D&D 2E [COMPLETE] Looking back at the limited series: Player's Option, Monstrous Arcana, Odyssey, and more!

[Orius]

I skipped over the Rod myself. I've never been all that into the classic artifacts myself because they really need to be worked into the campaign. Ironically though, the whole conflict between the Queen of Chaos and the Wind Dukes is something that does take place in the distant prehistory of my world, which implies the existence of the Rod, even though I've never used it.

I've also considered conflating the Queen with Lolth (does the game really need two powerful demonic queens with a spider fetish?), an idea I've seen other people suggest. I'm not sure how I feel about the obyriths because WotC didn't do anything particularly interesting with them except maybe for the few surviving lords.

The adventure itself seems to have had a mixed reception, there's a good amount of criticism over its fetch quest nature, and some critics don't think Skip's adventure design was all that inspired.

 

[cbwjm]

I didn't even know there was an adventure for the rod of seven parts. Thought there was only the artefact and some history over the fight between law and chaos.

 

[Voadam]

I never owned this but played in a 3.5 PBP game using it here. I had a blast and felt it tied in great with a bunch of D&D demonology and lore but I have no idea how much of that was the module or CanadienneBacon's DMing.

 

[Alzrius]

I'm going to go ahead and say this up front, just to get it out of the way: Return to the Tomb of Horrors is the single best prefab campaign that TSR/WotC ever made, bar none. I feel so strongly about that, I'm not even going to put a "to me" or "in my opinion" in there. This is the high-water mark for how a campaign-in-a-box (literally) should be.

Now, part of that is because it has good material to work with. The eponymous Tomb of Horrors was already plenty famous before this boxed set came along; the original S1 Tomb of Horrors (which isn't available on DriveThruRPG now, even though it used to be) was already well-known for its deadliness. And even before that, Gary Gygax ran it at tournaments as early as 1975 under the OD&D rules, which – fun fact – was reproduced for the special edition of Art & Arcana. An appendix at the back of the reproduction further reprints the original Tomb created by Alan Lucien and sent to Gary (for which the final enemy was a lich named "Ra-Hotep"), which inspired Gary to create Acererak's infamous resting place! So yeah, the Tomb of Horrors already had a deep bench before it was finally Returned to in 1998 (notwithstanding the original S1 reappearing in 1987's S1-4 Realms of Horror compilation, itself re-released as S1-4 Dungeons of Dread in 2013).

But even so, I strongly suspect that Bruce Cordell's masterpiece has something to do with the Tomb's enduring popularity. Or at least, with that of its creator, Acererak. Prior to this, Acererak was just the lich who built the Tomb and sank into quiescence inside of it; from here on out, he was one of the big bads of the D&D multiverse, a proactive source of malevolence weaving schemes of cosmic proportions that placed him among the ranks of luminaries such as Vecna, Cyric, Takhisis, and similar beings of enduring infamy. And this is where he entered the big leagues.

The sheer scope of this adventure is breathtaking. You start out with a raid on a giant lair that's reminiscent of (albeit a bit smaller than) G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, and that's just the prologue. After that, you have to navigate Skull City, a necromantic college-town (the college in question being known as the Bleak Academy) that's sprung up around the Tomb of Horrors. Then you have to go into the Tomb itself, which is exactly as it was in S1. In fact, the original module is given a full-on reproduction in the boxed set, to the point where you could pull it out and run it for an AD&D 1E group!

And that's still not the end! After that, you have to go to The City That Waits (aka Moil), a ruined city that's been shunted into a demiplane all its own. And if you survive that, you can make your way to Acererak's aptly-named Fortress of Conclusion on the Negative Energy Plane for the final showdown, to see if you can disrupt his master plan of collecting enough souls to merge his consciousness with the plane itself, allowing him to become all undead everywhere.

I ask you, does it get more epic than that?

