OW DR RY: TIA BES Descent into the Depths of the Game TSR Vol. 1: OD&D, AD&D 1e (1971-1989) by Shannon Appelcline Excerpt from Chapter 5: D1-D3 A Designers & Dragons Company Codex This article produced by Shannon Appelcline, Copyright © 2020 Designers & Dragons LLC. Designers & Dragons logo created by Daniel Solis for Evil Hat Productions, LLC, and used here with Evil Hat’s permission. This is an early draft preview. Please do not distribute. MORE PREVIEWS AT HTTPS://WWW.PATREON.COM/DESIGNERSANDDRAGONS Chapter 5: Greyhawk — Tournament Adventures (1978-1980) With a new AD&D rule system now in place, TSR was ready to start releasing adventures — except that’s not entirely true, as the majority of these adventures predated the completion of the trilogy of AD&D ruleBooks. And, TSR was ready to support Gary Gygax’s world of Greyhawk — except these adventures were mostly placed in Greyhawk retroactively. But, history is a funny thing, and these early tournament adventures are certainly recognized today as Both the first AD&D adventures and the first Greyhawk adventures. Name Type Authors Date Page G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief Adventure G. Gygax July 1978 G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Adventure G. Gygax July 1978 Jarl G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King Adventure G. Gygax July 1978 D1: Descent into the Depths of the Adventure G. Gygax August 1978 Earth D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa Adventure G. Gygax August 1978 D3: Vault of the Drow Adventure G. Gygax August 1978 S1: TomB of Horrors Adventure G. Gygax Late 1978 C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan Adventure H. Johnson, May 1979 J. R. Leason T1: The Village of Hommlet Adventure G. Gygax July 1979 S2: White Plume Mountain Adventure L. Schick August 1979 S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks Adventure G. Gygax February 1980 D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth Author: Gary Gygax Summary: high-level adventure Publication Date: August 1978 Artwork & Design The Cover. Like all of the earliest D&D adventures, this one features a monochrome cover. It’s colored orangish-brown and showcases a simple Dave Sutherland drawing of adventurers fighting troglodytes. The Maps. The Giants adventures had included very traditional maps of caverns, dungeons, and halls — exactly the sort of thing that you’d expect in classic D&D modules. Descent contains one similar map depicting a large cavern system, but it also includes some very unique maps that are unlike anything else produced for D&D, before or after. They show how the designers were still experimenting with graphic design, and how the whole game could have gone in very different directions. That begins with a “large scale map” that depicts nearly 2,000 square miles of caverns on a hex grid. It’s a rather peculiar hex map because it doesn’t label the individual hexes, but instead marks numbers at the top and bottom of the map and letters off to the left. (The result is pretty hard to read.) This map looks like it should support the biggest Underdark hex crawl ever, prefiguring wilderness adventures like X1: The Isle of Dread (1981). Instead, the encounters in Descent are mostly constrained to just four of those hexes. How do you provide tactical maps for such large-scale adventuring? Descent offers an answer for that too: it contains a set of four generic maps of tunnels and caverns that could be used in various orientations for specific encounters. It was sort of a reinvention of TSR’s Dungeon Geomorphs (1976-1977), but on a smaller scale. Origins & Other Stories I: More Origins of Tournaments. Gen Con D&D tournaments dated back to at least Gen Con VIII (1975), when Rob Kuntz ran “Sunken City”. However, the modern D&D tournament, with a focus on small groups running through multiple rounds of play, was instead initiated by Bob Blake, a member of a central Indiana gaming group called the Valparaiso University D&D Society. In his first tournament, at Gen Con IX (1976), twenty groups of five players competed. Blake also ran the tournament at Gen Con X (1977) and later saw both adventures published by Judges Guild as Gen Con IX Dungeon (1976, 1978) and Of Skulls and Scrapfaggot Green (1977, 1979). In 1978, TSR was playing with the idea of publishing tournaments too. That July they ran the three-part giants tournament at Origins ’78 (1978) and then immediately recouped their costs by producing the tournaments as the “G” Giants adventures (1978). It was a great model, and one that TSR could easily repeat. With TSR also being asked to run other tournaments, such as the adventure that became S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (1978) for WinterCon V (1976), it was clearly to their benefit to dovetail their idea of instantly available tournament adventures with