Cynidicea, Lost City, Masque of Dreams

Dungeon 142 has an adventure called "Masque of Dreams".

Now normally I'm the first to flip the page when somebody breaks out the "ye olde" spelling in the title, but I read this one and said, "Huh"?

You see, years ago, somebody on the Greyhawk AOL boards in the late 1990s wrote an article about survivors of the Twin Cataclysms, who had a Suloise city called Cynidicea in the Sea of Dust, that had survived, only barely. I thought it was all new content, and I liked it, so I snipped it for my campaign.

And I made it backstory for an NPC that she was a scout from there. The NPC ended up being played by a player who joined late, and is now deeply integrated and important in my campaign.

So when I saw Cynidicea in this advneture, I flipped and thought -- oh, this must an expansion of that old Greyhawk AOL posting, awesome!

But no, the adventure explains it is based on a module called B4: The Lost City, by Tom Moldvay. Doh, I had no idea!

Can anybody tell me about this adventure, Cynidicea, etc.? Any idea where I could pick up the B4 module?

Ah ... B4. Well, you could try rpgnow.com

Lessee ... here is the link to the page with B4:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=1116&

At least this was so as of this evening.

I think also that if you find any post done by the enworlder "Quasqueton" and look at his sig you can go to an "All my threads on what people thought about old school adventures". There is one of them on B4: The Lost City.

Hope this will serve as a starting point at least. This adventure was one of my personal favorites from "way back when"....

B4 is a great BD&D module in the pure Conan tradition. What more can you ask for than a ruined city, debased cultists and something awful hiding in the depths?

B4 is one of the classic modules. It's a basic dungeon crawl through a buried pyramid. The first 5 levels are completely mapped out and stocked, with a second 5 levels mapped out (though not stocked), and a city mapped out underneath. The Cynidiceans are strange exotic and half-crazy people that are split between 4 factions- the Magi of Usamigaras (magic-users, primarily), the Sisterhood of Madarua (warrior maidens), the Brotherhood of Gorm (warriors), and the Cult of Zargon (a demonic entity that lives in the undercity).

Like most of the B, X, CM, and M modules, B4 was later located on Mystara, but the original module is a standalone that can be set anywhere (and actually works out pretty perfectly for the Sea of Dust on Oerth).

As far as "official" material on B4 goes, there is mainly just that module. There was a "Return to the Lost City" bit in Dragon #315 (the first Campaign Classics issue), and the adventure in the recent Dungeon (which also can fit anywhere, but cleverly used some Mystara place names as a nod to that setting).

There is also the Gazetteer of Cynidicea which was the product of several fans on the Mystara mailing list (I was involved as one, but the primary author was Geoff Gander, the list mod and a long time contributor). Though it's set in Mystara, and is based around OD&D rules, it might still be useful to you.

B4 *was* D&D for this budding young gamer. Like every other member of Generation Moldvay, I cut my teeth on Keep on the Borderlands---but The Lost City was my first experience with an open-ended campaign.

I used Gorm, Usamigaras and Madarua as my 'default' D&D pantheon years to come, and I spent an entire summer filling notebooks with my development of the Undercity.

I just thought of something else. There is a reference to B4 in the module "Return to the Keep on the Borderlands," which is set in Greyhawk. One of the NPCs is a sister of Madarua, and there might (not positive) be a reference to a couple of the drug-addled Cynidiceans/Zargonites as well.

Cthulhudrew said:

There is also the Gazetteer of Cynidicea which was the product of several fans on the Mystara mailing list (I was involved as one, but the primary author was Geoff Gander, the list mod and a long time contributor). Though it's set in Mystara, and is based around OD&D rules, it might still be useful to you.

Click to expand...

This is a very interesting link, btw - thanks Drew!

Geoff Gander is one of the big unsung stars of D&D fandom, IMO.

Cthulhudrew said:

I just thought of something else. There is a reference to B4 in the module "Return to the Keep on the Borderlands," which is set in Greyhawk. One of the NPCs is a sister of Madarua, and there might (not positive) be a reference to a couple of the drug-addled Cynidiceans/Zargonites as well.

Click to expand...

Yup, that's the original source of the NPC, but I'm not sure if it actually said Cynidiceans in the module, or if I put that together myself.

IMC, Third, the masked warrior maiden of Maruda (perhaps that module said Madarua, but we always said Maruda) is of the the third caste (below clerics and sorcerers) in the service of Maruda -- which is a local name for Wee Jas, patron and guardian of the Cynidiceans in my campaign. Wee Jas, Suel goddess of magic and death, allowed the death of most of the Suloise Empire, but protected those who escaped through caverns to the west (to the main part of the World of Greyhawk) and a small isolated city of particularly devote adherents.

IMC, Cynidiceans are post-apocalyptic survivors of the Twin Cataclysms, with a totally isolated and backward (bronze age) city-state civilization that retains the ancient Suloise Empire's antipathy towards the Baklunish. I didn't have them living underground, but I did have them very pale (pure Suel) and wearing masks (to filter out the dust of the Sea of Dust). I viewed them as mainly surviving as goatherds in their deep desert mountains, on the north side of the Sea of Dust. They're always at risk of extinction, should the rains fail too many years in a row and the wells go dry . . .

Cynidicea is at risk of being infiltrated by the Scarlet Brotherhood, as the one surviving remnant of pure Suel, if the SB finds out they still exist. The Queen of Cynidicea had dreams of a growing red snake in the light of dawn (i.e., to the East), which is why Third was sent out, as a scout to see if any "civilized" peoples survived the destruction.

Anyhow, the Gazeteer is fairly interesting, but doesn't precisely fit my version as developed from the old posting on AOL Greyhawk. Oh well, parallel evolution in separation from each other leads to odd mutants, as the story of Cynidicea well-tells.

Zargon reminds me of "Dagon" in the 2nd Conan movie . . . I'm also wishing I still had some Gamma World stuff.

Oh, and Zargon also sounds a WHOLE lot like Cthulu, at least in the Gazateer.

I assume that's intentional. Cthulu being behind the Scarlet Brotherhood, and Wee Jas allowed the destruction of the Suloise Empire to hit at Cthulu's power before he could manifest in the PMP. Yes, that's cool.

But in days of yore, I decided the force behind the fall of the Suloise Empire into the Sea of Dust was Sauron -- that the Suloise emperor was one of the nine kings of men suckered into becoming a Nazgul for Sauron.

The reason I went with that backstory is geography -- the mountain-bounded borders of the the Sea of Dust are shaped like this: ]

The boundaries of Nurn, the land at the back end of Mordor are shaped like this: [

North of both is an endless prairie of vaguely Mongol like peoples.

So, I decided Nurn + the Suloise Empire was the same big place, shaped like this:
[]

And the Wainriders and Baklunish are the same people . . . the difference is that the western ones (in Middle Earth) were also corrupted by Sauron, whereas the eastern ones (in Greyhawk) listened to Al-Akbar and mostly stayed true to goodness, except for the demon worshippers in Ull and the Tiger Nomads who are under the sway of their neighbor, The Old One, who is son of ancient Witch Queen (not at all under Sauron's influence, ahem) and an supernatural entity (yes, it's just some random demon named Graz'zt, nothing to look at, don't be alarmed).

Back story is fun.