TSR's A series of adventures in unusually unruly strongholds: Introduction

Illustration from Slave Pits of the Undercity (1980) by David S. LaForce

D&D was born in the castle. The Castle and Crusade Society of wargamers brought Gygax and Arneson together over miniature battles fought at Bodenburg, a scale model of a medieval fortress. Castle sieges were one suggested scenario for the Man-to-Man section of Perren and Gygax's Chainmail rules, the predecessor to D&D's combat system. But despite the genesis of Gygax's and Arneson's dungeons as the cellar levels of castles, it was these underworlds and not the upper rooms that captured the imagination of generations going forward.

Indeed, it's not hard to see how attacks on fully manned fortresses can fall flat as an adventure. The horn is blown, the defenders stream forth from their barracks. Pitched battle on unfavorable terrain ensues. One might, perhaps, set up a night-time infiltration. But then the play only becomes catastrophic: one failure to sneak takes you to the pitched battle again. The appeal of the dungeon environment is precisely its disorganization. There, the adventurers control the tempo of exploration, deciding whether to push their luck, encamp, or retreat.

Still, TSR's first published adventure module was a stronghold assault, the enemy being hill giants (G1, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief), and the next two continued on to fortresses run by frost and fire giants. This choice joins the wargaming castle instinct with a wish to recreate the adventures of De Camp and Pratt's protagonist Harold Shea, guest and prisoner in the stronghold of the frost giant Utgardaloki. Also, the high character levels capable of taking on multiple giants at the same time can access the kind of magic - invisibility, illusions, distractions, knock spells, and the like - that'll support effective infiltration. 

In aid of this goal, the steading is not exactly on a war footing. Giants are drunk, feasting, asleep, on errands: plenty of gaps in the defenses for smaller folk to exploit. As well, the cellars play  more like a classic dungeon - one retrospective has called the lower level a "monster motel" -  - a pattern  followed in the Frost and Fire sequels. If they win through to the underground, the party can take back control of the tempo, switching to the more usual room-by-room exploration.

But let's turn to the next major series of campaign modules after the high adventure of the G-D-Q series. The A series was based on four adventures that made up the AD&D tournament at GenCon XIII in 1980, run on consecutive days as qualifier rounds, semi-finals and finals, at huge scale: 40 tables to start with. Each adventure had a different authorship, but the connecting plot was simple enough: you were mid-level characters infiltrating and attacking the bases of a ring of slavers in the failed state of the Pomarj, World of Greyhawk. 

A word about tournament play. Although this style has largely fallen out of favor these days, it was a well-subscribed activity at early conventions, an answer to the question, "How do I win at D&D?" Tournament mode differed from home-campaign D&D in design choices that equalized experiences across tables, so that in theory, the most skilled player groups could prevail. In the 1980 tournament, each group ran the same set of pre-generated player characters; the adventures were linear, presenting the same challenges in the same order; and sometimes, DMs were told to apply a standard amount of damage from traps and the like, instead of rolling dice. To determine winners, each run was scored by awarding points for dealing with enemies, bonus points for discoveries or anticipated clever solutions, and points deducted for party casualties along the way.

The linearity in these adventures, in particular, deserves comment. It's an innovation that appeared at Origins 1979 with the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan; the previous year's tournament module, the aforementioned Giants series, was more open-plan. TSR realized that what was good for the tournament might not be good for campaign play, so when the A series was published, some alternative paths were added to give players more of a sense of agency. For the most part, these revisions work, although the final chapter still presumes an escape from having been thrown in prison -- a plot fiat that shines notoriously in the gallery of Railroading Through the Ages.

In reviewing these A adventures, I'll examine how each one spices up the organized stronghold concept by presenting it as an unruly place -- factions that chafe, distracted guards, abandoned areas that follow their own rules, and clever defensive tricks that sometimes try a little too hard. The quality of this series, unfortunately, falls off from A1 to the later modules. It's not that the creativity is lacking. Rather, the idea of the unruly stronghold starts to repeat itself and challenge the limits of plausibility.