Fantasy Master- Gygaxian Systemless Supplements

[wulfgar]

Through the magic of the interwebs I just heard about a product called Aesheba:Greek Africa. It's a systemless rpg supplement about an alternate Africa populated with Greek City States. It turns out this is part of a series of books put out under Gary Gygax's name in the mid-late 80's. So far I've found:

The Convert
The Abduction of Good King Despot
Aesheba: Greek Africa

I'm not sure if there were any others in the Fantasy Master series.

So does anyone know anything about these books? Are they any good?

[philotomy]

I've heard good things about The Abduction of Good King Despot, but I have no personal experience with any of these products.

[foster1941]

The Abduction of Good King Despot is an old tournament module from the 70s, written by Will & Schar Niebling and Russ Stambaugh of the Metro Detroit Gamers (who were instrumental in early D&D fandom -- they ran their own annual convention (Wintercon) and also organized the D&D tournaments at the early Origins cons, commissioned the "Lost Caverns of Tsojconth" adventure from Gary Gygax and published the OD&D version of that module in 1976, published the original version of "Quest for the Fazzle Wood" (which TSR later re-released as module O1: The Gem and the Staff); Will Niebling worked at TSR for awhile, and in later years was CEO of Mayfair Games, a position he just retired from within the last year or so) that is a total fun-house non-ecologized dungeon. Released in 1988, AFAICT this was the first rpg product to be explicitly marketed as "retro" or "old-school," long before Hackmaster, Dungeon Crawl Classics, or OSRIC. Spoilers follow:















The idea is that the insane wizard Ignax has set the dungeon up as a test (there's a fairly detailed backstory about the long-standing rivalry between Ignax and another wizard, Candelabra; with both Despot and the PCs caught in the middle). The structure of the dungeon is a straight-line gauntlet with twelve major encounter areas, each tied thematically to one of the signs of the zodiac, and either 3 or 6 red-herring rooms for each major room (some are helpful, some dangerous, most are just time-wasters); there's a pattern on the floor (each 10' square is a different color -- red, green, blue, white) that if the players are paying attention tells which rooms lead to the major encounters and which don't (the pattern is too complex to detail here, but it's tied to which classical element goes with each sign). The treasure in each of the major encounters is a single huge gem of the stone tied to that zodiac sign. The challenges run the gamut of old-school D&D, starting out as straight combat (Ares = a group of berserkers, Taurus = evil witch and 2 gorgons, Gemini = 2 twin brother frost giants) and becoming more complex and problem-solving-oriented. The final room (after the obligatory false-ending in which if the PCs aren't careful they'll end up fighting Orcus!) is a huge set-piece which requires the PCs to figure out how to use 6 of the gems to free King Despot and which, if they're not careful, can lead to (1) losing the other 6 gems (which are supposed to be their treasure), (2) having to re-fight some (or all, or all several times!) of the previous 12 opponents, and (3) getting teleported back into previous rooms and having to work their way through again.










End Spoliers
As I've said many times before, this is probably my #1 favorite D&D module, both for the cleverness and variety of its challenges, and because of its unapologetically fun-house nature (it makes dungeons like White Plume Mountain and The Ghost Tower of Inverness seem downright naturalistic by comparison). It's got a very light and whimsical tone and verges in parts on being a comedy module (especially the various points at which Ignax appears and taunts the party in assorted guises) but, like the classic Dungeonland modules, players who let the whimsical nature get them off-guard won't last long, because the dungeon is also filled with very tough combat and puzzles. I've run this module twice, but neither time did the players make it more than halfway through (which was disappointing to me because IMO the second half of the module is more interesting than the first -- less combat, more puzzles).

As part of the "Fantasy Master" line the module doesn't have traditional statblocks, but rather has generic stats based on the ratios of the monsters' abilities to the party's abilities -- the monster has an x% chance to hit the average party member, is y% likely to be hit by the average party member, and can take damage equal to z% of the average party member's hit points. This theoretically makes the module usable both with any game system and at any level, but since almost all of the monsters actually come straight out of various D&D books I just use their standard D&D stats (which ends up balancing the module for a 9th level party). The treasures are similarly generic -- "something that will heal damage," "a weapon with a minor combat bonus," "something powerful that can't be properly used within the context of this adventure," etc. so this module can't really be run straight off the shelf -- the prospective DM is going to have to spend a couple hours filling in details (but that isn't too much of a burden, since the complexity of some of the encounters means that the DM should devote some time to studying them in advance anyway -- if the DM is trying to read the module for the first time as the players are going through it he's going to be in big trouble in some of the more complicated set-piece areas (think of, for example, Rob Kuntz's modules where a single "room" might have 3 or 4 different things going on at the same time).

One last note on The Abduction of Good King Despot: Gary Gygax used to cite this as probably his favorite D&D module that he didn't write, and it was his favorite to run at conventions (though from what I understand he ran an abbreviated version that could be completed in a single session, whereas the published version, unless the players are really good, is likely to take at least 2 or 3 sessions, possibly even more (cf. the group on dragonsfoot who recently took 7 sessions to get through the ostensibly single-session Tomb of Horrors)). He ran it most recently at a con in Canada, about 2 years ago.

