Old Game, New Game

Old Game:

Last night a couple members of my Olde School Wizardry homebrew campaign crew came out to finish our three-part Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set spin-off, set in the classical past of our campaign world.

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As a hurricane bore down on the nameless sea-side village, The Speculator helped with the evacuation efforts, carefully removing from the watchtower the crude bronze bell that housed Vaz Dragul, the enigmatic elemental spirit once bonded to slave-champion It-Sweeps.  Trouble broke out as Baat, the village troublemaker, tried to seize another man's wife, claiming that he would remain behind and survive the storm and that any who opposed him would be sorry.  Soon the meaning of Baat's cryptic threats became clear as a pair of Pastores swept down on the refugees.  These elementally augmented champions served the cruel Auldish overlords and had come to seize the villagers as new slaves for their wicked, elfin masters.

A super-powered slugfest ensued as Speculator handed off the bell to villager, Same, who became the new host of Vaz Dragul's power and the pair took on the Pastores.  One of the villains (statted from Captain America) was blinded by Speculator's touch, double-teamed, and knocked out, Same fell, plowed under by a rolling, hollow stone sphere and, after a few tense rounds, Speculator finished off the other foe (statted from Cyclops).  In the end, the unconscious villains were loaded into their own slave-capturing spheres and sent rolling out to sea.

from weatherstock.com

As we resolved some Charging, Grappling, and even a Power Stunt, my fondness for this vintage rules set was reawaken.  It was really the idea of degrees of success, governed by the Universal Chart, that set Marvel Super Heroes apart from most other early entries in the hobby.  For example, when attempting to grapple, a character could Miss, get a Partial Hold (yellow), or a Full Hold (red) whereas an attack with an edged weapon could generate a Miss, Hit, Stun, or Kill ... so technically Aunt May could end Bullseye with a simple kitchen knife, it just isn't very likely.

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The turn-by-turn use of charts has largely fallen by the wayside in tabletop role-playing in favor of target numbers and more sophisticated character sheets.  Correspondingly, it seems like GM screens went entirely out of fashion for a while there, until revived by Pathfinder and some retro-clones, but regular reference to charts was a staple of wargaming and so rests pretty deeply in the DNA of the role-playing hobby.  Nostalgia aside, we did find it quicker to record the target numbers for each degree of success on the character sheets (index cards) in the style used by 3rd Edition D&D to record the chance of rolling a critical.  E.g. "Fighting: Excellent 20 = 41, 71, 95" listing the 1d100 target numbers for Green, Yellow, and Red results.

The Universal Chart!  Check the top section to get a hint about degrees of success.

New Game:

Yesterday I also continued plugging away on writing Ghult: The Blood Coast, the scaffold board game that will tie together the activity in next week's middle school class.

Here is the random events chart!

Random Events: Immediately prior to the first player’s turn roll 2d6 and announce the event.  Unless noted otherwise, random events are resolved following the end of the last player’s turn.

2 Hurricane - “A strange hush falls over the shores of Ghult as clouds begin to mount higher and higher on the horizon.”  All ships that are not in a harbor space by the end of the turn sink.  The captains of ships sunk by a hurricane lose their next turn before being rescued and placed at Haut Port with an Expedition Marker and a Wounded Marker.

3 The Fever - “The men stumble and sway as they pick their way along the jungle trails, their eyes glassy and cheeks sallow.” All expeditions receive a Wounded Marker.

4 Cannibals - “Terrified villagers dash for cover -- the Eaters-of-Men have returned!”  Any expedition that is not in a space containing a harbor, village, ruin, Haut Port, or a base camp suffers a 1d6 attack at the end of the turn.

5 Natives are Restless - “The servants exchange furtive glances as drums throb in the night.” Roll 1d6 for each village: 1-3 discard any Pacified Marker; 4-6 no effect.  Any plantations in or touching spaces with unpacified villages stop producing gold until the villages are Pacified again.

