Obscure Adventure Review: Desert Plots

Amazon Mutual #2, Desert Plots
Mary Ezzell (The Dragon Tree, 1983)

The Dragon Tree was part of the flourishing horde of low-budget D&D-compatible publishers in the early 1980's. You might have read my review of the first book in their Amazon Mutual adventure series, a collection of four quests of wildly varying style and quality, influenced by the gonzo style of the Arduin rules and sporting the company trade dress of a monochrome Day-Glo cover.

There was only a second Amazon Mutual book, this one in eye-scorching fluorescent red instead of orange. It stands out as one of the few adventures from that era authored by a woman, Mary Ezzell. Her design and writing showcase a playful creativity that was soon to be lost, as TSR's detail-oriented fantasy realism, heroic plotlines, and oh yes, army of lawyers crowded more amateurish third-party publishers out of the game.

The title of the book, Desert Plots, links it to Dragon Tree's "Book of Plots" product, a collection of loose adventure storylines to be run in more detail by the DM. This link augurs in one of the fumbles of the book: the overarching plotline lacks a grand synopsis and is incredibly hard to follow. Two complete dungeons with about 20 rooms each are followed by five sketches of adventure material without maps that can be retroactively read to connect the two sites' goings-on. Along the way, we see four sections titled "What Really Happened"--two of which, unhelpfully, contradict the other two.

As this narrative goes on, the DM is repeatedly instructed to wing the details, and to adjust them not just for the characters' level, but for their play style as "hackers" or "thinkers." Amazon Mutual 1 also took play style into account, true. But the writing in Ezzell's adventures gets vaguer, with more self-serve instructions just when the grand design of the plot requires a stricter accounting, as if the manuscript is running out of pages.

And yet what a plot it is! The action is built around a series of increasingly preposterous magical gimmicks. Starting with a scroll that helps you find other specific written material with the help of a glowing green line, and a manual of very unusual golem recipes, we next see efreet working to exploit complex dungeon tricks, and rooms that go from one plane of existence to another. Much of the wackier stuff can be explained by the heirlooms of a religious order that used unusual magic effects to help people find harmony. The leaps of logic all hang together--barely.

Outlandish page art by Mary Ezzell

Ezzell uses the implications and side-effects of each gimmick to advance the character-driven plot, which sets up parallel love triangles each hinging on a forceful and creative female character. We have very much just been through the 1970's in this module, what with the flared hand-drawn psychedelic art and chapter titles. There are references to the Doors of Perception, student revolutionary movements, drugs-as-treasure, and heavy quoting of Buddhist philosophy. The meta-idea that the characters are working for the Amazon Mutual adventuring insurance company, which featured so prominently in book 1, is little more than a framing device in book 2.

Ezzell refreshingly refuses to lean on the Near-Orient cliches that are a staple of desert adventures. There are no harems, eunuchs, yelping desert raiders, or wheedling merchants. The orcs, efreeti, and bandits are "all D&D" here. Their uniqueness comes not from any surface detail but from their role in the convoluted and bizarre magical plot. While there is conflict and cruelty, everyone has reasons to do what they do, even if they are the wrong ones. Unusually for 1983, and probably thanks to the woman writer's perspective, a magic effect that could have led to nonconsensual player-character sex is specifically given a loophole.

Would it work at the table? Well, you would need to lay down the clues to the grand mystery a lot more firmly than the book's have-it-your-way approach. You would have to slalom past the 23 uses of "DMO" (DM Option) as a substitute for details, and jot down specifics that work for your group. The system might not matter much, because many of the encounters are designed for the "thinking" party to overcome through negotiation or puzzle solving. And yes, some of the dated references are a little cringey, like Heinlein's TANSTAAFL as a magic word, or a student movement called the "Orcan Liberation Front". All the same, the creativity on display in Mary Ezzell's Desert Plots might just be worth sharing with a set of old-school or even 5th Edition players who can appreciate its whimsy.

Amazon Mutual: Day-Glo Ideas from the Typewriter Era

Digital cameras can't really handle Day-Glo. I tried.

