun today: this time more or less successful, although I was happy they needed to cut it shorter than planned in the end. I had calculated with them planning how to do their road trip though the council, only for them to start immediately. Unlike what I thought might happen they did not try to open the black box with the macguffin immediately. which is nice. ]#ttrpg
Grenzland #3 “Worse Things happen at Sea”Cover of Grenzland #3 Issue 3 of Wanderer Bill's Grenzland fanzine just landed in my mailbox yesterday, with, among other things, an NPC class written by me ("The Anointed of Abyssal Slaughter"). It mostly was me combining the given topic of the issue with an interest in NPC classes a while ago. The 'zine also contains a one-page dungeon by Alex Schroeder ("The Crown of Neptune"), a game report ("Schiffbruch"), rules for…https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2024/05/17/grenzland-3-worse-things-happen-at-sea/
I bought a Razer headset on a whim while in the electronics store earlier. I don't think I will do that again. To get the fuil features I paid for I had to register and give more private details than I had to give for working in one of the biggest banks of Europe. Why does an electronics company want those kind of details from me. Why do they want me to give all that to use what I already paid for?#electronics
The Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy WargamingThe Highest Level of All: The Story of Fantasy Wargaming by Mike Monaco, is a free pdf download published at CMU Press under a CC BY-NC-ND license, and dealing with the history of the eponymous (if a bit incongruously titled) Fantasy Wargaming roleplaying game system. Yes, it turns out you can write whole books not only about DnD. At least if it's something as weird as that game at least.https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2024/05/17/the-highest-level-of-all-the-story-of-fantasy-wargaming/
asked in the #irc channel and found out @ngircd does not allow interlinking of different ircds. which is a feature I thought would be quite normal to have for IRC, but it seems not. ngIRCd at least is dead simple to set up. others don't make it that easy to get a small server running.
People are entirely too trusting when it comes to #ai. Yes, this technology might, MIGHT deliver acceptable results. But people expect things from it they really shouldn't. And they definitely need someone to double check if it doesn't, you know, leave out core sections of the document they try to create.(Personally I wouldn't trust any information generated by AI)https://futurism.com/the-byte/company-sheepishly-admits-handbook-chatgpt
Thinking WarlocksJohn Faed, Warlocks and Witches in a dance (1855) I am not a fan of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. In fact I am not a fan of the 4th edition either, or the 3.5th edition, or Pathfinder (the 3.75th edition) for that matter. Actually I burned out running 3e and that was the impetus to go back to older edition, retroclones, and the OSR.https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2024/05/16/thinking-warlocks/
[…] englischsprachigen Blog Stuffed Crocodile gibt es eine weitere Rezension zu einem DSA-Klassiker. Der neue Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dem DSA1-Werk Im Wirtshaus zum […]
Stuffed Crocodile 
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[…] Note: I have revised my opinion about this scenario somewhat in the mean time. […]
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[…] englischsprachigen Blog Stuffed Crocodile gibt es eine weitere Rezension zu einem DSA-Klassiker. Der neue Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dem DSA1-Werk Im Wirtshaus zum […]
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