Time for the latest compilation of old school Dungeons & Dragons threads; all of the compilations can be found in my Dungeons & Dragons blog tag. I’ve been more in a mood to do these posts on Bluesky, so this post came pretty quickly after the last one.

Fantastic Personalities (1981), by Bill Paley and Edward R.G. Mortimer. Back in the day, there were a lot more gaming supplements focusing on teaching inexperienced people how to play the game better!

Judges’ Guild was the second best RPG publisher back in the early days of D&D, and they published adventures, campaign settings, and gaming supplements. Fantastic Personalities is a collection of 85 non-player characters to be used to spice up any campaign! Let’s look at a few…

First we have a female monk, worshipper of the Egyptian god Thoth, on a quest to deliver a book to a temple. She avoids killing intelligent beings except for hobgoblins, who killed her father.

One of the quirkiest comes up in the book early: Lola Redstar, a woman from a science fiction setting whose space-car accidentally crashed through a dimensional portal and left her stranded in a fantasy setting. She now is on the lookout for a wizard who can send her home.

Characters appear of all levels and all backgrounds, such as this Eastern warrior on the hunt for a family heirloom stolen by pirates. Many of the characters have really nice adventure hooks like this.

There are often funny little details snuck into the character descriptions, like this one for Mikhail, who is looking for the perfect woman to marry. “Needless to say, he may be looking for a very long time.”

The backstories are quite well done for the era, such as this bard who was trapped in the Abyss for a while and now has a grudge against demons and devils.

Characters range from newbie adventurers to ancient and powerful lords; in the latter, we have this elven lord who has been searching for ages for his kidnapped lady love. (Another great adventure hook!)

There are also a few random full page illustrations; I particularly fancied this female magic user with power crackling all around her (and apparently through her hair).

There are also lots of evil characters, like this murderous thief worshipper of Loki. The characters not surprisingly for the era usually fail the Bechdel test and are described in terms of relationships with men (like Tina here murdering all of her male lovers).

I really do enjoy the creative backstories of the characters. Redti here was struck by lightning at an early age and now has a vendetta against anyone using lightning powers, including worshippers of Thor.

These characters are designed specifically for Judges’ Guild products, and refer to lots of their campaign settings and the Unknown Gods supplement for deities.

This sort of supplement isn’t very common anymore; they were much more popular in the early days of D&D when role-playing was a novel and quite unknown concept! It is fun to look back at the creativity of those early authors though.

King’s Festival (1989), by Carl Sargent. Sometimes an adventure I had never really heard of before manages to surprise me in a good way!

According to Drive-Thru RPG, this adventure was an effort to revise the “Basic” line of D&D, which had largely been supplanted by Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

This was the first TSR product written by Carl Sargent, who had previously done lots of classic Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay products like the super cool Warhammer City.

King’s Festival is a true “basic” adventure, written with almost a majority of the text describing how to run D&D and play it! There is an overview of roleplaying in general and lots of helpful tips along the way. And all encounter areas have lots of explanation of how to run them!

The adventure itself is straightforward: the characters come to town to attend the King’s Festival, but while they’re sleeping the town temple is attacked by orcs and the head priest is kidnapped! The characters must venture to the orcs’ lair to perform a rescue.

The adventure includes pre-rolled characters to get players started quickly; these character sheets include tips from the character’s mentors to help the player play well, a nice touch!

The dungeon itself is very simple: two levels, lots of rectangular rooms and corridors that make it easy to map (because back in the day the DM would only tell us what the rooms looked like and we had to draw the maps ourselves).

In Level 1, the PCs fight the way through the orc brigands and finally tackle the chief of the brigands and his magic-user advisor!

After rescuing the Priest, the characters learn of a secret second level filled with evil! They fight their way through undead to find an evil cleric guarded by zombies at the end!

Killing the cleric leads to a cryptic note leading to an even greater evil, which can be investigated in the follow-up adventure B12: Queen’s Harvest!

It is a really simple and straightforward adventure, but I have a great fondness for it because of how user friendly it is and how well organized it is! It may not have revitalized basic D&D, but it is about as good an introductory adventure as one could imagine.

