Best D&D Adventure Designer Ever, Part 3: The Best

Look, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s E. Gary Gygax. 

I’ve written about Gary’s design chops before (...in the article where I suggested he was a Lost Talent). Let’s look at Gary’s TSR career in terms of the three original categories: BREADTH, DEPTH, and ORIGINALITY. I won’t deal with his later work – LA, C&C, Castle Yggsburgh – though there is some very interesting stuff there. I haven’t read enough of it deeply enough. But let’s look at the core modules which really defined (and define, in many ways) the way D&D adventures work.
 
The Phlubs
First, briefly, a few items of his bibliography which don’t make the cut: the subpar Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits (dumped on his favourite artist to actually write, some cool areas and images but basically not very good), WG5 Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure (with Kuntz, fun and silly but not much to it), and the Castle Greyhawk portal treks: EX1 Dungeonland, EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, and WG6 Isle of the Ape. Genuinely interesting but very, very specific (particularly the first two)
 
Breadth and Originality
For Gary, his breadth is also his originality. Where he was brilliantly broad, he was also brilliantly original – what he put out in the late 70s and early 80s is nearly all “The First” of its kind.
 
Gary defined most of the subgenres of adventure we still use. T1 The Village of Hommlet and B2 Keep on the Borderlands are the seminal “home base and nearby dungeon” adventures; S1 Tomb of Horrors is the original funhouse dungeon and Ultimate Test of Player Skill; G1-3 Against the Giants are, individually and as a collection, the original base assaults; the Drow trilogy (D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth, S2 Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and D3 Vault of the Drow) is where the Underdark, the Mythic Deep Underworld, comes into being, really; WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (after a flirtation in G3) articulates the role of the Lovecraftian mythos in D&D; S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth is the classic sprawling dungeon-crawl; S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is the original sci-fi/fantasy mashup; and T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil, for all its (limited) flaws, is the first real published megadungeon, with its only rivals coming from the Judges’ Guild. (Q1, really, is the first proper planar adventure, but I don’t think it’s as canonically definitional as the aforementioned modules.)
 
We might look at a few JG modules and see parallel evolution. We know Ed Greenwood designed a big megadungeon in the 70s – in the first of his great campaigns, I believe, in the Ruins of Undermountain. We obviously know Dave Arneson had his Castle Blackmoor. But we’re talking here about the definition of the genre – and just as Gary undoubtedly had breadth of styles (First dungeon! Base assault! Cavern crawl! Sci-fi! Lovecraftianism! Underdark!), he also had a defining canonical effect. His Castle Greyhawk (never published) and his Temple of Elemental Evil inspired many successors, including, indeed, Undermountain – even where the successors were trying to fill the gap of Greyhawk or the mistakes of the Temple. His brilliance left a shadow even where it burned unevenly.
 
Depth
But the point is that Gary executed a lot of these very well. G1-3 and D1-3 are just very well done, with a lot of depth – the bonus dungeons in the Giants bases, the sheer range of options for handling the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, the clarity and pungency of the terse prose. B2 has the Original Great DMing Advice, and it really is great. You get the picture.
 
I wonder how important it is that the first prolific D&D designer was not just creative and clever and original but also (partly via his editors, I’m sure) actually pretty good at communicating his vision. You can run these adventures at the table. You don’t need, on the whole, to edit them yourselves or do a lot of work (T1/T1-4 is an exception; well worth running, but really needs a little bit of early expansion, and the T2-4 section is worth enriching, especially given the Nodes weren’t published in a finished state). Sometimes those only accustomed to newer material find the old modules under-done, or see them as “very hack and slash”. This is about both expectations and education. Let me briefly explain.
 
As to EXPECTATIONS, if someone is reading a module for the pleasure of reading it, Gygax modules will usually disappoint. A cool idea may appear, but these are terse, sparsely illustrated, and profoundly practical in purpose. If someone thinks, for whatever reason, that tightly-driven Plot Games are the Best Thing, Gygax modules will disappoint, because even in the modules where plot conveniences are offered to connect them to your game, these are fundamentally Location-Based modules (see my series on Location-Based Games for a bit more). Yes, the “plot” may take you through the Giants and Drow series, but the modules themselves are about places in a world, not beats in a movie. You need to come to Gygax expecting location-based modules to actually run at the table. He does both par excellence; in sheer usability, he has been rarely equalled since, perhaps never fully surpassed.
 