6 Pirate Raid - “Black sails on the horizon!  Reavers have come in search of booty!”  Any base camp in a space containing a harbor suffers a 1d6 attack.  If the pirates win the fight the base camp is not destroyed, but any expedition in that space receives a Wounded Marker and any gold in that location is stolen.  

7 No Special Event - “Somewhere in the jungle unknown birds utter strange, human-like cries that rise above the unceasing drone of myriad insects.”

8 Squall - “A sudden storm lashes the coasts of Ghult.”  All ships that are not in a harbor space are driven one space in a random direction.  Roll 1d6: 1 north; 2-4 south; 5 east; 6 west.  Ships that are forced into a space containing land but no harbor receive a Damaged Marker.  Ships that are forced into a space containing no water remain in place and receive a Damage Marker.

9 The Kracken - “It rises from the deep, driven up from the cold blackness by a great hunger -- The Kracken has come!”  All ships that are not in a harbor roll 1d6.  On a result of 1-2 they are devoured by the kracken.  The captain of ships eaten by the Kracken lose their next turn before being rescued and placed at Haut Port with an Expedition Marker and a Wounded Marker.

10 Tremors - “The earth quivers and mutters underfoot as the crashing of falling trees echoes through the jungle.” All Fortified camps discard one Fortified Marker

11 Volcanic Eruption - “Clouds of burning ash are spewed skyward from the distant peaks.”  Plantations produce no revenue this turn.  Each base camp suffers a 1d6 attack at the end of the turn.  Expeditions in base camps that are destroyed receive a Wounded Marker.

12 Roll Twice More - disregard any roll of 12

The entire rules set will come out at about three pages, but I still need to develop play-sheets for each captain to help them track gold and such. I'm also stumped as to what to use for game tokens / markers, but if I figure something decent out I might be able to play Ghult: The Blood Coast during the regular school year!

Dining Room Table Cartography

We're only a week away from the first session of my Summer Adventure Games Enrichment Camp and my dining room table has been converted into workspace.  Last night I painted an old piece of formica (not my first choice of materials, but it was lightweight and free) to create a campaign map for the return of students to the teeming jungles around Bawal Bayan, The Forbidden City.

Here's my first go using cheap acrylic paint on formica 

The map will help us track the campaign-level action as the students are divided among the several competing fantasy nations of my homebrew Olde School Wizardry campaign world.

Each student will take on the role of a captain, commanding an expedition that sails to unexplored Ghult to seek riches and settle new lands in the name of their motherland.  This will tie our various games together thematically:

• Rounds of Settlers of Catan will be set on the archipelago west of Ghult.

• The Adventurers: Pyramid of Horus will represent the action of teams competing to loot ancient ruins on the mainland.

• Thieves of Cadwallon will be set in the unaligned settlement of Haut Port (that's "Highport" for you old A-series Grognards).

• Small World will reflect the struggles of indigenous races deeper in the interior of the fever-haunted wilderness.

• Dagger for Kids will see explorers return to the deadly ruins of Bawal Bayan (inspired by I1 - Dwellers of the Forbidden City).

By the end of the week, the student who accumulates the most gold (points) across the various games offered will be the winner and will receive the title of "governor".  We'll also determine the winning nation (team) by summing the scores of the players.

Added some lettering w/ sharpie -- next I covered it with contact paper and added two-inch gridlines and a compass rose

I'll also run a few rounds of a meta-game each day using the campaign map, setting up the action in the break-out games that follow.  I'm still working out the details, but generally each captain (player) will have the following choices:

sail the coast looking for new natural harbors

• disembark and establish a base camp

• fortify base camp against possible attack (by natives or other captains)

• pacify native villages

• establish plantations to generate revenues

• explore the interior in search of ruins, native villages, or mineral wealth

• search ruins for treasure

• prospect for gold

• raid the plantations or camps of other captains

from wikipedia

Anyway, I'll be sketching out the details this week (hopefully by tomorrow) so I can get them into an easy reference format for my players.

