The last
time this adventure saw light of day was in 1981, when it
made TSR history by being released and recalled in a single
day. Few of the many, many gamers who played through the familiar
"green cover" version of the module by Tom Moldvay
and Jean Wells ever realized that there had been an earlier,
suppressed "orange cover" version by Jean Wells
alone -- the version now being posted here. For years the
few copies that evaded the recall have fetched high prices
at auction or in the Dealers Room at Gen Con,
typically sold shrink-wrapped so that the potential buyer
could never compare it with the more readily available version.
But it has never been accessible to the average gamer -- until
now.
A
Piece of TSR History
Coming
smack in the middle of the early classics of the D&D
beginner series, after B1. In Search of the Unknown
and B2. Keep on the Borderlands, and before B4. The
Lost City and B5. Horror on the Hill, this module
is unique in that it was the first TSR adventure by a female
designer. The early eighties was a time of enormous expansion
for the game. According to one TSR veteran, Wells hiring
was a deliberate attempt by Gary Gygax to expand beyond the
all-male perspective that had dominated the design department
for the companys first eight years -- no doubt with
an eye toward attracting a female market to match the burgeoning
youth market the game had already tapped. And, in fact, if
one exempts the original version of "Rahasia"(1),
Wells module is the earliest written by a woman in our
industry (2).
Objectionable
Art
Why then,
of all the modules TSR put out in its glory days, did only
this one see a recall? The answer lies in the art. Apparently
when the adventure was distributed to the staff at the TSR
offices, one of the senior executives flipped through his
copy and hit the roof. Not only did he order the copies already
sent out to stores recalled, but that night he or a member
of his staff went through the employees cubes and removed
all the personal copies handed out earlier that day. Only
the few copies belonging to employees who had taken them home
that night escaped the confiscation. The rest ended up in
a Lake Geneva, Wisc., landfill, along with all the copies
TSR could reclaim from those already shipped out.
What was
so objectionable? Take a look at the illustration on page
9, titled "The Illusion of the Decapus." A woman
tied by her own hair, being menaced by nine men who threaten
her with knives while tearing off bits of her clothing, is
hardly wholesome, but rather mild by TSRs standards.
After all, it pales in comparison with the cover of 1976s
Eldritch Wizardry (a nude woman tied down to a sacrificial
altar), or the various bits of actual female nudity in the
hardcover Deities & Demigods rulebook (1980, just
the year before), not to mention the various bare-breasted
illos of harpies, mermaids, and even witches that had appeared
in various D&D rulebooks over the year.
Perhaps
it was a matter of context. After all, Deities & Demigods
was part of the ADVANCED Dungeons & Dragons
line, whereas D&D itself and the "B"
line in particular were theoretically targeted at a somewhat
younger audience. (In practice, most gamers made little distinction
between the two, typically playing AD&D and adapting
the D&D modules to those rules.)
Whatever
the reason, this illustration is not the only one cut from
the revised version. Both the picture of the tinkers
wagon (page 6) and the PCs in an inn (page 7) were cut when
the corresponding text was deleted. The picture of the chained
wolf (page 11) was replaced by a more dramatic one of a downed
PC trying to keep the same wolf from tearing out his throat
(Wells-Moldvay page 28). The scene with Travis (page 15) was
replaced by a smaller, characterless one (W-M page 20), while
the fighting swords (page 17) and "ubues at home"
scene (page 19, by the inimitable Erol Otus) thankfully vanished
along with the monsters it illustrated.
Other
illos survived but were reduced in size (page 13) or cropped
-- see page 20, where the statuette of a woman was replaced
by that of a dragon or, more interestingly, page 21, where
in a masterpiece of economy the ghosts were removed and the
object on the pedestal redrawn, leaving the PCs exactly as
in the original. Likewise, in the illo on page 24, the dwarves
faces were redrawn to make them orcs, the ruby sword was added,
the windows were replaced by arcane designs, and the "sign
of Arik" was tattooed on the clerics and warriors
foreheads. And of course, many new illustrations were added
(17 in all) to fill gaps in the original (providing a picture
of the thieves Candella and Duchess, for instance) or to illustrate
new scenes added by Moldvay.
The Moldvay
Touch
Of course,
the two versions of the adventure differ in much more than
just art. Most significantly, Wells original takes Mike
Carrs B1 as its model, leaving many rooms unkeyed with
blank spaces for the DM to write in monster, treasure, and
trap (a model followed a few years later by Tracy Hickman
in the "Desert of Desolation" series). Moldvays
version, by contrast, follows Gygaxs B2 and his own
X2, Castle Amber (3) in presenting a fully-keyed, ready-to-play
dungeon -- the model TSR adopted at its default and has followed
ever since.
Other
Moldvay touches include the addition of an instructional section
at the beginning of the adventure, to show first-time DMs
how to run an encounter. The whole premise of the adventure
is changed, so that instead of exploring the ruins of the
long-dead Princess Argentas castle, as in Wells
original, the PCs are trying to rescue the princess very shortly
after the disaster that wrecked the castle. Whereas in Moldvays
version the mysterious dragon-rider -- the natural suspect
for having caused the disaster -- turns out to be noble and
good, in Wells original he is not only a black-hearted
villain but succeeds in corrupting the princess. Its
a shock to those who played the familiar "green cover"
version to find out that the ghosts dancing in the upstairs
ballroom apparently derive from the princess and her knight!
Other
changes follow the refocusing of the adventure. The area map
was deleted, along with all the accompanying wilderness encounters.
Several areas of the castle are redrawn, adding or deleting
rooms, while the entire Tower Level vanishes from the revised
version. More significantly, Moldvay fixes a significant flaw
in the original, explaining how the princess got upstairs
in her own castle by adding a main staircase (area 22 in the
"green cover" edition). The encounter with the cleric
Catharandamus is refocused so as to make combat with him unavoidable,
and his minions change from a pair of dwarves and a werebear
(the rightful bearer of the ruby sword) to a troop of orcs
and a werewolf.
And, of
course, the monsters. By revising the adventure, Moldvay spared
us from some really, really lame monsters getting into the
canon. There might be some adventurers who want to
fight six-legged duckbill rats ("barics") or go
toe-to-toe with bubbles (theyre . . . bubbles), but
the prize for true weirdness has to go to the ubues -- three-headed,
three-armed, oddly gendered creatures who feel as if theyve
somehow wandered out of Gamma World into D&D.
Ironically only the decapus, the source of the illustration
that caused all the trouble, survived (perhaps because it
was featured on the color cover art!).
At any
rate, now that the original is made available at last, we
cannot only appreciate what Moldvay changed but also for the
first time in almost twenty years see the original as Wells
envisioned it. Most may prefer Moldvays more polished
product, but I suspect some will ponder the possibilities
of running a "Return to the Palace of the Silver Princess"
with some serious surprises in store for those adventurers
who thought theyd seen everything . . .