As to EDUCATION, frankly, a problem is that plenty of good-faith readers, who want to run something at the table, just won’t get the conventions. Read a book in a foreign language – or better yet, a half-familiar language, like Chaucer’s Middle English – and you will, perhaps, find the whole thing frustratingly familiar yet alien, and impossible to really comprehend. Education is necessary to understand a language, and the conventions of the early modules leave a later generation of reader misreading them – particularly as to the Hack and Slash, Greedy Treasure Hunter interpretations. (S1 Tomb of Horrors is perhaps the ultimate example of this, leading to both bad reactions and bad table experiences. It’s a test for expert player; it’s a Special module, hence the series code. And the module does tell you that!) You have to understand the conventions – and the best guides for the budding Gygaxian DM are B2 and the 1e DMG. Now, the 1e DMG is maybe the worst-organised major D&D book ever, and it’s also the best D&D book ever. So you just got to take your lumps. B2 gives a very clear sense of what sort of game Gygax expected to develop – one of exploration and cunning and, yes, combat. With that education in mind, you will know the short entry in the adventure describing patrol and combat behaviour is not there to enforce a combat routine, but to describe a problem. The problem is that there are guards, next to a trap on the floor – the solution? Well, what do you have? Charm Person? A great scam? An ambush? Drawing the guards on to trap, somehow? Gygax is writing for would-be “professionals” – those who know what they’re doing. So educate yourself, and you’ll know the “content depths” on offer.
 
Gygax also does just realize a lot of things very well and in a way that any reader will understand: the creepy shrines in B2, G1, and G3 are all haunting; the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa is wonderfully alien; B2’s evil surprise is obviously genius from the get-go; the mapping and description in S3, including the guide on making the whole setting fresh and alien to the players (i.e., not describing the whole thing as a spaceship), is just very good technical writing.
 
Conclusion
Gary invented many major genres of adventure, and he executed them so well. It’s an easy choice. He’s the Best.
 
...Wait. Who’s that running down the aisle to the ring? IT’S BRUCE R. CORDELL! AND HE’S GOT A STEEL CHAIR!
 
Bruce R. Cordell
It’s the Dakotan Doombringer, the Young Gun, the Anarchist himself, Bruce R. Cordell. In the Dark Days of the Rebellion, as Lorraine and Skip reigned in terror, as nearly everything TSR published – even objectively cool stuff like Dark Sun – was turgid and unusable at the table (just see what Lorraine did to our boy Dougie Niles – the Maztica box set is...ugh)...a great white hope arose.
 
Cordell was 27 or 28 when his first module came out. The Gates of Firestorm Peak was published in 1996, and Cordell published 13 modules in the course of five years (1996-2000). What if I told you that at least 9 of those 13 were great modules (I note here that some people like Die Vecna Die! and Reverse Dungeon as well, but I won’t be including them)? What if I told you that Bruce originated important strands of D&D lore and adventure design in that period? What if I told you he designed the best official high level adventure ever? What if I told you he wrote an actually good 3^rd Edition adventure? (He also wrote the first 4^th Edition adventure, H1 Keep on the Shadowfell, but his blade was not keen by then, and his enemies did not cower; there are moments of brilliance in H1, but it’s not particularly good.)
 
Gates of Firestorm Peak
Cordell started his book career with the module that introduced the Far Realm into D&D – not just the general Lovecraftian weirdness that Gary so loved, but something/somewhere very close to the actual Lovecraftian mythos. Firestorm Peak (5^th-8^th Level) is...well, it has a 67-room Duergar fortress to storm as a taster. Hope you like fighting enlarged dwarf skeletons! And a dozen Carrion Crawlers! And an honest-to-goodness garrison, with tactics, and an extreme desire to terminate you. I won’t pretend this is a roleplaying-heavy section of module, though it certainly is a test of exploration skills (there are a lot of traps...). Not everything has to be (I’m looking over at Giants, Drow, and S1). This is a full-on, utterly chaotic war. There’s a commercial reason for this – the module was meant to showcase the Player’s Options line – but frankly, this is true D&D. One of my fondest memories of running the game was my players storming the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa with Svirfneblin allies, releasing and arming dozens of slaves, and then rampaging their way out.
 