Bob Blake’s own Gen Con work. II: The Descent Tournaments. The Descent tournaments repeated TSR’s publication trick from Origins ’78 at Gen Con XI (1978). Blake ran a multipart descent-into-the-earth tournament, then TSR immediately released three related adventures: D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1978), D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa (1978), and D3: Vault of the Drow (1978). Curiously, the first of those published adventures, Descent, wasn’t actually used in the tournament! Instead, the rounds of the tournament were all based on the latter two adventures — entirely excluding the first module’s bridge to the giants adventures and its introduction of the underground realms. III: Time for Another Break. So where did the new Descent adventures come from? Gary Gygax wrote them because he was “sick of writing AD&D rules”. For him, writing adventures was a “relaxation”, that was “almost as fun as playing”. The work on the descent series began after Gygax completed the AD&D Players Handbook (1978) and before he started the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (1979) — which once more meant that the rules for these adventures weren’t actually completed! IV: The Rest of the Con. What else was going on at Gen Con XI? The Dragon #15 (June 1978) reveals some specifics. TSR was pushing Gamma World (1978), which had been released at Origins, and the Players Handbook (1978), which was officially released that Gen Con. There was a Dungeon! (1975) championship as well as beginners’ D&D events run by J. Eric Holmes. They were also war game tournaments, showing the origins of the hobby. Sources & Tropes Design Trope: Railroad or SandBox? With that huge hex map, Descent could have been TSR’s first big sandbox adventure, allowing players to explore a vast locale as they saw fit. Using the large-scale map, GMs could have run years of adventures in the Underdark. In fact, Gygax did have some notes for places that didn’t make their way into the descent adventures. However, he never fully developed them because his players weren’t that interested in delving into “the depths of the Earth”. Instead, Descent is a bit of a railroad. The players are directed down a single path as they follow the fleeing drow from the Giants adventures. If they stay on track they’ll have two small encounters (with drow and mind flayers) then one big encounter (in a lair ruled by drow and troglodytes) over the course of the adventure. That troglodyte lair is a pretty classic locale-based (cavern) adventure, making it the exception to Descent’s railroad. World of Adventure Introducing the Underdark. The most historic element of Descent is certainly the fact that it introduces the Underdark, a civilized land beneath the Earth (Oerth). Sort of. The Underdark name isn’t used here; that instead originates in the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide (1986). And, the lands in this first adventure aren’t that civilized: the troglodyte lair could just as easily have been a cave of chaos. But, the potential is all here, particularly in that large-scale map. It would blossom in the next two adventures in this series. Exploring Greyhawk. Descent is a Greyhawk adventure, set deep beneath the surface. Because of its underground location, it doesn’t offer very strong ties to the rest of the setting — though years later Chris Pramas would refer to the drow of these adventures when he linked them to another drow society in western Oerik as part of the background for the Chainmail Miniatures Game (2001). The Creature Compendium Underdark Races. The famous monsters of the Underdark begin to gel in this adventure, which features both drow and mind flayers. Gygax also introduces a new monster, the jermlaine, which he invented as an “older version” of the gremlin. Finally, Descent also includes TSR’s first lich in an adventure: Asberdies, who has cast 600 magic mouth spells to protect the location of his treasure. Related Books • For the rest of the descent adventures, see D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa (1978) and D3: Vault of the Drow (1978). • For a later compilation of this adventure, see D1-2: Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1981). • For the new AD&D game, still in progress, see Monster Manual (1977), Players Handbook (1978), and Dungeon Masters Guide (1979). • For the first true hex crawl, see X1: The Isle of Dread (1981). • For the original geomorphs, see Dungeon Geomorphs, Set One: Basic Dungeon (1977), Dungeon Geomorphs, Set Two: Caves & Caverns (1977), Dungeons Geomorphs, Set Three: Lower Dungeon (1977), and Outdoor Geomorphs, Set One: Walled City (1977). • For the emergence of the Underdark, see the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide (1986). • For the future of the Greyhawk Underdark, see Chainmail Miniatures Game (2001).