TSR's module A2, Secret of the Slavers' Stockade (Fort Level)

TSR Module A2: Secret of the Slavers' Stockade

Harold Johnson with Tom Moldvay

At a couple of climactic points in module A1, Slave Pits, the adventurers can find documents that will lead them to the next adventure in the series. Moving away from the chaotic half-ruined town, you find a self-contained fortress in the wilderness, a staging point for the slavers' operations. This stockade is bounded by four intact walls, less of a ruin than the Highport temple. But inside, it's a fixer-upper, with ungoverned areas that continue the theme of the unruly stronghold. The troops are mainly goblins and hobgoblins, not orcs and half-orcs. Two independent bosses with powerful assistants run the place, one in the fort above ground, and two in the dungeons. 

Like A1, A2 was originally run as two parallel tournament adventures, with the above- and below-ground levels as the respective settings. The module's maps shade in the paths of each tournament version. It''s not hard to see how the requirements of each one-track, twisty gauntlet got in the way of realistic defensive architecture. However, even in the limited tournament mode, the fort level threatens the kind of barracks-clearing pitched battle I mentioned in the opening essay as a catastrophic failure for a fort infiltration. As always, full spoilers ensue.

Sure, go ahead, spoil one new monster on the front cover ...

FORT LEVEL: MOATHOUSE

The tournament starts with an easy if improbable way in. Just like in A1, an escaped slave, "Lady Morwin Elissar," shows you the route of her escape - an open window in the outer wall of the moathouse, with a convenient rope left dangling. This device is more interesting because the slave is an NPC who might go with you but is kind of unreliable. Still, it is only the first instance of a repetitive tendency that crops up throughout the module.

This moathouse is one of three buildings on the flat hill where the stockade sits, all held together with outside walls. It's also, you guessed it, an unruly stronghold. Garrisoned by a couple of hobgoblin squads, half of one floor is home to a haunt - more of a Victorian-story ghost than an undead monster. It's the haunting that keeps the troops scared of this area, justifying the lack of attention paid by the garrison. The challenge with this entity must have felt fresh at the time. But by now, dealing with a ghost's past-life obsession and present-day possession is part of 5th edition, and quite a few supplements have extended the Gothic notion into an adventure genre (link, link, link).

In this unruly zone, we are introduced to an unfortunate theme: the defender love silly traps. Here, they have acquired some fancy glassware and alchemy to blind intruders and trip them up with hundreds of glass marbles underfoot. Arguably, these traps sit at the outer limit of plausibility, but worse is to come.

One good point of the writing throughout this module shows up here. As in Albie Fiore's early White Dwarf adventure "The Lichway," each bivouac of troops throughout the fort has some kind of action ongoing, be it eating, gambling, or less wholesome sport. I've described this approach before as the "diorama encounter," but it seems to be a priority of the Johnson/Moldvay authorial team that gives welcome flavor. 

FORT LEVEL: GATEHOUSE

The next building along the railroad is a gatehouse on the far side of a courtyard where a wild anhkheg will pop out of a patch of mud and attack. Why do the defenders allow a powerful monster to sit athwart the only line of communication from moathouse to gatehouse (the walls connecting them have no walkway)? Here's the greed for variety, any fight that's not with hobgoblins, at the expense of naturalism. Other hard-to-believe premises: the fight can go on without the guards on the walls noticing, until the monster lets out a dying screech; and in fighting, the party will become so caked with mud that they suffer a -2 to hit until they can wash it off in a fountain some way down the railroad.

The gatehouse itself was only developed for campaign play. Its inner buildings are more hobgoblin guardposts and barracks, again with diorama activities going on. Beyond the gate that the anhkheg guards, there is another courtyard, which the players can gauntlet-run or sneak across, while guards patrol the walls above. A couple of patrols come with another new monster, an oil-sweating Gollum-like wretch known as a boggle, whom we see on the front cover. Here there's little opportunity to use the boggles' weird abilities. They are just being led around as sniffer dogs, bringing to mind another Tolkien character, the orc tracker Snaga of Isengard. Then on to the keep's courtyard garden where carnivorous apes and hobgoblin archers jump the party. A dead end -- unless they can open the locked door that leads into the keep proper.

FORT LEVEL: MAIN KEEP

The position of this building in the hill fort is beyond absurd. The ramparts have no connection to its interior, even though that's where many of the troops and leaders make their home. What's more, the ramparts loom over the keep - the better to shoot at the roof, allegedly -- but vision to the outside world is blocked by tall palisades cut through with infrequent arrow slits. It's as if the fort is prepared for an infiltration, more so than an attack; but even that goal is bungled in the execution, so that a dungeon-crawling party can take on one group of enemies at a time. For example, if the players make it to the courtyard, there's no line of sight to the fight there from archers on the walls, only to the roof.