Homeguard Campaign: More Puzzles

Our Homeguard BECMI D&D campaign group met again recently, this time exploring vintage TSR adventure The Horror on the Hill.  I glossed over time spent at the fort / base camp, distributing a few rumors and then fast forwarding to the party's first approach to the ruined monastery.  We tied this location into our campaign thematically with the idea that, like The Shrine of the Sacred Spring, a four-level homebrew dungeon we explored last year, this monastery may also have been built to guard a potent magical fountain -- it's exact location now forgotten.

wikimedia cc

This group loves puzzles and so I worked out some extra material ahead of time to add depth (and learning) to the experience.

First there was a handwritten prop -- a memoir from the last surviving member of a failed expedition to the eponymous, geyser-studded Hill.  Ever since Tolkien used this trick at Balin's Tomb it has been a go-to for me.  

from The Fellowship of the Ring 2001 New Line Cinema

In-campaign written accounts, whether journals, memoirs, annotated maps, or death-bed confessions create a number of puzzles for the players.

• What do we know about the writer and his or her motives?

• How reliable is the writer?  How does his or her biases show up in the text?

• What might be missing from the journal, letter, or map?

• What does a particular word or turn of phrase mean?

• What details may have changed since this account was written?

In this case, the four-page account was written in cursive, a script that was effectively foreign to about half of my players!  They could make out some words of course, but others were less familiar and had to be puzzled out by context.  The document gave a fair description of the upper floor of the ruined monastery but, as the wizard's party was whittled down, the description of locations and inhabitants on the second level became sketchy. The account of the third level of the dungeon lacked any contextual details (the wizard arrived there by tumbling down a slide trap and was lost) and likewise, the fourth level was largely a blur save for the clear recognition of a huge chamber containing a vast mound of treasure -- more than could be counted -- this last detail providing the hook for our group's involvement.

One-Eyed Willy's Treasure!  
from The Goonies - Warner Bros. 1985

"It's an illusion or a trap or there's a dragon."

This skeptical mantra was taken up around the table -- there had to be a catch, hadn't there?  There can't just be a huge pile of treasure waiting there to be taken, right?  I guess they're Learning the Dungeon.

With players as young as seven at the table, I knew the journal pages alone wouldn't provide enough to set this session apart from others, so I scratched around on Google and came up with another puzzle to add to the scenario.

This one was purely logic-based. I took a medium-difficulty puzzle from Math is Fun.com and I reskinned it, replacing "trees" with "towers" and "tents" with "wizards".  I couldn't just hand them the rules for solving it of course, so I had the "board" engraved on a wall with an inscription surrounding it:

Every wizard by his own tower

But no two shall share their power

Place the magic-users such

That not even corners touch

Not poet-laureate stuff, I'll admit, but it hinted at the rules of the mini-game without actually spelling things out / breaking immersion.  I sketched out the wall-panel on paper in advance, replacing the digits with symbols, so that created another sub-puzzle ... which mark meant "two", which meant "zero"?  

The final ah-ha moment was when I decided to make the wizards be removeable, ivory pegs.  These were then scattered around the dungeon (some in locations explored prior to finding the puzzle board itself).

accessed here

Both puzzles were a success and formed nice bookends to the combat encounters with hobgoblins and the kids' very first troll.  Being new to the hobby, they didn't know about trolls and their regenerative powers of course, so it was delightful to watch them scramble to find a way to dispatch it.  Fortunately they had already pinned some hobgoblins in a chamber with flaming oil and it didn't take too long for them to decide to toss the troll's head into the fire when, after lopped off in a backstab, it kept trying to bite them.

took this pic during a break - troll in upper left

The only thing that is a bit nerve-wracking about all of this is that I'll need to keep generating cool puzzles, traps and riddles for future sessions -- I've gone and set the bar pretty high for myself!

