The second of the solo adventure modules for AD&D and also an occasion to welcome Jeff Grubb, who would be instrumental in the creation of lore for D&D, both for the Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms settings, as well as writing novels for those settings and later on Blizzard’s Warcraft and Starcraft universes, among many other stellar contributions to nerddom. He had already been working for TSR for about a year, in the background, contributing to upcoming volumes such as Monster Manual II, which would come out soon.

Again, as in M1, these solo modules have kind of aged badly. This is no fault of the writer or the story but just because mechanically, the reliance on invisible ink and so forth didn’t survive well to our days. Today if you want a copy of this it’s either blank, just has an unreadable yellow smudge over the boxes where once the invisible ink could be seen, is written out (which loses the effect of surprise), or if it is a digital copy it’s pretty much useless. 

However, there is still fun to be had here. Grubb wrote out a pretty compelling introduction, very much based on the classical myth of the minotaur, and the idea is that the player has to traverse a labyrinth full of quizzing Minotaur statues who block the path. The player moves on by getting the answers righ, answers which are hidden in the invisible ink bits. The game also innovates by having a diceless combat system, with a kind of scratch card system of combat, where you reveal the ink to see combat results. Fun, but again, 40 years later, mechanically impracticable. Still, great writing by Grubb and great interior illustrations by another newbie, who we will see again often: the great, unfortunately late, Keith Parkinson.