The year: 1982.
The text: electric typewriter and Letraset titles.
The cover: fluorescent orange.
The art: strictly amateur.


"Amazon Mutual Wants You!" Volume One, from Dragon Tree Press, is the most interesting and creative of my three old-school pickups (previously, previously).

 High concepts.

The concept driving this anthology is very 1982. It's that era in which the first flush of playing D&D straight had faded out, and the kind of self-aware narratives seen in Dave Trampier's "Wormy" comic were taking hold. So, the party are meta-adventurers, having been hired by a guild (the titular Amazon Mutual) to carry out the corpse retrieval clause on other adventurers' insurance policies. The four adventures are four such missions, each with a different author and a markedly different style.

Some of the guild rules are typical AD&D fun-crusher magical fiats. Retrieval teams are geased ("absolutely no save!") not to steal the victims' possessions. Body bags of holding eliminate the problem of lugging corpses back. There are half a dozen better ways to approach the first problem, ways that open the slim possibility of hoodwinking the guild -- Amazon keeps a list of possessions and recovery teams are held liable for missing stuff; an annoying familiar chaperones the rescue effort; and so on. The body bags solve a problem that's nonexistent if the party eliminates all opposition before retrieving the corpses, and kill an element of challenge that should hang over the adventure if they don't.

The book's approach to what we would now call challenge ratings, though, is one of the dead-end gems of the Typewriter Era, up there with the Midkemia attack matrix.

• First off, each adventure has a manifest of all the experience points available in the form of monsters. (It would be most helpful if treasure was listed, too, though, but the need for a GM to manage advancement rate is one of the most underrated things in level-based gaming.)
• This manifest also includes suggested experience awards for outwitting monsters, dealing with traps, and finding clues and other plot goals. Given the slow advancement pace of by-the-book AD&D this is absolutely key.
• There's also a section where it's explicitly recognized that the character power level appropriate for each adventure depends on what approach the players and DM take. So, one adventure is suitable for level 7-9 if the DM plays it as a standard fighting room-crawl, 14-18 (!) if the DM treats it as an organized fortress where all the denizens can be warned in a short time, or much lower levels if the players choose to take on the adventure with sneaking, diplomacy, or infiltration.

Temple of the Four Gods. The first adventure takes you to retrieve four adventurer bodies from a temple with a prosaic layout, short on monsters and long on tricks and traps. There are a few clues explaining how the temple went over from the four gods to the service of Loki, but overall this is a funhouse mini-dungeon with a few random gleams of dark humor.  Two corpses can be had almost immediately without any fight, one comes after a four-goblin battle, and it's only the last body that forces the players past a meaningful number of tricks and traps. Would run: 3/10.

Stronghold of the Mer-Witch. An underwater cave mission to retrieve two adventurers. One is dead and can be found almost immediately after a nasty fight with a gigantic eel. The other is alive but a captive of the mer-witch deeper in, who commands a small army of mer-orcs and (not very tough) sea trolls, and can throw three death spells a day among other powers. A coral golem and an interestingly furnished underwater torture chamber liven up the otherwise unremarkable, "storehouse, barracks, kitchen" design. Would run: 6/10.

Mission to Danger. The gonzo spirit of early-days roleplaying lives here. The person to be rescued, captive but not yet dead, is a "Hobbit Fighter-Techno" with a pistol, a switchblade, and a deadman switch, for he has mined the dark elves' dungeon fortress to blow sky-high! The DM is asked to play out the ticking clock in four hours of real time. Some nice situations can happen: meeting an illusionist cat who might help with infiltration, a possible fight between an enemy red dragon and a captured rainbow dragon, finding out the hobbit is an ornery and contrary ally, and a treasure hoard that turns into a river of molten gold if the explosives blow. Would run: 8/10.