To Find a King (1985), by Bob Blake. Let’s follow up with another adventure with “king” in the title!

This was one of the RPGA (Role-Playing Game Association) tournaments run at GenCon that got turned into a published adventure. The original tournament had 8 parts, 4 of which are published here, focusing on investigating a prophecy of a new righteous king!

The first part is a highly linear wilderness hike. It has some painfully outdated tropes, such as the characters being rescued by “gypsies” and finding some of their valuable items have been pilfered.

I get the feeling that TSR just didn’t care too much about the RPGA adaptations. I did a doubletake the first time I read this insane mistake in the printing: the players encounter a pair of Mountain GIANTS, but that is not how it is described at the page bottom!

In the second part of the tournament, the PCs must travel and negotiate with a powerful lord for a set of keys that will unlock an objective to fulfill the prophecy. The lord is pretty unscrupulous, however, and sells the keys to evil-doers before the party arrives, leading to a pursuit.

One fun part of this section is that the PCs can get ambushed by the evil part at a landslide if they pursue directly; if they “head them off at the pass,” they can be the ones doing the ambush here!

In part 3 of the adventure, the PCs must infiltrate a lair of bugbears to steal a magical artifact that is key to the prophecy. This includes painful tribal stereotypes like this bugbear witch doctor.

In the final part of the adventure, the PCs travel to an immortal druid to gain a potion to bring a beloved old king back to life. The druid has gained immortality by turning himself into a stone head! The PCs have to answer 3 traditional riddles to earn the potion.

To Find a King shows that not all classic adventures are winners! This one is very by the numbers. It works as a tournament for a convention but is quite uninspiring for a regular campaign. Nevertheless, TSR would publish the second part, The Bane of Llywelyn, a month later.

Caverns of Thracia (1979), by Jennell Jaquays. This one is a true classic, albeit one that even a lot of gamers might not be familiar with!

Judges Guild was a company founded in 1976 to produce D&D supplementary materials, and for a few years had official approval from TSR to do so! They ended up producing a surprising number of quality products, including two classic adventures by Jaquays.

Like in all her products, Jaquays drew much of the art herself, illustrations that were of great quality for that era of D&D.

The Caverns of Thracia were remarkably thought out, as a history given in the book indicates. Not showing all of it here, but it involves a race of lizard men who predated humanity and the subsequent takeover of the area by various factions, all of which still have some sort of presence.

The caverns are also quite large — there are four full levels plus a half level consisting of a forbidden temple and some surface ruins — arguably 5 levels total!

One thing that really stood out to me reading this book today is the humor: Jaquays adds a lot of subtle wit throughout the book, making it fun to read beyond just prepping for the adventure, like the rumor table titled “The Taverns of Thracia.”

The adventure is very nonlinear — many ways to enter and explore the various levels — and there are lots of nice Jaquays-exclusive twists. One that is fantastic is a spectral Incarnation of Death that appears in a temple to the death god Thanatos to any character that is gravely injured.

Did I mention the humor? Even the names of rooms in sequences have a lightheartedness to them.

One thing that Jaquays in known for is encounters that are unforgiving for the careless adventurer! In this snippet, a chest is protected by a spectral mouth that, if not slain quickly, will reappear again and again, stronger each time.

One really neat twist is that the adventurers can revive an original Thracian warrior who has been in stasis for thousands of years! She can prove a valuable ally… if the players can figure out how to communicate with her, since she speaks no modern language.

The third level is probably the highlight of the caverns, a complete underground forest and palace, filled with trees protected by dryads. The map itself is just lovely.

There are some lovely nasty tricks around. There are a series of water basins that can be used to summon a water elemental and/or teleport any creature anywhere in the caverns. The Minotaur King can use the basins to surprise attack the adventurers with a water elemental anywhere!

Before wrapping up, I have to highlight one more little joke in the dungeon. “The Shadow Knows.”

Jennell Jaquays died suddenly in 2024 at age 67. I knew her as an “internet friend” through Bluesky and Twitter and I think all RPG fans were struck by the loss. But the Caverns of Thracia live on, having been revised for 5e D&D and Dungeon Crawl Classics!

Well that’s it for today’s round up of old school D&D! Hopefully more to come soon…