Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Recaps & Roundups part 40: The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth


The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth was written by Gary Gygax for use as a tournament module at Wintercon V, late in 1976. Metro Detroit Gamers, the organisation that ran the con (and seemingly still does!) were given permission to sell the module. Apparently there were only about 300 made, sold as looseleaf sheets in ziploc bags. The adventure was later reworked by Gygax and published by TSR as S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, but today I'm only dealing with the original tournament version.

As can be seen on the cover above, it begins with a healthy dose of Greyhawk lore. To summarise, decades ago the archmage Iggwilv conquered the marches of Perrunland, and took loads of its treasures, including an artifact known as Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn. Legend said that he hid these treasures somewhere between the Sea of Dust and the Duchy of Geoff. Later, Iggwilv was slain by the demon Graz'zt, and his minions were scattered by an uprising of oppressed subjects. Much of the treasure was regained, but the Lanthorn and a number of arcane tomes were never recovered. This fits with later stuff from official TSR materials, except for one thing: Iggwilv is described here as a male, but later as a female. It's an inconsistency, but not an insurmountable one. I could always chalk it up to faulty knowledge from sages, or the ubiquitous sex-changing magic that is rampant in old-school D&D.

The tournament scenario involved teams of six players each. It looks to me as though all the teams used the same characters, with each team coming from a parallel world due to the caves being a dimensional nexus. There were six teams exploring the upper level in round 1, with the best player from each being taken to form a single team to explore the lower level in round 2. Those PCs were: Cathartic, a 7th level human cleric; Ethelrede, an 8th level human fighter; Flemin, a 6th level dwarf fighter; Dunil, a 9th level hobbit thief; Weslocke, a 4th/9th level fighter/magic-user; and Hockerbrechte, a 4th/4th/5th level fighter/magic-user/thief. I'll use these characters (complete with multi-dimensional make-up) as an NPC party in that region that has been into the caverns.

The tournament rules are odd, in that damage done is averaged out rather than rolled on dice. So a hit from a sword will always do 5 points of damage. I suppose this is an attempt to mitigate at least some of the game's randomness, which is probably a good idea for tournament scenarios.

The goal of the adventure is to penetrate into the central room of the Greater Caverns, where the Wondrous Lanthorn lies. That chamber has six doors, all of which must be opened before it can be entered. Opening a door other than the final one results in teleportation to another location, making the whole process more difficult.

The caverns themselves are very much a monster zoo, with blink dogs, displacer beasts, stirges, dragons, cockatrices, giants, and many other creatures living side by side. There aren't any brand new monsters, except for a giant snapping turtle. The hill giants are oddly specified as being Chinese, which could be literal if the dimensional nexus aspect of the caves is taken into account. Most of the monsters gets a brief physical description, and for some this might be the first time ever. The Rust Monster, for example, wasn't described in Supplement I: Greyhawk, but here it's said to be a "large armadillo-like creature with 2 tentacles on its head near mouth".

The central chamber, and the treasure, is guarded by a female Vampire Lord. In the later module this will be Drelzna, the daughter of Iggwilv, but here she's just a vampire with no particular backstory. Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn is a lantern artifact that sheds a golden light. Different effects can be obtained from it depending on the use of various coloured lenses.

Obviously, I'll include this adventure as a location in my version of Greyhawk, but I won't point any adventurers towards it until I get to the release of the module version. If anyone stumbles across it before that, they'll get to play the tournament version (without the tournament rules, of course). I've checked, and the maps are identical between both versions, so any discrepancies shouldn't be too hard to reconcile.

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