Grimethorp's Manor. This adventure plays around with the Amazon Mutual premise. The party has to retrieve a peacefully deceased retired adventurer from his mansion, following the letter of his policy, but his ghost doesn't want his body moved. It's a clever concept but the execution is lacking. Until the party finds the body, they will be walking through the mansion rooms with nothing interesting to do. When they try to take the body out, the ghost starts interfering, casting nuisance spells and animating the house's furnishings to attack, just to frighten and annoy but not cause harm. That's also not going to work. You frighten D&D players by taking huge chunks of hit points, and making them roll save-or-die, not by having a rug say "boooo".  Would not run as is, and the adventure needs a lot of editing to work; I'd start by having bandit squatters and other random ruin pests in the mansion to give the adventure a real first act, make the ghost's attacks really dangerous, and on top of that have the rest of the bandits coming home from a raid just as the party is making to leave.

The Awesome Pain in the Ass That Was DragonQuest

Continuing my trio of bargain-bin rescues from Glasgow (actually a gift from Paolo, in lieu of buying an adventure from the system) I present to you DragonQuest, 2nd edition!

Why does this RPG system set my teeth on edge? My nostalgia should be all for SPI and the days of punching out wargame counters, all for Deathmaze and Citadel of Blood and War of the Ring and Sword and Sorcery. But good boardgaming chops do not guarantee a good roleplaying game.

Let's judge a book by its cover. Sorry guys, RPG players are not just dreaming of being Conan. D&D art got that right more often than not. They are in a fantasy-hero world, but team players; just like they're in a horror world, but not doomed, and in a science fantasy world, but stone cold medieval. The Frazetta muscleman hoisting up the results of his DragonQuest like a trophy bass is someone else's idea of "sword and sorcery".

The writing style of the game is a 180 degree reaction against the fast, loose but evocative D&D writing of the time. No gaps and confusing terminology here! DQ is buckled and strapped into the case law structure of an SPI wargame's rules (see 3.7.5.1 and apply the Rules Writing Procedure). If the GM has leeway, we'll tell you exactly where that leeway is. It's meant to be clear, but it's mechanizing and alienating on the page. The wargame influence also shows in the tight regulation of combat on a hex grid.

Maybe case-law would work if the mechanics were more elegant, as in Metagaming's contemporary offering The Fantasy Trip. But they're standard Rolemaster-type fare, a percentile skill system with "RPG 2.0" features like separate fatigue and physical damage, damage-reducing armor, critical hits, background packages, custom advancement ... Determining target numbers might have you multiplying 39 by 2.5. Damage involves frequent table lookups to see if a crit and physical damage happen. God forbid you should have a d6 laying around the house, here, roll one of your d10's and take half for a d5 instead. And roll four of those d5s to determine your character's stats.

What's a Satanic panic?

But it's funny how often interesting magic systems come attached to clunky base mechanics, while elegant systems like TFT or RuneQuest have difficult or prosaic approaches to magic. Certainly, something was possessing SPI around the turn of the 80's. They had a boardgame about the demons from the Lesser Key of Solomon, and worked some of those names into their Citadel of Blood adventure game. And yes, there's a whole school of DQ demon summoning that ramps up to 16 pages of fully powered Goetic infernal royalty. That menu is clearly where all the love lies, and the other magic schools suffer collectively by comparison. Some are solid, some near-unplayable like the Water Magic school with its Aquaman-style restriction.

By the way, there is a lot of cribbing from D&D, especially in the monster list. And in the kind of rules that compel game balance. Wizards can't cast near cold iron or while being distracted by damage. Player characters who poison their weapons might nick themselves. This points at the heart of the problem, that Dragonquest isn't built around a compelling setting (implicitly, as in D&D, or explicitly, as in Runequest). So much of it is generic that the special stuff fails to stick.

For example, instead of alignment, your characters get a quasi-astrological Aspect which gives them bonuses and penalties for very short periods of the day or year, or around a birth or death. Sounds cool, but it doesn't really resonate with any other social or magical structure, mostly boiling down to an optimum time and place to do housebound skill tests. Only the death aspect has any impact on the typical adventurer, with a +10% bonus just after a mammal dies near you.

