So, by 1982 Gygax is busy with other parts of the business and modules by him are getting pretty thin on the ground, he had promised The Temple of Elemental Evil which has still not materialised (and won’t until 1985) and had mainly been busy with the promotion of AD&D, the development of the Greyhawk setting and the TV/Film possibilities. However, in 1982 he brought us two modules, this being the first of those two.

Not exactly a new module as the core dungeon is a reworking of the 1976 Lost Caverns of Tsojconth (with an o), it’s still a pretty impressive module. Split into two sections of thirty pages each, one being the adventure proper and the other with new monsters, spells and magical items to be found in the adventure, it does stand above other modules of the time. This is also because Gygax clearly knows the world of the setting really well, it’s his creation after all, and there is a good effort of contextualizing the adventure in terms of the wider history and geography.

The adventure starts off with a wilderness section which will then move into the caverns proper as they are discovered by the party. This cavern complex is not a particularly believable one, with its distinct events and monsters in each and every room, busier than a subway station at peak hours, but it does give the module an exciting quality of finding out what is around each and every corner. The ending set piece is an all time classic with an encounter with a sleeping beauty who is more than meets the eye and definitely a most memorable module.