But wait, there’s more. Beat the Duergar and you go into the Twisted Caverns, where, uh, the Far Realm is manifesting...and if you receive healing at all there’s a percentage chance of your body warping?!? You start to lose your temper and go insane due to the eldritch energies?! You might start losing Wisdom if you dare to sleep in the Caverns? And all of this is FEEDING the bizarre beasts inhabiting this region? Yes, it’s a dungeon crawl section – but one with legitimate overtones of Call of Cthulhu. And it’s not playing. You might end up permanently mutated. If you lose all your Wis “temporarily” you end up insane – give your sheet to the DM. The party falls into cycles of rage against each other more or less as long as they’re in the Caverns – I hope you like losing half your HP to your friends! (That might sound bad to you, but think of this way: it’s not PVP combat. It’s the DM unleashing the full evil of this module, and an excellent motivation to go and close the Vast Gate unleashing this madness, exacting vengeance upon the wicked as you go.) Then you have the warrens of the Troll mutates, seemingly thousands of Gibberlings, and Deepspawn, and, and, and...
 
Oh, but you can befriend the Myconids here. Cordell will never leave you without a friend. Even when you’re in this mind-twisting hellscape. Wait. You can befriend the lost Duergar too? (Cordell does smirkingly note that they won’t know you butchered their friends.)
 
Now it’s time to beat the boss. Oh wait there’s a Living Wall – made up of one of the adventurers you’re here to rescue. Time to cut her open! Then there’s an uh, Neh-thallgu with seven donor brains...you get the idea. There’s some weird and new monsters here, and they will leave their mark on you.
 
And then there’s the Inner Sanctum, which is just full of stuff. Great loot, a Djinni you can contract who only opens worldgates, a functioning and interactive planetarium, and then there’s Madreus and his legion of underlings ready for the last fight. Beat the bad guy, close the gate. Simple fun – as long as you’re still sane by this point.
 
Illithiad and Sahuagin Trilogies
Five of the six books of Cordell’s Monstrous Arcana trilogies are good: All three Sahuagin books (Evil Tide, Night of the Shark, and Sea of Blood), and two of the Illithiad trilogy (Masters of Eternal Night and Dawn of the Overmind). Illithids are much cooler here than in even Night Below, and the Sahuagin have never been equivalently realized.
 
Shark-men are cool, but they’re even cooler when the designer pulls of multiple successful underwater adventures (has anyone else even pulled off one?). And there’s a Ghost Ship that’s actually cool! That’s really an investigation section, too. There are base assaults, investigations, a section where you go Undercover Brother as shark-man slaves, and an inverted temple made of pearl with a god-warped High Priestess who’s turning into an eel. Oh, eel-men are behind it all. Ugh. Eel-men, even worse than shark-men.
 
And it’s executed well! You can read this stuff! Cordell is much wordier than Gygax, but it’s usable still.
 
I don’t really know what to do say about the Mindflayer adventures. I mean, it’s actually hard to summarise what’s going on in them. The first (weak) entry starts with, uh, the sun in your gameworld starting to dim. Why? Better do this, then that, then some other stuff, and then, uh...
 
Visit a Mind Flayer ringworld and stop the schemes of a mad engineer involving alternative universes? And you can lose?!?!?
 
Low-Level Adventures
Wait, you thought that was the punchline? No, not even. Brucey could write good low-level adventures. The mid-level adventures in Firestorm Peak and the trilogies are the sweet spot for designers. It’s low and high level adventures that struggle to impress – there are loads of low-level adventures, and most of the *good* ones are workmanlike at best.
 
But Cordell has two bona fide good low-level adventures, and both are not just good, well-executed things, but cool. The Shattered Circle (1^st-3^rd Levels) sends your PCs into a pseudo-Underdark complex with spider-people which actually demands exploration and skill. Ah, there’s a flooded section! Work it out. And you can turn the spider-people against each other. It’s fine for low-level adventures not to be tedious and slightly insulting (“Oh, go kill eight bandits, you suckers!”). Gary got this: there’s a Drow running a front operation for, uh, Zuggtmoy! That’s your first dungeon. There are like seventy tribes of humanoids in some crazy caves. Not one tribe, but a billion tribes. Bruce gets the same principle. It needs to be cool or weird.
 
And then there is Sunless Citadel (1^st-3^rd Levels), the first (?) 3^rd Edition adventure. Look, this has some 3^rd Edition nonsense. 2^nd Edition had decadence; 3^rd Edition had soullessness. I know which I’d choose. Everything has Encounter Levels attached, the stats are daggers to the eyes, etc. But the complex has a good map, and there are just layers: loads of different monsters, organically placed (Quasits and Mephits in the first section of the complex); there is Meepo, beloved Kobold who can get you by the whole Kobold layer (and it must be said, only rarely was even Gary so explicit about the possibility of bypassing enemies by friendship); there’s a Goblin tribe for a more traditional crawl/assault; and then there’s the excellently sinister Gulthias Tree and its dark fruit and fell Twig Blight spawn. Evil plants are underused (and the Gulthias is superior to the Kampfult, atmospherically).
 
