Sunday, January 10, 2016

[Mystara] Tom Moldvay's Lost Known World Modules?

Back in December I was talking about the origins of the Known World (later Mystara) Setting that grew out of the Akron, Ohio based home campaign of TSR game designers Tom Moldvay and Lawrence Schick. Tom Moldvay wrote many rulebooks and modules that would be associated with TSR's Known World:

  •  X1 - Isle of Dread (with David Cook), 1980 
  •  X2 - Castle Amber, 1981 
  •  Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules, 1981 
  •  B3 - Palace of the Silver Princess (with Jean Wells), 1981 
  • B4 - The Lost City, 1982 
  • M3 - Twilight calling, 1986 B1-9: 
  • In Search of Adventure, (contributor), 1987
  • "The Keep on the Borderlands", 1981 (sub-editor )
  • Dungeons & Dragons Expert  (Cook/Marsh), 1981   (sub-editor )
  • AD&D Mystara: Mark of Amber (credited for the X2 Castle Amber material), 1995
It has long been believed that the short story Black Lotus Moon that Moldvay wrote for Dragontales (1980 TSR) is also based in that same world.

A few days ago, my friend and fellow blogger Grodog  told me about some other lost modules that could be connected to this setting. C-2 Seren Ironhand (AD&D) was a module written by Tom Moldvay, published in Challenges magazine in 1986.

In Heroic Challenges, Lawrence Schick reported about this adventure module for 6-9 characters of levels 4-6 :
"The heroes root out a band of river-pirates, deal with an ancient race of cat-people, then explore the ancient dwarven mines of Morindar. Includes a 'Royal Commision' sheet empowering the adventurers to wipe out the pirates and reclaim wilderness land."
Originally planned as a trilogy, CH-1 The Morandir Company and CH-3 The Mountain King were never published. However, Grodog has apparently come across these unpublished modules and is planning to run the whole trilogy at GaryCon 2016. How I would love to go there!

Could these modules reveal more about the original Known World Campaign or are they a completely separate thing? That is hard to say. Tomas Steven Moldvay (born Nov. 5, 1948) passed away on March 9, 2007.





-Havard

4 comments:

  1. A quick correction, Havard: I'll run CH-1 this year, CH-2 next year, and CH-3 the year after. I'll post some more detail about the adventures on my web site sometime soon-ish.

    Allan.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah! Thanks for the clarification! And thanks again for letting me know about these gems. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Summary details posted at the Acaeum until I get them added to my site: https://www.acaeum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=249131#p249131

    Allan.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks again Allan! Reading with great interest! :)

    ReplyDelete

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