It's Clobberin' Time!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, among a host of other projects this summer, I'm attempting to expand the depth of my Olde School Wizardry campaign by running a series of one-shots within the same campaign world, but using different published rules sets.  Each set of role-playing rules has its own unique flavor and tends to encourage both a certain style of play and the emergence of specific themes.

Robin Laws explains:

"Another factor to consider when choosing a game is how well its theme and tone suit your tastes, and those of your group.  We often focus on how well a game's rules perform certain tasks: we want to know if its combat system is elegant or clunky, its character progression fast or slow, its powers well-tested or unbalanced.  At least as important is its emotional content." 

                                                        (from Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering, 2002, available here)

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I chose to use TSR's Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set for my first one-shot ... though, since at the time of this writing I'm planning a third session, I probably need to come up with something better to call them ... "mini-campaigns" ... "spinoffs"?

This was before Spawn, Deadpool, and any of the grittier stuff.

I played MSH pretty extensively back in Junior High.  One friend was forbidden from playing D&D by parents, so it became an obvious go-to for us.  Angsty teen skater Trevor Morton suited up to battle evil as Orion.  Another friend dutifully slogged through four separate published adventures with his hero Camoflage ("The bad guys will never see me coming!").  My older brother even got in on the action briefly when the streets of New York City erupted to disgorge a giant pink sewer alligator, part of a plot by Baron Zemo.  Still another friend was briefly obsessed with Ironman and wanted to recreate the feel of the Armor Wars storylines.  We literally played the cover right off my player's book.

A couple years ago, when my friend Steve hooked me up with a whole box of HeroClix, I dug my box back out and taught my kids to play, running a half dozen short adventures for Red Wasp, Super-Sarah, and Ironman.  We had fun with it, but with school limiting game time we focused much more on D&D.

This year I dusted MSH off yet again and converted the Universal Table to D20 (basically just divide everything by 5) to use as the core mechanic of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Call of Cthulhu mashup set in Arkham Massachusetts.  I can't claim credit for the idea -- it was Steve's -- but four young ladies in my middle school after-school games club seemed to enjoy unraveling the sinister plots of Keziah Mason (though they actually got pretty attached to Brown Jenkin, deciding that he was too cute to slay).

If you haven't seen it yet, please do yourself a favor and watch this

Penned by Jeff Grubb, who clearly knew and loved his source material, Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set did a far better job than most games of emulating the big, two-fisted, four-color world of action found in the marvel comics titles of the 80s.

MSH gets right to the point -- The very first ability score you generate for your character is "Fighting".  That's right, in MSH punching people in the face isn't a skill that some characters have in varying degrees, it's an ability score ... its fundamental to who every character is and becomes their first and most basic measure of identity, because, you know ... super heroes!

Best . Punch . Ever

Here's what else MSH offers:

• Character generation provides a sweet balance of random rolls and player choice.

• Power Stunts (using your powers in less than straight-forward ways), The Universal Table mechanic, and broadly defined categories of action mean you can quickly and easily simulate any sort of action that you can find on the page of your favorite comic with virtually no crunch.

• A round is the amount of time it takes to do something in the frame of a comic book page.

• The experience system is innovative -- players acquire points (karma) for doing heroic things in proportions that throw system weight behind the theme of the game -- saving citizens and preventing crime will net you more karma than merely pounding on Dr. Octopus.  Karma is acquired at the end of each encounter, keeping the choice-to-reward interval very tight.  More importantly, karama can be spent to modify just about any die roll.  This creates a constant tension for players between choosing to stack the deck for short term success versus saving karma for long term improvement (a very gradual process).

• Contacts are flexible and represent allies that the characters can call upon in need.  What's cool about this system is that the players don't need to identify their contacts during character generation but may opt to save them to declare at any future point in the game.  In addition to shifting some narrative control to the players, this also simulates the turn-on-a-dime plotting of many comics.  Black Widow just happens to have worked with a fellow who can get the heroes the schematics that they need to sneak into the facility and catch the bad guy off guard before the hostages can be harmed.

