A really fun “funhouse” dungeon, this is just a small location with puzzles to solve and McGuffins to get in the shape of three amazing weapons, Wave, Whelm and Blackrazor which have become legendary in AD&D, even if Blackrazor is clearly a ripoff of Elric’s Stormbringer from Moorcock’s tales. This isn’t really Schick’s fault though as this was never meant to be published, it was just something he sent in to TSR to apply for a job as a kind of design portfolio. Well, TSR liked it so much that they published it without even letting him revise the adventure. It published in the S series, which clearly had the idea of publishing individual dungeons with S1 being The Tomb of Horrors. 

It is also the first adventure module published by TSR for AD&D that was not created by Gygax, the first of many, of course, but still significant because of that, there had been D&D modules like Mike Carr’s In Search of the Unknown published by TSR before, but no AD&D modules. As you can imagine, seeing as this was kind of a showcase dungeon, there isn’t much of a plot here, but what there is is a lot of fun rooms with puzzles to solve and monsters to defeat as well as unique loot to get. Schick also writes in an entertaining fashion, making this a really fun adventure to read.

I am sharing images from both the 79 and 81 versions because I won’t be coming back to this for the 81 re-edition, which adds some images like those by Bill Willingham and a great map by Erol Otus, as well as a new color cover to replace the original 1979 monocolored one.