An adventure module that, like many others, had its origins as a tournament module, Dwellers of the Forbidden City is much more of a sandbox module than what we are used to now. There is a loose plot to it which impels the party to go explore the adventure area, but it’s not at all a comprehensive plot that covers the whole of the vast city and environments.

This of course allows DMs a lot of freedom to add story beats to the module and there are some suggestions at the end of the module on ideas that DMs can use. If you have ever read Conan it’s easy to see how this adventure is based on the Red Nails story, but there are also some added monsters here which in time would become iconic D&D monsters: the Aboleth, Tasloi and Yuan-Ti all make their debut here and they are all pretty great (always had a particular love for the Yuan-Ti myself).

So, even if I’m into a more explicitly loreish adventure myself, this is still a pretty fun adventure, full of interesting monsters and explicitly situated in Greyhawk, so we can see how the shared universes of D&D are coalescing into something more coherent than the earlier adventures.