I have been rather distracted for a few months and haven’t had much time to do old school Dungeons & Dragons threads on social media, but I’m working my way back into the habit! Here’s a compilation of the four most recent threads I did about classic D&D products.

Dark Sun (1991), by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning. This is a big one: probably the most innovative and ambitious campaign setting that TSR introduced into Dungeons & Dragons, and one that also introduced innovative play mechanics.

Dark Sun was a massive entirely new campaign for 2nd edition D&D, describing a barren world ravaged by the careless use of magic. It is a bleak setting, primitive and dangerous. The box contained a rule book and a campaign book, an adventure, and a map.

The rules introduced new player races, as well as versions of the traditional races warped by the brutality and danger of the world. Elves, for example, are shifty and fast traders who wander the desert.

Half-giants are introduced as a player option, and they are of course extremely powerful and tough, but limited in intelligence due to their magical crossbreeding with giants.

Giants have an additional quirk: they are known to change their attitudes regularly. To reflect this, one half of a giant’s alignment is fixed (for example, “Lawful”) and the other half is chosen anew every day (like “good,” “neutral,” or “evil.”)

And halflings? They’re practically feral!

Players may also play half-dwarf, half-human breeds, known as “Muls.” They are strong and have incredible endurance, and are often used as worker slaves for their durability. (Slavery is one aspect of the setting that has gotten more awkward as time has passed.)

Another new race to play is the Thri-Kreen, insectoids obsessed with the hunt! They are also known for their fondness for eating elves, making the races seriously at odds with each other.

Dark Sun brought some significant rules changes. For example, all PCs start at 3rd level! This is said to be due to the harshness of the world…

The world of Dark Sun is in ruins due to magic-users known as “Defilers,” who leach power from the land but do not replace it. Defilers can level up faster than Preservers, and it is typically an evil path.

Another more or less evil character option are the Templars, who are clerics who gain their power from the ancient sorcerer kings who rule the surviving cities on Athlas. Regular clerics can also be played, who worship one of the elements.

Adding to the power of PCs on Athas is that all characters have some latent psionic ability. One can also play a dedicated psionicist, who is the mental power version of a wizard.

Metal is scarce on Athas, and ceramic pieces tend to be used as currency. Much of the exploration of ruins is motivated by finding metal to be made into weapons.

The world of Athas is detailed in The Wanderer’s Journal, and much of it is a merciless desert, reaching perhaps 150 F in the day and dropping to freezing at night.

All the biggest cities on Athas are ruled by corrupt Sorcerer Kings, who are almost always powerful defilers and who rule with an iron fist over their subjects.

The middle of the known part of Athas is a sea! But it is a Sea of Silt, which can be waded through but which one can easily “drown” in. The Sea of Silt holds many islands with ruins that can be explored.

The large full-color map of Athas shows the known parts of the world, plus a hint of some more lush — and dangerous — areas that lie beyond treacherous mountains.

Adventures were given a (temporary) new style in Dark Sun — an introductory short story, plus two flip books, one for the Dungeon Master and one with illustrations for the PCs. This radical restructuring of adventure books would only be matched by the extreme changes introduced in 4th edition D&D — and would prove just as unpopular.

Personally, I never quite got into Dark Sun. The world was a little too bleak, and it wasn’t clear what, exactly, PCs should be doing in the world! This apparently became more clear in later released adventures.

Treasury of Archaic Names (1979), by Bill Owen. This is one of the unusual but remarkably good supplements that came out in the early days of D&D!

Judges Guild produced supplements for Dungeons and Dragons, and produced some of the most impressive non-TSR gaming products at the time. This particular product is exactly what it says: a collection of medieval type names for quick use!

This includes male and female names, nicknames, surnames, place names, and guidelines for making up your own names!

Perhaps my favorite part is the nicknames list: you can randomly choose a nickname to go with a name, e.g. Bungling Bill!

There is even a list of archaic nicknames, like “Quachehand,” i.e “Shaky Hand,” and “Zouch,” i.e. “Slovenly Man.”

The book also includes guidelines for generating your own style of names, with an example from the author that he used for generating zombie names. He imagined a class of semi-intelligent zombies who have simple, three-letter names.

The Treasury of Archaic Names is representative of a past era, when information on names was not readily available on the internet! Nevertheless, it is still great to have such information available even today, in one compact collection.

Pinnacle (1986), by Dan Greenberg. Every once in a while, I come across an obscure vintage product that is an unexpected delight!

Pinnacle is another in Mayfair Games’ Role Aids line of D&D supplements, produced without any approval from TSR because lawyers said they could get away with it! The Role Aids adventures vary in quality dramatically, but many of them are surprisingly excellent, but largely unknown today.

The title doesn’t even give a hint of the craziness of the adventure, though the back cover, in the form of an official letter, does. The characters are invited by the Gentlemen’s Adventuring Society to join in a race to the top of an unclimbable peak, with a 100,000 GP prize!