And there's yet more content, if you know where to look for it! Cordell wrote an article ("Below the Tomb of Horrors") in Dragon #249 describing how to get to the area beneath Acererak's masterpiece, where he threw the actual architect, a cheery fellow named Moghadam, along with the workers who built the place and left them to die. While it has no map, it describes a number of creatures and encounters, along with traps and hazards, that can bedevil those who venture down into the place (although getting there is no easy feat, since Acererak didn't mean for it to ever be discovered). Heck, there's even a double-sided promotional page ("Catacombs of the Necromancers") that was released alongside this boxed set as an additional clue for when the players reach Skull City. I consider myself fortunate to have not only gotten a copy when I picked up the original set, but for having the foresight to put it in the box where it wouldn't get lost or be destroyed.

And that's just barely overviewing what's actually in here. I can't even begin to describe how expansive this boxed set is. Every NPC is fully developed and fleshed out, even when they have no flesh on them! Whether it's Academician Drake at the Bleak Academy to Tarnhem the balor (aka Acererak's father), the sheer amount of content crammed in here is unbelievable. Not to mention how deadly the adventure is. The fact that it makes you go through the original Tomb is bad enough; presuming you don't get killed during the trek (or before you ever get that far), the subsequent areas don't let up. Instant death traps and encounter areas designed to put the hurt on you seem like they're everywhere; it's a beautiful paean to old school design at its finest.

I have no doubt that's why this boxed set has been so heavily referenced going forward, both directly and otherwise. Not only would the Tomb itself be seen again in the Tomb of Horrors Revised (3.5E), Tomb of Horrors (4E), and Tomb of Annihilation (the latter two being homages rather than literal reappearances), but numerous references to other aspects of this adventure would show up elsewhere, such as the Bleak Academy being spotlighted in Tome and Blood, or Acererak having become a vestige following his defeat as per the 3.5 Tome of Magic.

That's not even taking into account that Cordell would also tie this into his "Neverness" world, slipping in a sly reference connecting this adventure to College of Wizardry, which in turn connected to not only Den of Thieves and Bastion of Faith, but also Reverse Dungeon, itself connection to 3E's Bastion of Broken Souls, etc. Oh, and Tarnhem was mentioned in the Dungeon Builder's Guidebook. And the PCs visit the world that Moil came from in Dead Gods, itself the sequel to The Great Modron March and prequel to Faction War (according to the latter's prologue). It was the sort of interconnectedness that I, having a beautiful mind, couldn't resist mapping out.

All of which is to reiterate how this book is at the apex of D&D design. It's a campaign of vast scope and epic stakes, with a deep well of lore that not only ties into numerous other parts of the world (by which I mean the multiverse), but also makes numerous contributions that were referenced and drawn upon later. Even today, this is what I think of when I think about classic campaigns, where the need for heroes is great and the challenges aren't sugarcoated. Giants and necromancers, winterwights and balors, traps, puzzles, plane-hopping, exploration, all leading up to a diabolical demilich...this is the distilled essence of D&D, right here.

I doubt we'll ever see something like this again, and while I consider that a shame, I'm still hopeful that I can run my current group through this someday. Live or die, this is the sort of campaign that leaves you with stories to talk about for years to come.

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[Voadam]

The huge impact of AD&D energy drain combined with not really wanting a lot of instant death opportunities for a long term campaign meant this was not something I expected to want to actually run, knowing it has a huge undead component and the TOH killer dungeon style. I never got it in the 2e era but I picked it up in PDF later because it is such an icon, although I have not gone over it in depth.

Thanks for the review!

 

[Orius]

Yeah, I got this. I wanted it for that repro of S1 but the campaign itself is pretty good. But like @Voadam said, it's damn deadly, with a lot of downright nasty and massively unfair traps. The adventure book has a series of illustrations showing a party of ten adventurers going through the campaign; only three make it out alive. I don't know if I'll ever actually run the thing because there are just so many ways off getting a TPK.

While the adventure is loaded down with a number of deadly traps and tricks, my absolute favorite isn't one of the killers. In Acererak's Fortress of Conclusion, there is a lever labeled with a plaque that says, "Push Me". If someone pushes the lever, it triggers a nasty trap that makes the walls smash together or something. If someone pushes the plaque , it reveals a secret door that leads deeper into the final dungeon. Clearly, Acererak is a tremendous dick, and I think the trap is hilarious.