• The Resource System is light and flexible, throwing the game's focus back on the heroic action scenes where it belongs.  You don't know exactly how many millions Tony Stark is worth, you just have a general idea of what he can buy at short notice and what he can't.

If you can't spring for the $100 to get your own vintage copy, you can get free pdfs of the rules and just about everything else ever published for the game at Classic Marvel Forever -- a truly amazing and obsessive work that also includes stats for every hero and villain you can think of, adventure seeds, and D20 conversions.

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So how did MSH work for a pseudo-Homeric Classical Age mini-scenario?

Pretty doggone well!

Our story opened with a small group of "Champions" deciding to go rogue and escape the grip of the Auld (pronounced "old"), an evil, alien, psychic overlord.  

In session one the players built characters, learned the basics of the system, hatched a very basic plan, and effected their escape.  They weren't going to get off easy of course, and in the second session we shifted into hunt-down-the-runaway-supers mode, a style used so well in Uncanny X-Men titles of the 1980s.  The climax of the second session was a three-on-three super hero fight.

  

On the players' side were:

• The Speculator ("The spy"), who bent light around him so that he walked cloaked in shadows and could blind foes with a touch.  His piercing gaze could penetrate any illusion and detect the slightest details in his environment.

• It Sweeps, formerly a janitor in the palace of the mad overlord, he could unleash swirling clouds of sand, grit, and glaring light capable of blinding and disorienting foes.  He could further shift these forces to created detailed mirages.

• Krome, his bones replaced by a captive water elemental, lashed out with amazing strength using the pair of aqueous tentacles sprouting from his back and was able to pound all but the toughest foes into oblivion in seconds.

On the NPC side and blocking the escape of the characters were:

• Primus Gvarrus, a hulking suit of burnished bronze armor, piloted by the suffering mortal trapped within.

• Krathel, who attracted and adhered dead vegetation until he became a sort of thirty-foot-tall living wicker man.

• Aquilla, an airborne blaster who scouted out the action and attacked from above.

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Intimidated by Gvarrus's nigh-invulnerable might, Sweeps opted instead to neutralize Aquilla with a series of blinding blasts that kept him out of the action.  Meanwhile, Gvarrus and Krathel teamed up to pound Krome senseless, foiling his escape.  Picking his moment carefully, The Speculator blinded Gvarrus and, depleting his karmic reserves, forced his way through the psychic barrier to freedom with Sweeps on his heels.

The final act of session two was an amusing denouement-turned-chase-scene involving a lake, a hedge, and a sheep, in which Sweeps accidentally divested himself of his super powers, ensuring that he would escape the inevitable pursuit by the agents of the Auld.

I'm keen to see what our third and final session of this MSH mini-campaign will bring.  I think we'll roll the clock ahead and pick up with The Speculator and his comrades having settled in to watch over a sea-side, bronze age community as its benevolent guardians.  How will the village fare when the servants of their former master finally track them down?

Homeguard Campaign: A Riddle

The door was made of iron, and wore a thick coat of rust.  It was one of those doors, cast with swirling acanthus leaves, raised studs, leering goblin-faces and a grinning skull surmounting all.

It was sealed of course, hinges hidden on the far side, and investigation revealed no sign of lock or key hole, but the evil priest was somewhere beyond it and he was in desperate need of a good beating.

Then there was the ceiling.  It was perforated at intervals with these troubling holes.  Just narrow enough to prevent a gloved hand from exploring very far, torchlight revealed the slightest hint of something metallic waiting within each of these several dozen recesses.  A trap.

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Above the door, just about as high as a man could easily reach, a strange word was inscribed, each letter on its own dusty ceramic tile: WHAOXSDME

Holly the elf, one of the six adventurers gathered in the room, scrutinizing the lintel made a discovery; there was an inscription here!

In deep caves and in dungeons

I hide from the sun

Yet always I follow

No matter how fast you run

By noon of each day

I've shrunk to my least

But when the day dies

I grow long in the east

"It's a riddle!" 

"What's Whaxsome?"

