8/5/2007 11:19:38 PM - B3.

Palace of the Silver Princess

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Help The last time this adventure saw light of day was in 1981,
when it made TSR history by being released and recalled in a
Eberron single day. Few of the many, many gamers who played
Forgotten Realms through the familiar "green cover" version of the module by
D&D Miniatures Tom Moldvay and Jean Wells ever realized that there had
RPGA been an earlier, suppressed "orange cover" version by Jean
Wells alone -- the version now being posted here. For years
Message Boards the few copies that evaded the recall have fetched high prices
Chat Rooms at auction or in the Dealers’ Room at Gen Con, typically sold
shrink-wrapped so that the potential buyer could never
compare it with the more readily available version. But it has
never been accessible to the average gamer -- until now.

A Piece of TSR History DOWNLOAD (2.26m PDF)

Coming smack in the middle of the early classics of the D&D beginner series, after B1. In
Search of the Unknown and B2. Keep on the Borderlands, and before B4. The Lost City and B5.
Horror on the Hill, this module is unique in that it was the first TSR adventure by a female
designer. The early eighties was a time of enormous expansion for the game. According to one
TSR veteran, Wells’ hiring was a deliberate attempt by Gary Gygax to expand beyond the all-
male perspective that had dominated the design department for the company’s first eight years -
- no doubt with an eye toward attracting a female market to match the burgeoning youth market
the game had already tapped. And, in fact, if one exempts the original version of "Rahasia"(1),
Wells’ module is the earliest written by a woman in our industry (2).

Objectionable Art

Why then, of all the modules TSR put out in its glory days, did only this one see a recall? The
answer lies in the art. Apparently when the adventure was distributed to the staff at the TSR
offices, one of the senior executives flipped through his copy and hit the roof. Not only did he
order the copies already sent out to stores recalled, but that night he or a member of his staff
went through the employees’ cubes and removed all the personal copies handed out earlier that
day. Only the few copies belonging to employees who had taken them home that night escaped
the confiscation. The rest ended up in a Lake Geneva, Wisc., landfill, along with all the copies
TSR could reclaim from those already shipped out.

What was so objectionable? Take a look at the illustration on page 9, titled "The Illusion of the
Decapus." A woman tied by her own hair, being menaced by nine men who threaten her with
knives while tearing off bits of her clothing, is hardly wholesome, but rather mild by TSR’s
standards. After all, it pales in comparison with the cover of 1976’s Eldritch Wizardry (a nude
woman tied down to a sacrificial altar), or the various bits of actual female nudity in the
hardcover Deities & Demigods rulebook (1980, just the year before), not to mention the various
bare-breasted illos of harpies, mermaids, and even witches that had appeared in various D&D
rulebooks over the year.

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8/5/2007 11:19:38 PM - B3. Palace of the Silver Princess
Perhaps it was a matter of context. After all, Deities & Demigods was part of the ADVANCED
Dungeons & Dragons line, whereas D&D itself and the "B" line in particular were theoretically
targeted at a somewhat younger audience. (In practice, most gamers made little distinction
between the two, typically playing AD&D and adapting the D&D modules to those rules.)

Whatever the reason, this illustration is not the only one cut from the revised version. Both the
picture of the tinker’s wagon (page 6) and the PCs in an inn (page 7) were cut when the
corresponding text was deleted. The picture of the chained wolf (page 11) was replaced by a
more dramatic one of a downed PC trying to keep the same wolf from tearing out his throat
(Wells-Moldvay page 28). The scene with Travis (page 15) was replaced by a smaller,
characterless one (W-M page 20), while the fighting swords (page 17) and "ubues at home"
scene (page 19, by the inimitable Erol Otus) thankfully vanished along with the monsters it
illustrated.