Before I get into the intrigue, let me show the innovative hex grid map of the mountain, basically a vertical dungeon of different terrain types and regions where special encounters can happen.

You might ask: why don’t adventurers just fly to the top? Well, this particular peak has anti-magic spirits swirling about it that will knock any magical flight out of the air. And there’s a reason those spirits are there, and that gets to the twists of the story…

Decades earlier, an assassins guild joined forces with an alchemist to produce perfect golem-like assassins called Shaken, and they succeeded ten years ago, with a secret they found at the mountain peak. The pinnacle of the mountain contains a portal to the world of the Andine, a powerful magical class of beings. One Andine stayed behind in hibernation to protect the portal, and was found by the assassins and his blood is used to create the Shaken! The assassins used to be opposed by a group of paladins called The Order of Gold, but the group was slaughtered down to a single man by the Shaken. This survivor, now incognito, has arranged the race up the mountain to uncover the assassins!

What makes the adventure so fun is the large amount of intrigue in it. To start, the PCs all have local contacts in the area that they can talk to do get intel before the official race begins. The contacts list are tailored to pregenerated PCs, but can be adapted to any group.

There are also the rival teams to contend with, each of which is detailed and has its own plans (and cheats). Each team, for example, is given a colored pyrotechnic arrow to launch from the pinnacle to prove their victory, but Sire Fribben has replaced all the arrows with his blue ones!

And the Shaken themselves will try to kill the PCs at the celebration before the race! One will teleport into the big party cake before it is cut, and will leap out to attack! (Though the image more shows him crawling.)

Role Aids products never earned the same prominence as TSR D&D products; even today, as you can see in my cover photo, I bought this for $12, below the original cover price! But Pinnacle is a surprisingly fun and clever adventure with lots of twists.

The Apocalypse Stone (2000), by Carl and Pramas. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and… your players will probably feel pretty angry!

The Apocalypse Stone is one of two end-of-the-world adventures released by Wizards of the Coast to explain and rationalize the major rules changes that would be coming with D&D’s third editions. The other adventure was Die Vecna Die!

This was not the first time that D&D used adventures to explain rules changes. In going from 1st edition AD&D to 2nd edition, TSR released two adventures to commemorate the transition, and in particular explain why classes like Assassins had been removed.

The Forgotten Realms had the “Avatar” trilogy of modules, which involved all the gods being banished to the mortal realm for a time. The God of Death was himself murdered, thus explaining the end of Assassins.

To go from 2nd to 3rd edition, Die Vecna Die! (which I’ve talked about before) is an amazing dimension-hopping adventure in which Vecna seeks to become greater than a god. It is set in the Greyhawk realm, however, so WotC provided a “generic” The Apocalypse Stone adventure.

The adventure amounts to playing a dirty trick on the players. An object called the Stone of Corbinet has long served as the foundation of reality, guarded by a loyal family. Now an outcast from that family tricks the characters into stealing the stone, setting the end of the world in motion. The trick is to make the characters think they’ve won by acquiring the Stone and passing it to someone they think is divine, and then let them play another adventure before the world starts to come apart, with hideous monsters like the classic kaiju-like Tarrasque rampaging.

The PCs learn that they have been instrumental in bringing about the apocalypse, and must prove themselves worthy of righting their wrong to the gods, before entering a final epic battle for the stone! They can be helped by a repentant Death Knight along the way.

In one of the most horrific twists, a major devil had his plans interrupted by the removal of the Stone, and he takes personal revenge on the PCs, killing their loved ones and stitching them together as horrific flesh golems!

The adventure offers the option for the DM of letting the PCs save the world as it is, save the world but have it irrevocably changed, or have the world end! It also provides rules for players to be punished for their mistake by being turned into Death Knights themselves.

Overall, it’s hard to imagine a group of players not being quite ticked off by the trick. It’s one thing to trick the players, it’s quite another to have that trick be the literal end of the world. A DM would have to have a very special group for this to not make folks angry, I think.

Tricks like this aren’t impossible, though. One of my favorite modern RPG adventures is the classic Death Frost Doom (2009), in which the PCs will likely release a very powerful evil. The adventure is so great, though, because it doesn’t manipulate players into doing it — they will likely just do it without thinking.

The Apocalypse Stone isn’t as fondly remembered as Die Vecna Die!, probably partly because it is overall a straightforward adventure and partly because it is hard to beat the magnificence of the latter adventure!

PS The Apocalypse Stone isn’t the first adventure to explicitly bring about the apocalypse! The Role Aids box set Apocalypse, released in 1993, also provides a way to end a campaign world in spectacular fashion. That same year, TSR sued Mayfair Games for trademark violation, and though they largely won the court case, Mayfair ended up selling the Role Aids line to TSR a few years later. It’s not clear if The Apocalypse Stone was inspired by Role Aids, but it’s plausible.

That’s it for this edition! I have lots of other classic old school D&D products to discuss!