 

[Alzrius]

Coming to the final entry in the Tomes limited series, 1999's Axe of the Dwarvish Lords, I found myself thinking just one thing as I re-read this book.

"Dwarves. Why did it have to be dwarves?"

Now, I've mentioned before that I've never been a particular fan of dwarves. While gnomes are an example of a D&D race that have no real identity to them, dwarves have always had too much, at least to my mind. The presentation of dwarven culture, and the stereotypical tropes and attitudes therein, were always so strong that they seemed to overshadow any particular dwarf's individuality. Quite often, a given dwarf is "fleshed out" by changing just one of their typical characteristics - the drinking, the emphasis on clan structure, the craftsmanship, the subterranean lifestyle, the hatred of giants/goblins, the chanting songs, the emphasis on beards, etc. - and calling it a day.

But this isn't a rant about D&D's dwarves in general. Rather, it's an explanation as to why, as soon as I picked this book up, I found myself struggling to hold my interest. Though to be perfectly fair, this did manage to keep it...barely. It helps that the Tomes series plays into traditional D&D-isms by design, evoking the classical aspects of the game and leaning into them. So a dwarf-centric quest that hits all the highlights you'd expect is a feature rather than a bug.

In this case, the vast majority of the adventure is a classic dungeoncrawl to retrieve the eponymous Axe...and that's about it. In terms of scope, it's surprisingly restrained compares to the last two Tomes adventures, but I can't fault this completely; unlike, say, the Rod of Seven Parts, this one doesn't connect to ancient demon wars nor does the Axe have the power to reshape reality. It's scope is entirely political/military in nature, and only for one race at that, so the limited feel is understandable.

I will say that I liked the villains that this adventure introduced. Tairdo and Qamhuul should be held up as examples for how not to make your villains cardboard cutouts. While they're fairly straightforward in their nefariousness, their presentations sufficient details that you can get an idea for just how twisted (though not necessarily threatening) these guys are. For instance, Tairdo's spell list has numerous "named" spells (e.g. evard's black tentacles, mordenkainen's disjunction, etc.) that he's renamed after himself. There's no mechanical differences, just that he's put his own name in, with the text describing how he'll explain that he invented all of those spells himself, and has just been too busy to correct the wider "misunderstandings" about who the real inventor is. It's little things like that which make it clear exactly what sort of person the PCs are dealing with.

The nameless hordes of goblins who make up the rank-and-file villains are something else altogether. While I applaud having the various generic stat blocks all on a single page for easy reference, the way in which those goblins are utilized (these are your basic goblins up against PCs of level 13-15) made me think of the kobolds from Dragon Mountain. The difference being that this book borrows a lot of the various rules from Player's Option: Combat & Tactics, such as overbearing, shield walls, spear hedges, etc. The rules are all listed here in full, so there's no need to bring another book to the table, but honestly I get the feeling that if all of these advanced military tactics - which have various game statistics and modifiers - are brought forward in a campaign where they've never been used before, some players might cry foul. After all, suddenly introducing these sorts of military formations out of nowhere runs the risk of making it seem like the DM is artificially powering-up the bad guys. At the very least, it invites the PCs to try similar things on their own, and that might not be a door a DM wants to open.

I should mention that the Axe itself is, in the same tradition as the Rod from The Rod of Seven Parts expanded on quite a bit here. Not only are its powers, abilities, and curses all given a great deal of greater information, but we also get never-before-seen write-ups for four attendant (minor) artifacts that were used in its creation: the Brutal Pick, Earthheart Forge, Anvil of Songs, and Shaping Hammer. It's interesting that these aren't necessarily a "set" of items in terms of them having resonant powers. Unlike the pieces of the Rod or the Hand and Eye of Vecna, the only ways that the Great Tools (as the set is called) interact is with regard to how some of them can be used to destroy others...including the Axe (which is properly called the Fierce Axe).

On a minor note, if you hunt down a used copy of this, make sure that the map booklet is still attached in the back, otherwise you'll have a hard time running some of these areas.