Other illos survived but were reduced in size (page 13) or cropped -- see page 20, where the
statuette of a woman was replaced by that of a dragon or, more interestingly, page 21, where in
a masterpiece of economy the ghosts were removed and the object on the pedestal redrawn,
leaving the PCs exactly as in the original. Likewise, in the illo on page 24, the dwarves’ faces
were redrawn to make them orcs, the ruby sword was added, the windows were replaced by
arcane designs, and the "sign of Arik" was tattooed on the cleric’s and warrior’s foreheads. And
of course, many new illustrations were added (17 in all) to fill gaps in the original (providing a
picture of the thieves Candella and Duchess, for instance) or to illustrate new scenes added by
Moldvay.

The Moldvay Touch

Of course, the two versions of the adventure differ in much more than just art. Most significantly,
Wells’ original takes Mike Carr’s B1 as its model, leaving many rooms unkeyed with blank
spaces for the DM to write in monster, treasure, and trap (a model followed a few years later by
Tracy Hickman in the "Desert of Desolation" series). Moldvay’s version, by contrast, follows
Gygax’s B2 and his own X2, Castle Amber (3) in presenting a fully-keyed, ready-to-play
dungeon -- the model TSR adopted at its default and has followed ever since.

Other Moldvay touches include the addition of an instructional section at the beginning of the
adventure, to show first-time DMs how to run an encounter. The whole premise of the adventure
is changed, so that instead of exploring the ruins of the long-dead Princess Argenta’s castle, as
in Wells’ original, the PCs are trying to rescue the princess very shortly after the disaster that
wrecked the castle. Whereas in Moldvay’s version the mysterious dragon-rider -- the natural
suspect for having caused the disaster -- turns out to be noble and good, in Wells’ original he is
not only a black-hearted villain but succeeds in corrupting the princess. It’s a shock to those who
played the familiar "green cover" version to find out that the ghosts dancing in the upstairs
ballroom apparently derive from the princess and her knight!

Other changes follow the refocusing of the adventure. The area map was deleted, along with all
the accompanying wilderness encounters. Several areas of the castle are redrawn, adding or
deleting rooms, while the entire Tower Level vanishes from the revised version. More
significantly, Moldvay fixes a significant flaw in the original, explaining how the princess got
upstairs in her own castle by adding a main staircase (area 22 in the "green cover" edition). The
encounter with the cleric Catharandamus is refocused so as to make combat with him
unavoidable, and his minions change from a pair of dwarves and a werebear (the rightful bearer
of the ruby sword) to a troop of orcs and a werewolf.

And, of course, the monsters. By revising the adventure, Moldvay spared us from some really,
really lame monsters getting into the canon. There might be some adventurers who want to fight
six-legged duckbill rats ("barics") or go toe-to-toe with bubbles (they’re . . . bubbles), but the
prize for true weirdness has to go to the ubues -- three-headed, three-armed, oddly gendered
creatures who feel as if they’ve somehow wandered out of Gamma World into D&D. Ironically
only the decapus, the source of the illustration that caused all the trouble, survived (perhaps
because it was featured on the color cover art!).

At any rate, now that the original is made available at last, we cannot only appreciate what
Moldvay changed but also for the first time in almost twenty years see the original as Wells
envisioned it. Most may prefer Moldvay’s more polished product, but I suspect some will ponder

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8/5/2007 11:19:38 PM - B3. Palace of the Silver Princess
the possibilities of running a "Return to the Palace of the Silver Princess" with some serious
surprises in store for those adventurers who thought they’d seen everything . . .

Notes

(1) Originally published as D&D compatible by Daystar Publications in 1979 and credited to
Laura Hickman, "Rahasia" reappeared in later versions (released by TSR in 1983 and again in
1984) jointly credited to Tracy and Laura Hickman.

(2) Two other early adventures were cowritten by women: Palace of the Vampire Queen by Pete
and Judy Kerestan (Wee Warriors, 1976) and Quest for the Fazzlewood by John and Laurie Van
De Graaf (Metro Detroit Gamers, 1978). The latter was revised and published by TSR in 1983
as a one-on-one module (01. The Gem and the Staff).

(3) Castle Amber itself was probably the inspiration for one of TSR’s most famous modules,
Tracy Hickman’s I6, Ravenloft.

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