The interior layout is also absurd and not remedied in the campaign version. A single path spirals around, kinking up a few times, before ending up in the central room where the main leaders and troops are found. Cut a single door to break the spiral, and the leaders would have easy access to the entrance and be able to reinforce the defense. But where's the fun in that, compared to dungeon crawling?

Worse yet, the dungeon crawl is fixed up with tricks and traps worthy of a Scooby Doo haunted house. You have the stuffed bear rolling down a ramp to frighten you backwards into a pit. Then the hobgoblin ambush where some of the troops dress as mummies and run at an angled mirror so you'll waste spells and missiles on their reflections. Not just silly, these traps make no sense placed across the only route of reinforcement in an active stronghold.

Off the tournament track, there is another haunted area shunned by the soldiers. But this ghost is just a set of gimmicky manifestations engineered by the escaped slave who lives in the rafters. All these hijinks aside, the final encounter area has a memorable leader in Icar. He's a fire-loving blind warrior who fights with super-senses, taking after Daredevil or Zatoichi. Some of the diorama encounters in the central area are likewise good, and there's a new monster, the cloaker, whose hypnotic droning works as an opiate of the masses for the enslaved. In the boss area, whose defense the module illustrates with an innovative (at the time) tactical map, are a couple of ways down to the dungeons.

...and on the back cover, another new monster to spoil

Can we fix the fort? Maybe, but extensive changes to the map would have to be made. And then the module becomes something different. Raising the alarm no longer causes a temporary pressure situation before the party can scoot on to the next isolated area. It activates the whole beehive of the garrison, acting all together in a mass of close to 100 hobgoblins and powerful leaders, and certain to overpower the mid-level party it is rated for.

Next: The dungeon level

The Night's Dark Terror Project 0: Introduction

We're going to be talking about Basic D&D module B10, Night's Dark Terror, in the next series of posts. Written by Graeme Morris, Jim Bambra, and Phil Gallagher, and released in 1986, the module -- like X1, Isle of Dread, before it - was explicitly meant to help players transition from the dungeon delving of early levels into outdoor adventuring and the Expert level rules. As a "transition module," not only are there many paragraphs of advice and play aids for outdoor settings, but it's numbered in the B series instead of the X series -- presumably because 2nd level characters could in theory play it. The reality, as we shall see later, is something else!

X1 might be better known. It came earlier in time and shipped as part of the first Expert boxed set. But B10, in my view, has more critical acclaim surrounding it. Those who know it rave about it -- in blogs (link, link, link), in videos (link, link). The adventure is ambitious -- a mini-campaign stretching across a hundred miles. Its dozens of encounters are built around a multi-stage villainous plot together with many side-adventures. Reviews often mention the gritty naturalism worked into the setting, and that the authors were three-fifths of the design team behind Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which debuted the same year. It has a "Wild East" feel, with many places and characters in the sparsely settled frontier sporting Slavic-sounding names. Horse trading and rustling play a big part in the early action, not to mention an extended homestead siege. The quality of detail in the fights, settings, and treasures is way above most contemporary adventures, certainly in the B series.

And yet a few complaints keep surfacing in the reviews. In particular, we keep hearing that the adventure, for all its sandbox credentials, railroads the players at times, frustrates them at others. This is valid; I've been running a modified B10 in my group for a few months now, and because I value player agency, have had to make some plans for what happens if they go off the rails. I also think the adventure departs from naturalism in places. Or at least, from the standard I prefer, where part of exploration is not just discovering places and peoples on the map but figuring out how they operate. Because of this, I thought it would be a worthwhile blog project to go scene by scene through B10, at least until I catch up to the party in real-time, offering play notes, critique, and reworking where necessary.

Now, I have been running the adventure in 5th edition D&D, somewhat against my inclination, but this adaptation is not an aspect I'm going to cover much. There are already a couple of translations about, but owing to the players starting the adventure at 4th level and also being quite skilled at working their characters, I've had to significantly upscale many of the encounters. I'll also leave out some of the elements from the larger campaign that I've included in the plot. So, these critiques will be written about the module as it is, with the possibility that they'll be played either in B/X D&D or a related ruleset, or in 5e. Finally, I'll leave out spoilers for what's ahead in my ongoing campaign, so my players can take a look back at things they've been through and still enjoy the rest.

Onwards, to the sound of wolves howling ...

Next: Starting Off In Kelven