At least the 2nd edition book concludes creditably, with a tight little sample adventure in a bandit oasis. It maybe shows, though, that DQ doesn't really know what kind of fantasy game it is. The journey to the camp is described last of all, oh yeah, you might encounter a sand golem. The real detail is put into the characters at the camp, their secrets and intrigues. It's not really necessary that one is a halfling and another is a hobgoblin. The magic, too, is subtle, pulp-story stuff. There are other consequences of aping the pulp era (the camp is run by one "Alla Akabar," and roles for NPC women comprise jealous wife and sex victim). Perhaps the game is more suited for would-be Conans after all?

Can We Do Better than the Tyrant's Demesne?

So. I'm back.

Visiting Paolo up in the northern lands, we went to the excellent game shop Static on King Street and browsed its second-hand trove. I came away with two third-party products from the glory days of my first encounters with D&D, the early 80's days of electric-typewriter-and-Letraset layout, amateur art, and occasional gemstones of creativity amid the dross of naive simulationism. Paolo added thereto a third item from his collection. In the next few posts, I'll now review and muse upon these items in ascending order of interest value.

First up: WITHIN THE TYRANT'S DEMESNE, "a complete campaign module set in the world of Haven." The stats are from the "Thieves' Guild" game but very similar to the levels and abilities of D&D or its then-numerous improved systems. The authors don't get cover billing, but it's a collaboration among four names, chiefly Walter Hunt and Richard Meyer. The artists include -- is that Jeff Dee? no, the similarly cartoon-deco-styled V. M. Wyman (are those sci-fi lady initials?), and some other less talented names.

Overall: A standard fantasy city where the intrigues are predictable.

Cons: The kind of gazetteer-style design Zak's Vornheim reacted against. We start with a regional map and history, call out the factions and describe in detail each of their characters, go for a "tour" around the city neighborhoods, involving more building, shop and character descriptions, and finally -- in a 48-page book -- get down to six pages of plots and encounters that deploy what we've seen.

There's very little bizarre about the place, even in its weirdness. There's a tyrant, who keeps power through his brutal guards, the unfortunately named Redshirts, and also through a coopted thieves' guild. There's a merchant society, a bunch of wizard guilds. Reading about the other characters, it doesn't feel much like a tyranny is going on. Political allegiances of most shopkeepers are down to a random table. Explicit descriptions of oppression, resistance, toadying, plotting, and cowardice are few and far between. Probably the most memorable encounter hook is a bunch of blobby chaos creatures who bring back human meat for a butcher, Sweeney Todd style.

Awful wordplay abounds, like the gang modeled after The Who with a "Dr. Jimmy," a "Quiet One," etc.; the potion seller Plazebo; throwing in some obscure US labor movement references, a wizard called Ilgwu who is involved in a plot with the resistance leader Johill. But ...

Pro 1: In a fantasy world filled with Butars, Adars, Radmars, Bonams, Corams, and the occasional Lobar (all from the Tyrant's Demesne, mind you), it can be hard to get names straight. Yes, awful puns can help the DM remember who's who.

BUT, the players must get the puns only too late, or never. So Plazebo is too obvious; the Who goons could be just under the radar. Likewise the most clever name in the module, a lockpicker named Kasserine Khyber, after two famous mountain passes from military history. I once had a party do a whole campaign where Rick, son of Nick lived in a millhouse with a water gate near the Ford of Jerrold and was being investigated by the Wood Warden Burnsteen from the rangers' Post... Thankfully, they never got it until I revealed the scheme.

Pro 2: The intrigues, when actually described, are decent spots of mystery. There's a fairly linear plot to follow and discover a traitor to the Tyrant; a more multi-threaded plot involving apparitions of the apparently dead Johill, with a Scooby Doo-type explanation; and a number of short encounters that highlight some of the other secrets of the town. They're just hiding behind long stretches of description that follow neither the logical order of player engagement with the setting, nor the order of GM preparation to run any given adventure. The helpful table of NPC stats in the back can't mitigate this.

To do better in a modern-day roleplaying work, we have to realize what the city is, functionally, for the players and their characters. And that's the next post.