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Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Adventure A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity

 

Designer: David Cook

 

11” x 17” Loose card-stock cover

 

8.5” x 11” inner booklet, stapled, 24 pages (including covers)

 

Edition reviewed: 1980, TSR Games

 

Number of Characters: 6-8 (stated within the booklet)

 

Character level: 4-7

 

Cover description: It is time to put a stop to the marauders! For years the coastal towns have been burned and looted by the forces of evil. You and your fellow adventurers have been recruited to root out and destroy the source of these raids. But beware, hundreds of good men and women have been taken by the slavers and have never been seen or heard from again!

 

Player summary: For years, organized pirates and slavers have made a living by pillaging the coastal towns on the Sea of Gearnat and capturing innocent folks to be sold as slaves. The coastal lords have hired you and your team to put a stop to the raids. The slavers and their pirate organization have been traced to the city of Highport; a once human city that has been overrun by orcs, goblins, kobolds, gnolls and trolls. You’ve been given transport to the city, and you have entered and explored as much as you can without drawing unwanted attention. You’ve talked in hushed tones with locals, and the bits and pieces of information you’ve gathered for a few gold coins has led you to a ruined temple compound in the corner of the city.

 

Dungeon Master information: There are two options listed for gameplay: tournament or campaign. While the rules vary slightly for each, the starting position is altogether different. The starting location for tournament-play definitely gets things rolling much quicker while campaign-play forces the party to punch their way to the meat of the adventure.

 

There are plenty of encounter areas to keep a team of adventurers busy for quite a while (three to four multiple-hour sessions, at least). Half of the encounter areas have nothing to do with the storyline which conveys a sense of a rather disorganized slaver organization; they’ve established their headquarters in a compound shared by deadly creatures.

 

It appears as though the primary goal of the characters is to put an end to every slaver employee found within (and under) the temple compound. To do so, they’ll not only have to contend with the slavers and their lackeys, but they’ll also have to dispatch some very powerful temple inhabitants along the way.

 

My thoughts: This is a hack-and-slash adventure with minimal problem solving. Sure, there are traps here and there, but there are far more clusters of unavoidable combatants the party members will have to annihilate in order to complete their exploration of the compound. The unrelated (storyline-wise) denizens of the compound are quite challenging as well.

 

Although it isn’t mentioned, when the party members finally discover a room full of kidnapped innocents, there could be spinoff quest lines for those individuals who wish to be returned to their families, or perhaps wish to join the adventures to fight alongside them and provide a little payback to their captors.

 

The encounter descriptions are crystal clear. The upper level and lower-level maps line up where they should (trap doors, stairs, etc.) and make design sense. The monsters are clearly described as are their most likely course of actions when they engage the adventurers. All in all, I think this would be a fun adventure to run as a DM, and I believe the players would certainly enjoy the varied encounters (there’s quite a few with interesting adversaries that have nothing to do with the slaver business).