"And ... and if we get it wrong the spikes come down and ..."  

"I can figure this out."

"Can you press the letters?"  

"I'm going to start pressing a couple of them and see if ... "

"No!"

"It's shadow."

"You don't use all of the letters."

"You've got to press them in order."

"I bet it's some monster.  That doesn't sound good about the day dies."

"It's shadow."

"Are you sure?"

"Look, it's shadow"

"I press shadow."

DM: "So who is doing the pressing?"

"I will."

DM: "It's a little too high for you to reach."

"I'll give her a boost."

DM: "Tell me exactly what order you press the letters in."

All Together: "S-H-A-D-O-W!"

DM: "Okay, Holly presses the letters one at a time.  Hidden gears creek as the door swings inward ..."

[cheering]

Led by Holly the Elf (played by a very clever fourth grade girl) the party blasted through this puzzle in far less time than it took you to read this post (far, far less time than it took for me to think up a simple riddle and prepare a drawing of the sealed iron door).

My wife was in the adjoining room with the rest of the adults, listening in on the action.  Also an educator, on the drive home she would point out that the players ranged from a 2nd grade girl to a 7th grade boy ... not usually kids who spend a lot of time playing together ... and that for those minutes at the table, they were fully engaged and operating as peers.

That's a pretty amazing testament to the power of the story-telling medium of paper-and-pencil tabletop RPGs to engage young people -- even those native to a digital era.

Turning Four

Aerick, my oldest daughter's fighter and a core character in our Homeguard campaign for mostly elementary school aged players, reached fourth level yesterday!

  

He now sports an impressive 25 hit points (4d8), his hit scores have improved by a point, and he is the proud wielder of a magic sword (one of only two magic items in the party).  

here's the mini she uses for him

I did a quick count last night and I believe that she has run him for almost exactly 30 sessions of play, averaging about two hours each.

1983 Mentzer Basic

Lawful to his very core, we're playing Mentzer-era Red Box Basic D&D, and there is no paladin character class (we're in dwarf = a class territory here), but if there were, then Aerick would be a paladin's paladin.  He has no problem picking up treasure if it's there, but if a quest to stop some vile foe or rescue an innocent awaits, he won't be swayed from his course by the prospect of mere riches.

Actual quote: "We don't have time.  We need to get this potion back to the Downs before the people there die." 

That sometimes means leaving a lot of experience points on the table in the form of unclaimed treasures. Despite the flashy Larry Elmore artwork, mechanically, Basic D&D doesn't reward players for combat or heroic play nearly so generously as for scoring big hauls of loot.  Greed tempered by caution is the most sure way to advance in level, which in my mind makes Aerick's rise to the rank of "hero" (level titles are way cool) that much more impressive.

Mentzer Expert ... yeah, this fighter is dead meat too ...

In a rare moment of perfect timing, a beautiful copy of Mentzer Expert D&D arrived in the mail yesterday, expanding the adventure to levels 4-14.  A gift for my daughter of course!

The Forest Oracle: The Worst is the BEST!

As I mentioned previously, my Homeguard campaign group (BECMI D&D) just completed adventure module N2 The Forest Oracle by Carl Smith (1984).

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Over on RPG site enworld, The Forest Oracle has received the distinction of being heralded, "the worst TSR module ever published."  Folks there go on for 31 pages of posts (one page shorter than the module itself), describing the various flaws of this prepackaged adventure and eventually developing an amusing mini-game, writing additional encounters in an imitation of Smith's style.

These criticisms aren't unfounded.  There are certainly some pretty bizarre plot holes: 

• If Madame Riva, a mere fourth level magic-user, is somehow potent enough to curse the entire region of the Shire ... whoops ... make that "The Downs", the event that sets up the entire plot, then why can't she handle her own ogre problem?

• Why do the orcs feel the need to equip their prisoners with an axe?

