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).

D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa Author: Gary Gygax Summary: high-level adventure Publication Date: August 1978 Artwork & Design The Cover. D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa featured one of TSR’s early monochrome covers. It was green. Origins & Other Stories I: Same ‘Ole, Same ‘Ole. Shrine features the same origins as the other descent adventures: it was written by Gary Gygax while taking a break from AD&D; it was run as the official tournament at Gen Con XI, supported by Bob Blake; and it was immediately released as a print adventure. It appears that Shrine was the first round of the tournament. Sources & Tropes Game Tropes: Tournaments, Scoring. Bob Blake believed in objectively scoring tournaments. In The Dragon #19 (October 1978), he explained some of the criteria he used to score Shrine. Anyone who passed through the shrine, pressing forward in the hunt for the drow, received points. However, the most points went to parties that pursued the “perfect” path, which appears to have involved moving nonviolently through the Shrine. Points were also awarded for slaying kuo-toa and for surviving the experience. Design Trope: Gygaxian Naturalism. Shrine is a much more impressive adventuring locale than those previously detailed by TSR and that’s in large part due to its Gygaxian Naturalism. Shrine depicts an entire society of kuo-toa, centered around their eponymous shrine. It’s not only a more coherent and mature location than the somewhat random collection of monsters found in the troglodyte lair in Descent, but it’s also the first complete adventure from TSR that players might not just fight their way through — though there were some minor examples in the Giants adventures, where players might have made common cause with the rebellious orcs in G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (1978) or with the rival drow in G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King (1978). All of these Naturalist ideas — of building civilizations and creating locales that could support more than just hacking and slashing — would become even more important in D3: Vault of the Drow (1978). Design Trope: Railroad or Sandbox? Shrine exactly matches the format of D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1978): it railroads players through two short encounters, then continues onto a much longer locale-based adventure that takes up the bulk of the book. Worlds of Adventure Exploring Greyhawk. Like its predecessor, Shrine is lightly set in (beneath) the world of Greyhawk … but you can barely tell (except for the development implicit in this underground realm). Exploring the Underdark. Shrine shows the potential of the primordial Underdark by depicting a (small) civilization. The Creature Compendium Kuo-Toa. Gygax created the kuo-toa because he wanted another non-human race for the Underdark, to complement the drow and mind flayers. He says he made them “out of whole cloth”, which probably means that any similarity to H.P. Lovecraft’s deep ones was not intentional. (At TSR, Rob Kuntz was the big Lovecraft fan, not Gary Gygax.) They would join the drow and the minflayers from Descent as a standard race of the Underdark. Svirfneblin. Gygax created the svirfneblin, or “deep gnomes”, because he was tired of “basically good gnomes hanging around”. The svirfneblin were instead gnomes that could “give a party some major headaches”. They also referenced gnomes’ classic depiction as earth elementals because they had earth elemental summoning abilities of their own. They would become another standard Underdark race. The Rogues Gallery Blibdoolpoolp. For the first time ever, D&D players are given the chance to meet a god: Blibdoolpoolp, the Sea Mother of the kuo-toa. Notably, Gygax includes no stats for the Sea Mother: PCs are unable to fight her, which is quite different from the direction that D&D would move with the release of Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits (1980). As for the strange name: Gygax says that it was “onomatopoeic”, meant to remind players of “the sound of large drops of water falling into a pool, and splashing in general”. Related Books • For the rest of the descent adventures, see D1: Descent into the Depths of the Earth (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).