My overall impression is that while you can call this an epic D&D adventure, it's the most basic one around. Straightforward in its presentation, impactful only for a single demihuman race, and without even much in the way of supporting material (i.e. this has no articles in Dragon magazine adding to it that I can recall), this adventure is what you get when you try to make a relatively boring premise as flavorful as you can. How much that works is questionable; if the icing is delicious, and the cake matter itself is tasteless, is the dessert a good one? How you answer that will likely be how you feel about this module.

Overall, Axe of the Dwarvish Lords closes out the Tomes series with a thud rather than a resounding thwack, which makes it all the more appropriate that the next series is one that goes out of its way to avoid the usual D&D tropes...

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[Orius]

I never went after this one myself. Again, adventures were never very interesting to me.

 

[Weiley31]

Before getting into the next book on the list, I'm going to take a moment to rant about something that's long irked me:

The Player's/DM's/Campaign Option books are NOT AD&D 2.5!

I know that's a designation that's entirely fan-made, and which is retroactively applied, but it's always made me roll my eyes, because it's conveying upon these books - as well as AD&D 1st Edition's Unearthed Arcana, which is similarly referred to as AD&D 1.5 - with a status that they don't actually possess.

The salient factor, at least as I see it, isn't so much that these books present alterations to various aspects of the Core Rules. If that was the sole determinant, then the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana should be...I'm guessing 3.6? After all, "3.75" is widely regarded as being Pathfinder 1st Edition. So clearly there's more to it than just altering the Core Rules.

And really, Pathfinder demonstrates what the real issue is: not that aspects of the game's basic rules are altered, but that they're altered and those alterations become the default from then on. The 3.5 Core Rules replaced the 3.0 Core Rules, and "3.75" (i.e. Pathfinder 1E) replaced 3.5 for all intents and purposes (even if it was technically not the same thing, being a different game from a different company). So by that token, the various "Option" books aren't any sort of upgrade to the core AD&D 2nd Edition game; they're a series of fairly sweeping optional rules, no more and no less.

The first of which we'll look at now: Player's Option: Combat & Tactics.

For me, this book is the aperitif of the Option line, presenting a modest offering before the series would start going hog-wild with wildly different forms of magic, expansive new high-level rules, and even rearranging how characters were built under the game rules. This book, by contrast, with its various options for running combat, was by far the tamest of the series. Given that it was also the first one, I'm left wondering if it was supposed to serve as the lead-in to the larger changes, or if it was simply seen as obligatory.

That last idea, that this book had a sense of "let's get this out of the way" is almost certainly my own bias, but I can't help the impression - and I suspect I had this same reaction back when I first pick this up (I distinctly recall that, even back then, I got this mostly to complete the set) - given that some of what's here is retread ground. Weapon groups and specializing in weapons? We got that back in PHBR1 The Complete Fighter's Handbook. An expanded unarmed combat system? PHBR15 The Complete Ninja's Handbook came out at almost the exact same time as this book. Heck, I even mentioned both of those things when I covered those books back in my leatherettes retrospective.

It doesn't help that some of the book's content that are technically new retread old ground. The mass combat rules here aren't those of the Battlesystem Miniatures Rules, Battlesystem Skirmishes, or even the alternative rules from DMGR2 The Castle Guide; while I can appreciate this book being a one-stop shop for all things combat-related, and doing so without referring to another book, I can't help but think that this particular wheel didn't need to be reinvented over and over again. Don't you think so, Birthright Campaign Setting?

All facetiousness aside, there is a lot of new content here, although looking back on it now, a lot of it doesn't feel new. In this case, however, I'm aware that time has colored my perceptions: things like a +1 bonus when attacking from higher ground (hello there, General Kenobi!), attacks of opportunity, disarming enemies, etc. all make me think of D&D 3rd Edition. While this book was written well over a year before TSR would be bought out by WotC, and so can't really be said to have been floating ideas for what would make it into 3E, it's clear to me (particularly in light of having recently finished 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons, which talks about the 3E design process) that this book was very much on the minds of WotC's design team when it came time to revamp the game.

Rather oddly, one point that sticks out to me now is how there's one place where this book did include some stealth-errata: it allowed characters from the warrior class group (i.e. fighters, rangers, and paladins) who received bonus non-weapon proficiency slots from high Intelligence to spend those on weapon proficiencies, which reversed what PHBR1 The Complete Fighter's Handbook said on the subject.

