TSR's module A3, Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords

Dungeon Module A3
Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords
by Allen Hammack

Hey, we finally get to fight these guys ... right? Right??

Imagine you had to write an adventure for a tournament, whose express purpose was to overpower PCs without fail at the end, setting them up for the jailbreak premise of the final adventure. You might be forgiven for thinking that whatever the players did up to that wouldn't matter. So, go ahead and fill dungeon maps with fights, tricks, and traps, to kill time until the big plot twist. 

That's the best explanation for the step-down in quality we see in A3 compared to its two predecessors. A1 and A2 delivered believable, unruly slaver posts whose failures were excesses of creativity. This module, from Allen Hammack, delivers the same kind of funhouse environment that this experienced tournament writer had already delivered in the previously published TSR module, Ghost Tower of Inverness. Very little work, compared to the previous modules, went into improving A3 into a better place for campaign play.

It's not that we've lost the trail of the slaver organization in A3. Far from it -- the players are assumed to have picked up one of the four different clues to the location of the final stronghold scattered around A2. (To a modern designer this seems like wise deployment of clue redundancy, but it's actually a byproduct of A2 being built from four tournament tracks that were originally run in parallel, so each track had to furnish the clue to advance to A3.) The clues lead to a mountain where the trail of the slavers ends and you find a trap floor that dumps you into the dungeon through a slide. Eventually you find the level boss and go through a secret door in his throne room to the town of Suderham, hidden in the mountain's volcanic crater, that is the slavers' HQ. 

Leaving aside the homage to the multi-cave opening of the original tournament grindhouse, Tomb of Horrors, this path makes no sense. The players have picked up the directions that the slavers use to get to their lair. Why not follow the actual route that the caravans and cargoes take, rather than this route that, by the module's admission, is a difficult side tunnel that the Slave Lords only defended as an afterthought? The reworking of the A-series modules for 2nd edition D&D, Scourge of the Slave Lords (1986), plugged this plot hole; in it, the players are tipped off to the cave entrance by a renegade priest working to subvert the operation from within. As with the help players get from escaped slaves to enter the A1 and A2 complexes, the logic of the unruly stronghold is not optional. The party needs some kind of leg up against a competent defender.

The theme of A3's first dungeon, such as it is, raises the stakes in the humanoids game. Whereas A1 abounded in orcs, and A2 in hobgoblins, A3 turns to the next strongest type, gnolls. Along with their giant hyenas, the gnolls go along with the final boss, Yeenoghu! No, not the actual demon prince of gnolls, but an illusionist casting his image to rule over the credulous hyena-men. The rest, however, is less creatively deployed.

We enter the dungeon through a trap - the front of the party is dumped into a salt slide. This trap screws them seven different ways that make no sense. You see, the salt is left over from a long-dry underground river, and in combination with the magic fungi in the tunnel, it casts a slow spell on you, unless you avoid contact with it by using one of the two leather toboggans, and also you have a chance to lose an item, or break a potion. And it dumps you into a welcoming party of hostile gnolls.

The twists and turns of the conventional-looking dungeon maze take you past the gnolls' usual giant hyena pets, symmetrical areas where you encounter stalactite monsters (AD&D's ubiquitous piercers) and a stalagmite guy (a roper, or rather a variant -- a STOroper!), and a few more tricks like an electric arch that shocks you unless you coat yourself in liquid latex from a pool. Eventually you get to the illusionist, find the secret door, and are through to the mountain's volcanic crater wherein nestles the next stop on the ride  -- the slavers' town of Suderham.

The module feels a need to hurry up at this point, so (in tournament play at least) the party automatically finds a group of silk-clad slave buyers, overpowers them, and disguises themselves in their fancy robes -- all in narration. Using this age-old adventure trick, they pass the super-tight security of Suderham and enter a town adventure.

Thus led by the nose through the gates, our heroes are left to find the secret entrance to the Slave Lords' lair on their own. Fortunately, in this less-than-unruly stronghold (garrisoned by 600-plus soldiers!) there dwell a few  snitches and infiltrators who drop unnecessarily cryptic clues to the location of the secret entrance in an empty bordello chamber. Lots of space is dedicated to listing shops that are closed and one-sentence residences. While there are a few places the party can get into trouble, the town is admittedly just there to get you to the final dungeon with little fuss. The best thing about it is an NPC called Samovar, who absolutely must be played as a hefty Russian homebody.

Most of the art is by Willingham and Dee but you'll also see a few of Erol Otus' creepy freaks

There's not much theme to these latter catacombs, though each encounter is interesting in its own right, combining a by-the-book monster with inventiveness in its environment: hell hounds on a heated floor, a pit with a gelatinous cube in it, a minotaur with a crossbow who stalks the players through a maze, and so on. Finally, we arrive at the moment when -- in tournament play -- the party is trapped between two magic walls and knocked out with sleep gas. In campaign play, there's instead a rumble with the high-level Slave Lord NPCs. But even if the good guys win, we're told the situation is hopeless. No matter where they go from there, the party will end up in the prison scenario that starts A4.

A3 feels rushed, full of B-movie cliches, dungeon tricks that work "just because," and railroaded action. It's not an unruly stronghold so much as a staged one. The impulse to make a stronghold messy comes from the overpowered and uninteresting action that comes about once you realistically think about how the bad guys would defend their lair. Here, the overpowering is part of the point, but there's also a need to give some adventure. Hammack resorts to the standard D&D playbook, rather than any kind of naturalism, to do that. Even the one "new monster" isn't that new -- it's just a higher-statted book monster along the lines of the "margoyle," "greater basilisk," and other creative failures that would end up padding out the pages of the Monster Manual II. Apart from the town layout and the Slave Lord characters, there is very little here that I want to use for my own campaign, as my players make their way to the island where the slavers they've been chasing for three years of play make their base.