So, there I was…standing in the
RPG section of the greatest bookstore on earth. You've got to know someone is a dedicated collector when his wife has agreed to detour through Portland, Oregon on the way home from their 25th anniversary vacation so he can stop at Powell's City of Books. Fortunately, my wife also loves Powell's, so we were both enthusiastic. She's pretty tolerant of the whole collecting thing…and she's really pretty, too. (Best gaming item in my collection! I'll wager that my copy of
gamer girl is nicer than anyone else's! Neener, neener!)
Powell's has a good selection of modules and other items, but they aren't Half Price Books. The guys at Powell's generally know what they're holding and charge what they think they can get for the item. Sometimes they think too highly of their stock, but Powell's isn't exactly under pressure to sell right away. There were hundreds of people there when we visited, on a weekday afternoon. It's the place to snag a book you can't find anywhere else, and sometimes one slips through….
Anyway, there is a
D20 point to this post....
I found what I was looking for there, but not at the right price. I wanted a copy of the 3.0 module,
R3 Rappan Athuk The Dungeon of Graves: The Lower Levels. Known generically as Rappan Athuk III, this is the final module of a series that includes:
R1 Rappan Athuk: The Dungeon of Graves: The Upper Levels
R2 Rappan Athuk: The Dungeon of Graves: The Middle Levels
R3 Rappan Athuk: The Dungeon of Graves: The Lower Levels
Fans of the series know that
R1 and
R2 are still relatively common on Ebay…although their price is likely to creep up in the near future as supplies dwindle. R3 is a bit more of a challenge. There are usually copies around, but the price has crept up as high as the $100 range in recent history. Copies offered for $35 have been available on Ebay and on Amazon, but I just couldn't pay for that.
The copy I found on the shelf at Powell's City of Books was $40.
I actually considered it for a moment. $40 was not far off of what I would pay when shipping is figured in and the hassles related to that. I was almost…ready…to…give in and buy, but my stubborn shopping instincts just forced me to wait. I bought another Necromancer Games module instead, L1
Demons and Devils, for a pretty good price.
When we got home I decided to check Amazon just one more time. You never know! What I immediately hit was a new copy of
R3 on Amazon for $15. I could not hit the instant purchase button fast enough.
Here's the link for the other copies hiding there. Go get em!:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/ ... ition=used
As I type, there are four other used-like new copies of R3 on Amazon for under $15, one for $18 and others ranging up from $30. It's a good moment for a D20 Acaeum guy or gal to BIN those babies while they're there!
The $15 R3 arrived yesterday. I have been gnawing on it for a while.
At this point in D20 history, the Rappan Athuk modules aren't going to sneak up on anybody. They're pretty well nigh infamous. Some of the focus has shifted off of the original 3.0 modules because of the hoopla over the
Rappan Athuk Reloaded boxed set for the 3.5 Edition.
(While I'm gloating, I must tell you that I got my copy of
Rappan Athuk Reloaded at a Vancouver, Washington comic book store in April of this year. It was cover price. The comic book buyers didn't know what it was. When I asked the store guy for a box to put it in he said, "That must be something special." I said, "Oh YES!" Only thing is, it's in shrink, dang it!)
Rappan Athuk is a dungeon crawl across three modules and 15 levels with a nice encounter with a major demon for the final scene. (I'm not spoiling the module for you. Orcus is on the Necromancer Games logo and he's also on the cover of R3. By the time you get to the 15th level the big guy ain't exactly a surprise.)
R1 and R2 are stapled, saddle stitched. There are 48 pages in R1 and 64 pages in R2. R3 is a perfect bound book of 112 pages. Even with the obligatory wasted space in every D20 product used to list the OGL rules compliance and advertise other publications, all three modules are still great values because they do not fall into the pit that hampers a lot of other D20 items: They do not waste dozens of pages with new rules. There are no new prestige classes, new spells, new blah blah blah crap, etc. Nope…we get right to the good stuff!
The technical aspects of the Rappan Athuk modules are outstanding. When I say "technical" I mean all of the presentation details that make a module memorable and a joy for the DM to use. The maps are black and white and very clear. They avoid all of the pitfalls of crappy, computer graphics and the hopeless garble that results when color maps are slugged down to black and white. The artwork is good (if not exactly Erol Otus or Morno) and there is enough of it to give you the feel of the encounters.