This is the only module in the Fantasy Master line I actually own. Of the others, I've heard mostly good things about The Town of Baldemar (designed by the late Bob Blake, who used to run the D&D Open tournament at GenCon) and mixed things about AEsheba: Greek Africa and The Convert (both by Frank Mentzer; the latter was originally an RPGA tournament module and TSR tried to sue to prevent New Infinities from publishing it). There were at least 2 more titles announced for the Fantasy Master line that weren't published before New Infinities folded in late 1988 -- Those Darn Dwarves (which AFAIK has still never been published) and Epic of Yarth: Necropolis and The Tomb of Rahotep (which was later adapted to and published as part of the Dangerous Journeys: Mythus game in 1992 (and then adapted again to d20 and republished by Necromancer Games in 2002)).

[dwayanu]

Thanks for bruiting again the module's excellence; for whatever reason, I only now got the picture of why it's so beloved!

Another o.o.p. gem for which to quest ...

(sad that back in the day, all I saw from New Infinities was the Cyborg Commando game)

[wulfgar]

Have an exalt Foster1941! Great information.

[calithena]

FWIW, I know Russ Stambaugh rather well, though I haven't talked to him for about a year. He's a really wonderful person. In addition to having co-written GKD, he also was Gary's co-DM for the original GenCon run of D3: Vault of the Drow. I can't really do that story justice, but how Stambaugh got the group he was DMing to come in second rather than first in the final round of the tournament is a really great gaming story. (Basically the party just got suckered into talking forever to supposedly willing-to-negotiate drow at the black tower, and then when they finally looked out the window...)

[Zulgyan]

And where would one get such an awesome module?

[philotomy]

There's a copy up for auction on ebay, right now.

[foster1941]

May 28, 2008 18:30:00 GMT -6 philotomy said:

There's a copy up for auction on ebay, right now.

Somebody from this site should buy it. Better yet, somebody from this site should buy the rights to it and republish it. I asked Gary a couple years back if he knew who currently owned the rights and he didn't, but suspected it was probably the original authors (since New Infinities didn't get bought out by another company, it simply folded).

[geoffrey]

I just ordered a copy from Biblio.com for a grand total of $13.49. Foster, your review sold me on it.

[foster1941]

Hope you like it. Lest anyone hold me responsible after spending $ on this module and hating it (or, even worse, being indifferent towards it) I want to stress that my (and EGG's) opinion of this module's quality is by no means universally shared. The structure is completely linear (there's literally only one entrance to and one exit from* each of the major encounter areas, and you have to go through all of them in order), the contents are very whimsical (including a talking goldfish, an NPC with a lisp who gets offended if you mispronounce his name, and the Gnax Family portrait gallery (Agnax, Bignax, Cygnax, Dognax, Eggnax, f*gnax, Gygnax, and Hognax)), and there is absolutely no verisimilitude or logic (except for the internal logic described in the spoiler-block above), so if any of those bother you you're probably not going to like this module. For many people this module (alongside White Plume Mountain and The Ghost Tower of Inverness, but even moreso) would probably encapsulate everything they think was "wrong" with D&D in its early/primitive days before Tracy Hickman/Ed Greenwood/Monte Cook/whoever came along and saved it from itself. If you're the kind of person who thinks "how did the BBEG possibly have the resources to build this place, and even if he did, why would he use them in this way?" or who wonders what all these monsters are actually doing when they're not waiting for the PCs to show up, this module is almost certainly not for you. It meshes with my preferred approach to play almost perfectly (and even helped define it), but if there's one thing I've learned in my years of online D&D fandom it's that not everybody shares my preferred approach to play...

*actually a couple rooms do have 2 exits, but even in those cases both of them still lead to the next major encounter area

[Melan]

And the eBay copy is mine, at a very advantageos cost no less! ;D

[geoffrey]

I have received and read my copy of The Abduction of Good King Despot. It was definitely worth the money I paid for it. I think it would be a blast to play.

I like the way each monster can be scaled to the level of the party exploring the dungeon. Even 1st-level characters could do it (with some work). This dungeon (which I will gear toward 3rd-level characters) will find a place in my upcoming Holmes-only D&D campaign. The module's light tone will fit in quite nicely. Since my Gamma World games are so dark, I'm looking for the converse in my D&D campaign.

[kenmeister]

Btw, when I found out about Good King Despot I went to Amazon, not eBay, and found 3 of them all not too expensive. I purchased one, and I'll actually be running it starting in July. Anyone in the NH-MA-RI area is welcome; there's room for one more player.

[aldarron]

Well, I can't say I share the enthusiasm. I bought Good King Despot when it was new because I was impressed that it was a favorite of Gygaxs and I wanted to have a product from his new company. I honestly think its one of the worst modules I every read. Nothing in it makes any particular sense in any way. In fact its more of a parody than a module. Quirky?; yes but for me not particularly funny or particularly fun. I'm not saying this to discourage those who like it, just to point out to those who are considering buying it after reading the glowing statements (as I did when I read the back cover) that you might find it as unrewarding as I did.

[Falconer]

Is your copy for sale? ;-)

[aldarron]

Heh. Well, yes it might be. Give me a couple days to dig it out and see what kind of shape its in. I'll PM you with the details.