Bruce wants you to enjoy being a 1^st level chump. He doesn’t want to give prizes away too early – but he wants you to stay for the big stories. How many official designers from, say, 1985-2014 could that be said of? Greenwood, Richard Baker, Carl Sargent, Lisa Smedman? Who else? How often do you read a late ‘80s or ‘90s or ‘00s module – not just low-level ones, but really any – and think “wait, they actually play D&D and they like it”?
 
Bruce Cordell somehow wrote a half-score great modules in that era of darkness, and wrote two intro modules to stand against the best. Intro modules are hard, because they need to be accessible to new players, fun, easy to read for the DM, and so forth – and actually, for all the awful 3e guff, Sunless Citadel is an example of a basically fairly easy module, parsing-wise. Compare the key to the map. Describe stuff to your players. See what they do. Repeat, until they enter into legend, or die in shame.
 
Entering Into Legend
On which note – what about Return to the Tomb of Horrors, guys? This is a whole campaign, and the first bit is, you know, good. Then the second bit – “The Black Academy” – is suitably cool. You can steal the necromancer clothes but they’re evil. You proceed by...well, doing something you never ever should. It’s not always well-organised, but the first few sections are cool. Deadly, weird, baroque. Cordell does baroque well.
 
Then there’s...Moil, the City that Waits. Chills yet?
 
Oh yes, you beat Acererak before, but can you beat him in his lair in the interdimensional city of Moil?
 
Wait, sorry, first you need to go find some stuff in the original Tomb of Horrors. Which is included in facsimile form. Oh, great. Guess I’ll die, then!
 
And then you go to the City That Waits. Wanted to hunt a Lich in an M.C. Escher painting? Towers rise from nothing and to a lightning storm; perspective fails the eye; what is close and what is far? And there are just so many scenes, man. Follow the trail of a previous adventurer – sit at the table he hauled to the window of a ruined bar, as he looked out over this otherworldly realm, this ex-city, this living monument to death. Free pre-historic thieves from magic mirrors! Try to avoid their inevitable betrayal! Find out what a Brine Dragon is.
 
And this is all a location – not a railroad, but a series of locales, an epic Impossible City, a final proving ground for great players.
 
It’s not even Acererak’s lair. Which, of course, contains one last Grinning Green Devil Face.
 
Conceptual Density
Is it a Bryce term? Basically, Cordell has Conceptual Density. Shark-men but there’s a ghost-ship but the shark-men have an underground arena but their base is actually in an inverted spire made of pearl but really the plot is the work evil eel-men. It’s kobolds wait it’s goblins wait it’s an evil tree wait it’s an evil priest. Oh the sun is going out but there is this shell game but wait there are sleigh-riding illithids racing you to an archaeological dig but what’s in the dig BUT A SPACESHIP and then you go to a ringworld but you can befriend all the grimlocks and then it turns out the plot involves inverting the multiverse. Liked one Tomb of Horrors? How about three Tombs of Horror(s)? AND A CITY THAT HAS NO TOP OR BOTTOM.
 
You get the idea. Just idea after idea after idea. It’s like Si King writing everything on coke. (Bruce, get help if you need it.) There is glory in Cordell’s work. It seems bottomless, and reaching beyond the lightning clouds of Moil. Even the fadeout after Sunless Citadel dims not the glory; the Muse sat for him for the apportioned Quarter-Score Years, and has returned whither she came.
 
Bruce Cordell was made for 2^nd Edition – which sounds strange, given his open “plots” full of rich ideas, great treasure, and plural solutions are the opposite the standard 2^nd Edition fare. 2^e was at its best, really, in presenting cool settings for DMs to actually write. Some of its best adventures were weird leftovers or rewrites of a previous era (e.g. the heartbreakingly diminished FRQ1 Haunted Halls of Eveningstar or that magnificent high-level headscrew S5 Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga, or indeed Night Below, which I believe was written in part years before it was published). But Cordell meets the moment: 2e is baroque and overdone and full of crazy stuff, and he says – what if I designed some actual adventures for this, rather than novels or print-pap?
 
The Actual Conclusion
I don’t think I can say Bruce Cordell is a better designer than Gary Gygax.
 
I can’t say it.
 
But I can think it.