One caveat about the maps: 3rd Edition demands mapping in 5'x 5' squares. R1 provides maps that do not have squares at all. R2 is carefully mapped using squares, but a scale is not given…I think it's 5'x 5'. R3 is mapped with an excellent grid and is very clear, but the scale is 10'x 10'. The dungeon levels are huge and will require large graph paper where the DM maps in 5' x 5'. If you're a DM who cannot overcome these technical details, you probably should stop reading the modules and let someone else DM.
The monster stat blocks are perfectly organized without the major errors that creep into too many publications when the rules are as complicated as 3rd Edition. There are a lot of monsters, so the beasties do not all get their own sidebar. There is a handy appendix of monster stats at the end of the module that the DM could just copy or print from PDF and hold in his hand for convenience.
One common 3rd Edition-ism that the Rappan Athuk modules avoid is the use of grey scale or busy graphics. Grey scale is a background of grey-to-nearly-black ink behind monster stat blocks or even behind the entire page. In some 3rd Edition products the background for part of the text is actually black, with the letters in white. Other 3rd Edition products cannot resist jamming the page with repetitive graphics such as elaborate borders for each page. Similarly, some of the old TSR 2nd Edition modules were printed on parchment type paper. My suspicion about most of this is that the intent was to make the modules hard to photocopy. If so, it worked…but it also makes modules really hard to read and wastes a lot of ink and space. Aside from a small amount of grey scale behind the maps in R2, the Rappan Athuk modules don't do that crap…nor do they test our eyes with impossibly small type or ludicrous fonts. (Thanks for listening to that rant, by the way.)
Rappan Athuk set the bar very high for 3rd Edition products way back in 2000. A number of other companies would have done well to copy them. Too many did not.
Quality can range widely in 3rd Edition products. The first 3.0 cock-up of the classic
Dark Tower, for instance, demonstrated absolutely no command of the new rules but made up for it by showing no respect to the original Judges Guild module and omitting the name of author Paul Jaquays entirely.
Dark Tower had to wait for a Necromancer Games fix. (You know a module is good when it gets published in the same edition twice.)
The Rappan Athuk modules are written for anyone to use, but they reflect the philosophy of Bill Webb and Clark Peterson: "3rd Edition Rules. 1st Edition Feel." The writers tend to assume that their customer is the usual Acaeum-type RPG veteran. I love these lines from the introduction:
"
Why is the dungeon there? No one knows. Why do the monsters usually fight rather than talk? We aren't really sure. Why are there 16 trolls in a cave with a jug of alchemy? No one cares. What do all the monsters eat? We don't know that either (although "adventurer" probably tops the menu). And we don't have to know these things. This isn't an ecology experiment; it's a dungeon -- the quintessential setting for pure sword-and-sorcery adventuring!"
R1 is planned for six characters of 3rd level and the plan is for the party to level-up appropriately as they venture deeper and deeper into the Dungeon of Graves. Peterson and Webb understand well that experienced players will do better than newbies. They give notes on where the party should go and what they should avoid. R3 includes a careful buildup to the final encounter. Completing the various adventures along the way to meeting the Lord of the Dead gives the party advantages that might help them prevail. Blundering straight into the final show will probably end badly.
Rappan Athuk is not a "killer dungeon" because it does not have the deathtraps and inescapable situations found in a module like
Tomb of Horrors. However, characters are going to die if the party is careless or unlucky. That's supposed to be part of the fun. Remember when it was actually frightening to go down into an imaginary dungeon? Remember when you didn't know if your character was coming back? That's Rappan Athuk.
The Rappan Athuk modules are not for children. It isn't that there's gore or sex or anything really lurid. It's just that the bad guys in this deep dungeon are doing horrible things to people and the atmosphere is pretty grim. I could actually smell the fetid aura of Rappan Athuk as I thumbed through the modules earlier this week. (But that might also have had to do with the septic system repairs we were having done that day…you decide.)
There's a ton more I could say about the three Rappan Athuk modules. This is already a really long post. Every time I open up these three books I find something that interests me, a great idea, a scary picture, a story hook, or someone really cool to kill...someone who really really
reeeaally has it coming.
So, if you read this far rather than just clicking on the link above, Rappan Athuk 3.0 is worth collecting even though
Rappan Athuk Reloaded exists. My advice is to snap up those modules on Amazon and go get R1 and R2 while people still think they're cheap modules. I don't know if the three 3.0 modules will be super collectible or not, but I do know that any old-school gamer will enjoy at least reading them.
Your thoughts?