• Why can't the level 12 druid (who can cast spells like Finger of Death, and Creeping Doom, which can inflicting up to 1000 hp per round!) and his guard of level 5 non player characters handle a mere 21 goblins by themselves instead of needing help from the players?

The Oracle himself

• Why can't Chloe the nymph figure out how to wake her boyfriend, sleeping in an unlocked cabin, by herself?  If she has a magic potion that can lift (her own) enchantment upon the lake, then why doesn't she just use the antidote herself instead of waiting for the players to wander along and asking them to do it?

Then there is the style of the writing.  The majority is fine, but there are quite a few amusingly awkward passages:

• "The trip to the Downs is accomplished with little more than travel.  The Downs looms in sight, as does the glory of helping this blighted, suffering land."

• "Two orcs watch the party while the others rest and drink wine or eat.  One guard watches the wood cutter, and another watches those gathering fallen branches.  The four orcs sit between the two groups, roughly 150' from either.  The guards are more interested in watching their friends than a group of prisoners."

photo from quietlakect.com

Much less easy to overlook in a published for-profit product are inconsistencies and errors in the actual game mechanics or their presentation (emphasis added):

• "Evan the Forester (Fighter; Lvl 3; AC 6; MV 12"; HD 2; hp 5; #AT 1: Dmg 2-7 [axe]; SA/SD None)"

• goblins "(AC 6; MV 6"; HD 1-7 hp; hp 5 each; #AT 1; Dmg 1-6 [sword]; SA/SD None)"

• "Roll 1d6.  On 1-3 the brigands surprise, on 3-4 there is no surprise, and on 5-6 the party surprises."

Of course it's more than a little absurd to go back to these products from the 80s and critique them as if they were works of literature; I doubt anyone would bother to do the same with 30-year-old articles from Readers Digest or Life magazine, but then with the rise of the Old School Renaissance there is significant interest among a certain set of gamers in these classic products.

For me, The Forest Oracle is distinct by being the very first TSR module that I ever purchased, prepared, and ran on my own.  I'd already run my older brother's copy of B2 The Keep on the Borderlands and many homemade scenarios prior to this, but I can remember walking into Juvenile Sales (now defunct; yes, it had the absolute worst name for a toy store EVER) looking for new game material like it was yesterday.  

The Keith Parkinson artwork on the from cover, the fairly brief length, the generic fantasy world setting, the sealed shrink wrap, and the fact that it was a low level module (for levels 2-4) that could provide new adventure for my players who had completed B2 all made The Forest Oracle an obvious pick.

How awesome was Keith Parkinson? cover of Northern Wilderness, Paladium Books

My first run through was a bit rough, but my players were patient.  I think I was so focused on keeping the game moving that I overlooked the module's flaws and we had a good time over the three sessions it took to complete it.  The plot was so simple and episodic that the next time I ran it I didn't need to refer very closely to the text, and so again, the flaws went largely unnoticed.  I'd go on to run The Forest Oracle maybe six more times over the years and at some point I stopped even bothering to bring the module to the table, just working from memory.

When I ran it last month for The Homeguard campaign, a handful of modest changes made the game play both rich and memorable:

• When confronted by the brigands, the characters gave the secret pass-sign that they had learned from another group of bandits outside Quasqueton during an earlier quest and ended up with a rich source of rumors, foreshadowing, and advice.

 from http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Siren

• Chloe, the nymph of Quiet Lake, became a frightening, ghostly siren who longed for companionship, but couldn't understand why her lovers became so still and dull when she had lured them below the surface of the lake.

• The Bloody Hand orcs were recast as the vanguard of a massive horde and forecast events that will continue to impact the campaign. 

• Starbuck the red squirrel, a knight visiting the court of the High Druid, became a companion and guide upon the trail.

In the end, Carl Smith's work, for all its flaws, had done exactly what it was designed to do: it opened a door to a new imaginative landscape and provided a springboard for ideas that continue to provide players with hours of adventure and fun.  

You can get it as a pdf from Drive Thru RPG for $4.99 right here.

Best . module . ever .