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Help The fourth of July, 1862. A shy Oxford mathematician whose favorite hobbies were
photography, befriending little girls, and writing nonsense verse took three of his boss’s
Eberron daughters on a picnic. During the course of the outing he made up a story about the adventures
Forgotten Realms of one of the little girls, Alice, after she fell down a rabbit hole into a strange land where she met
D&D Miniatures talking animals, living playing cards, and creatures out of nursery rhymes -- a story he later
RPGA turned into one of the great classics of English literature, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865), published under the pseudonym "Lewis Carroll." Several years later he wrote a sequel,
Message Boards or more properly companion piece, Through the Looking Glass (1871), in which Alice steps
Chat Rooms through a mirror into a topsy-turvey world inspired by the game of chess. Under the joint title
Alice in Wonderland, they have delighted children and scholars ever since. (1)
The late 1970s. Gary Gygax, the father of D&D, runs a party
of battle-hardened adventurers through the dungeons of
Castle Greyhawk when, falling down a very deep hole, they
stumble upon a very strange level indeed, populated by a
senile magic-user polymorphed into a anthropomorphic White
Rabbit and other suspiciously familiar characters . . . .
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forth, while the Jabberwock, Jub-Jub Bird, and Bandersnatch
are all statted out as "nonesuch" unique creatures.(3)
Sadly, these two adventures stand very near the end of Gygax’s career at TSR. A dozen
preceded them (none more than 32 pages long and the majority with only 16, 12, or even 8
pages of text), while only one followed.(4) Brief as they were, these fifteen adventures basically
defined what a D&D adventure was and for years stood as exemplars of the genre. The first
eleven of them, at least, are still classics of their kind, as is the late Gygax-Mentzer collaboration
Temple of Elemental Evil. But the other late adventures give a sense of too much borrowing from
other genres (Carroll and King Kong, respectively) without capturing their spirit. Despite being
intended in fun, the unrelenting mayhem of Dungeonland and The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror
creates a sense of bedlam, and the parody element opened the door for the later WG7, Castle
Greyhawk (1988) -- thought by some at the time to be a deliberate attempt by TSR to destroy
Gygax’s reputation in the wake of his departure from the company. The truth, especially given
the freelance talent involved, is more likely to be that someone thought it a good idea at the time.
They were wrong. Castle Greyhawk’s assortment of villains -- Col. Sanders, the Pillsbury
Doughboy, the cast of Star Trek, and others -- would be more in keeping with a bad episode of
Scooby Doo than a dungeon crawl. Unfortunately, the Castle Greyhawk collection of
unconnected parody adventures tainted the mystique of D&D’s original dungeon so badly that
not even the astonishingly deadly killer dungeon presented slightly later in WGR1. Greyhawk
Ruins (1990) could reclaim its lost prestige, and the site has remained abandoned as far as
publication is concerned ever since.
Notes
1 Matched only by the excellent nonsense verse found in Carroll’s otherwise terrible duology
Sylvie and Bruno (1889)/Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) and his masterpiece, the
incompatible Hunting of the Snark (1876).
2 "Monty Haul and His Friends at Play" (issue #14), "Monty and the German High
Command" (issue #15), "The Thursday Night D&D Game for Monty and the Boys" (issue #16),
"Monty Haul and the Best of Freddie" (issue #24), and "Monty Strikes Back" (issue #28). See
also Gygax’s own account of a very strange session in "Faceless Men & Clockwork
Monsters" (issue #17).
3 A far deadlier version of the Jabberwock debuted in the third Monstrous Annual (1996) and
was used to great effect in Chris Perkins’ short adventure "The Manxome Foe," included in the
adventure anthology TSR Jam (1999).
4 The giant series (G1, G2, G3), the drow series (D1, D2, D3), S1. Tomb of Horrors (all 1978);
T1. The Village of Hommlet (1979); S3. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (1980); B2. Keep on the
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8/5/2007 11:22:32 PM - EX1-2. Dungeonland and The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror
Borderland (1981); S4. The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and its lesser companion piece, WG4.
The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (both 1982, the latter apparently based on events from Rob
Kuntz’s campaign); EX 1 and EX 2 (1983), and WG6. Isle of the Ape (1985, developed by Bruce
Heard). Gygax also collaborated on three other AD&D adventures: Q1. Queen of the
Demonweb Pits (1980, written by Dave Sutherland to provide a climax to the unfinished drow
series), WG5. Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure (1984, with the other DM from the original
GH campaign, Rob Kuntz, as the primary author), and T1-4. Temple of Elemental Evil (1985, a
masterpiece apparently written by Frank Mentzer from Gygax’s notes).
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