D3: Vault of the Drow Author: Gary Gygax Summary: high-level adventure Publication Date: August 1978 Artwork & Design The Book. At 24 pages, D3: Vault of the Drow was the longest D&D adventure to date. The Cover. Like all of the early D&D adventures, Vault was published with a monochromatic cover, in its case purple. The topic of the cover is somewhat surprising, because it shows a sacrifice upon Lolth’s altar. This of course recalls the controversial cover to Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry (1976), but a lack of nudity probably made this one less problematic. Vault was revamped with a blue-framed full-color cover in a second printing (1981). Origins & Other Stories I: Same ‘Ole, Same ‘Ole. The origins of Vault match the rest of the descent series, which were all created by Gary Gygax, run as tournaments at Gen Con XI (1978), and promptly sold as adventures. Vault was used as the basis of the second and third rounds of the Gen Con XI tournament. The exact dividing point isn’t obvious, but it is known that the second round of the tournament resulted in TPKs for everyone but the winning team due to “a horrible encounter with a demon.” II: Getting High. Gygax ran Vault around four times prior to the tournament: for his Lake Geneva group and for playtesters. The reaction of his Geneva group, which now included some TSR employees, was perhaps the most amusing: they “took one look around and made haste to get away”. Surprisingly, Vault was one of few high-level adventures that Gygax ever ran, demonstrating how very different his intent was from how D&D was being played. Gygax said: “All of my players retired their PCs from general play when those characters reached the mid-teens in level.” III: The Missing Adventures. Vault references the next adventure in this ongoing sequence, “Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits”. Gygax had a plan for it but he would never write it. Instead, it would appear two years later by a different author and with a different plot. Gygax also would have liked to write more adventures in this area. He hoped to use the drow “as villainous antagonists in many an adventure into the fastness of the Underdark” and many years later said that expanding the drow city of Erelhei-Cinlu would be one of his top choices for a return to D&D (with the other being revealing what might lie beneath the Temple of Elemental Evil). Sadly, none of this came to pass. IV: The First Upgrade. A few years down the line, TSR would compile the first five “G” and “D” adventures into G1-2-3: Against the Giants (1981) and D1-2: Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1981). Vault got reprinted at the same time, but it was big enough that no such compilation was necessary! The new edition of Vault is largely identical to the original, other than some artwork changes: the sacrificial cover by Dave Sutherland has been replaced by an Erol Otus piece depicting Eclavdra Eilservs and her tentacle rod. Additional pieces were added on the interior and back cover. Sources & Tropes City Tropes: Infiltration. After five volumes of dungeon, hall, and cavern crawls, Vault offered something totally different (and totally new for D&D): the infiltration of a city. Certainly, this sort of infiltration was possible to a minor extent in G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (1978), but in Vault it’s pretty much the whole story. The players must sneak around an evil city, investigate clues, and figure out what to do within. As Gygax said, it required skills like “big-time roleplay” and “bribery”, “threat”, or “whatever”. Design Tropes: Sandbox. More generally, Vault is a huge sandbox. There’s no indication of what players should do once they get to the city, and this has caused quite a bit of confusion among players of this adventure. Eclavdra, the quarry of the previous adventures, has almost no presence in this one, and instead the focus turns to the foes of her house in the Fane of Lolth — which has led a generation of casual readers to believe that Lolth was the instigator of the Giants adventures rather than Eclavdra and her Elder Elemental God. Worlds of Adventure Exploring Greyhawk: Erelhei-Cinlu. The adventure is an extensive description of the drow city of Erelhei-Cinlu, hidden deep beneath Greyhawk. It also hints at an adventure out onto the Sunless Sea. Sadly, this would be nearly the last appearance of these evocative locales, other than a few magazine appearances: Wolfgang Baur would reveal another civilization upon the Sunless Sea in “Kingdom of the Ghouls” for Dungeon #70 (September/October, 1998) while Erelhei-Cinlu itself would be revisited in “Vault of the Drow” by Monte Cook for Dragon #298 (August, 2002). The Creature Compendium Drow. Of course, the drow were the background foes in the Giants adventures (1978) and starting with G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King (1978), they became a more active force, bedeviling the players throughout the descent adventures (1978) until they land in their home city of Erelhei-Cinlu. Now, the new demihuman race finally takes center stage. So where did the drow come from? Gygax apparently found the word “drow” with a definition of “dark elf” in some book. Back in 1979, he credited either Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828) or Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth (1691-1692, 1815). Much later, he said that he found the word in an “old unexpurgated dictionary”. The exact source remains unclear today, as the word was not actually in any widespread use. Many researchers suggest that Gygax stumbled upon the word “trow” from the Orkney and Shetland islands, which does indeed have a variant “drow” and itself is derived from “troll”. However, if the drow are drawn from Anglo-Saxon lore, they could alternatively be descended from the Svartálfaheimr — the dark elves of Norse mythology. Whatever the source of the name, Gygax then proceeded to create a race of his own, who finally get more extensive details in Vault: we learn that their city is arranged into Houses that are at odds with each other and also discover the importance of the spidery religion of Lolth. And it’s made more obvious than ever that the drow are evil. Gygax would later express amazement at the number of people who wanted to play drow, since he’d done his best to make them irredeemable — though he acknowledged that maybe only 99% were evil. Ironically, Gygax wrote about a non-evil drow of his own: Leda, in the Gord the Rogue novels (1985-1988), who was a clone of Eclavdra(!). But the most important question about the drow was left unanswered in Vault, and so players spent the next decade arguing whether drow should be pronounced like “bow” or “bough”. Fortunately, Frank Mentzer compiled a pronunciation guide in Dragon #93 (January 1985) where he said: “drow, or dro”. OK, maybe that’s not so helpful. The Rogues Gallery Eclavdra Eilservs. The players chase Eclavdra all the way back to Erelhei-Cinlu, and then she largely disappears into her house’s estate. At the least, Vault presents her whole story: that her house tried to become monarchs in Erelhei-Cinlu, causing the priestess of Lolth to turn again them. In turn, house Eilservs turned to the Elder Elemental God and attempted to mostly his worship to a puppet kingdom aboveground. After this adventure, Eclavdra largely appeared in novels, starting with Gygax’s Gord novels. She appropriately makes an appearance in the Against the Giants novel (1999), where she is killed. Elder Elemental God. Like Eclavdra, the Elder Elemental God largely disappears in this final descent adventure. There is another EEG temple, but it’s just a copy of the one found in Hall of the Fire Giant King. With that said, there’s one puzzle related to the Elder Elemental God that is just about invisible because it was never explained. The web of Lolth contains four strange items: “an iron pyramid, a silver sphere, a bronze star of eight points, and a cube of pale blue”. They’re said to be for Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits and indeed become teleportation key there, but that wasn’t Gygax’s original intent.

Gygax has another try in T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985) where the four icons are explicitly linked to the elements: an earth pyramid, an air circle, a fiery star, and a water square. It appears that the objects were meant to free the Elder Elemental God from imprisonment — but they were never used for such in each Queen of the Demonweb Pits or The Temple of Elemental Evil, probably due to Gygax’s lack of late involvement in either. Lolth. Instead, we get a major appearance by a new god, Lolth. She’s introduced as the main god of the drow, and somewhat surprisingly, she’s hanging around in the dungeons under Erelhei-Cinlu. As such, she’s the first god (or at least demon lord) that D&D players could officially kill (or at least banish). In later years, Lolth has been very popular, and the Elder Elemental God has been all but forgotten, so apparently Eclavdra’s plot really didn’t work out. 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 reinvention of these adventures, see GDQ1-7: Queen of the Spiders (1987). • For the emergence of drow as a player race, see Unearthed Arcana (1985). • For a far-future reference to the drow of the Vault, see Chainmail Miniatures Game (2001). • For other drow cities, see Menzoberranzan (1992) and Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue (2012). • For another Elder Elemental God appearance that didn’t really happen, see T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985) and for his revelation as something else entirely, see Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (2001). • For another temple to Lolth, see the largely unknown Assault on the Fane of Lolth (2005). • For the continuation of this story (sort of), see Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits (1980). • For TSR’s next adventure, see S1: Tomb of Horrors (1978).