Likewise, while this book goes out of its way to highlight that these rules are optional, and in many cases modular, one of the most notable changes it introduces is also one of the more subtle: it redefines the use of "rounds" as a unit of time, now calling it a "combat round." The difference being that a "round" is one minute, whereas a "combat round" is said to be between ten to fifteen seconds (though it explicitly says that five combat rounds make up one round, suggesting that they're actually twelve seconds long). 3rd Edition would shrink this down further, making rounds a six-second unit of time.

Also, I rolled my eyes a little at the period-based weapon listings later in the book. I mean, I get that if you want your game to reflect a different genre, then tailoring equipment lists is one of the ways to do that; as this book notes, it'd feel weird if a samurai fought with a pilum (though if you want your game world to have a culture that's not just a historical pastiche, liberally mixing particular elements seems like a fun way to go about doing so, at least to me). But the divisions in chapter seven feel a little too narrow to me: did we really need lists of appropriate weapons for the Dark Ages, Crusades, Hundred Years' War, and Renaissance?

Overall, I understand what this book was trying to do; the fighter (and its cousin classes) can be very boring in AD&D 2nd Edition. Heck, the mainline Core Rules don't even allow for critical hits! But while I won't say that this book is bad, the solutions it presents feel overwrought; we get pages and pages of critical hit tables for the body locations of humans, animals, monsters, all with variations depending on the type of damage dealt (i.e. slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning). It's like bringing in the Army Corps of Engineers to replace a flat tire.

Looking back now, the impression I have is that the majority of what this book offered was too much work to bring into your game, at least if you wanted to introduce anything more than a couple of small changes. The reward simply doesn't seem worth the payoff in terms of making everyone at the table relearn/remember various tweaks and tidbits. It's entirely possible that I'm misjudging this, of course, but given how prosaic many of these options are (a casualty, I suspect, of focusing so firmly on the non-magical aspects of a high fantasy world), I've never been able to get excited about what's here, neither when I first read this book nor now.

The bottom line is that the strategy involved in Combat & Tactics works, but comes across as a Pyrrhic victory.

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So basically, what your saying is, if your gonna play 2nd Edition, the best bet, without too much of a headache, is to just use the Complete Fighter's Handbook for your Martials/Weapon Specializations, The Ninja Handbook for Martial Arts. and not worry about using Combat and Tactics book aside from perhaps taking the Critical Hits rule from it, unless you 5E the Critical Hits.

 

[Alzrius]

It seems oddly appropriate, with everyone gushing about the 5E reincarnation of Spelljammer, that we come now to Tale of the Comet, the first product in the Odyssey line.

...or at least, notwithstanding the release of The Savage Coast, an online-only Odyssey product that had been released a year prior to this (and was itself a re-release of material from Red Steel and Savage Baronies), along with its supplement Savage Coast: Orc's Head.

Now, the product history on the sales page for Tale of the Comet talks about how the Odyssey line never really got a firm definition as to what it connoted. While that might be technically true, I think that if you look at the themes of the products released under the Odyssey banner – themes like "swashbuckling wolf-men conquistadors in a land of magical radiation," "your high-fantasy world is invaded by the Borg as controlled by Skynet," and "werewolf barbarians fight wizards in undead mechs" - you can see a unifying element in how outré these ideas are.

If the Tomes line was "back to the classics," in other words, then Odyssey can be summarized as "not your daddy's D&D."

The irony here, of course, is that exploring a crashed alien spaceship is a classic D&D adventure, as per S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. But whereas the robots and alien life forms there were largely lacking in sapience and mostly content to stay on the ship (even if creatures like the aurumvorax, which originated there, would eventually get out to invade the wider ecology of Greyhawk), there's no such passivity to be found by the aliens here.

Instead, what's fallen to the PCs' homeworld is a local offshoot of an interstellar war where the good guys are a benevolent alien race called the rael (no relation to the real-world UFO religion Raëlism, except in the name), who to my considerable irritation are never given game stats anywhere in the product. I mean, we get stats for rael NPCs, but never PC racial information for characters who want to play one. I get that's not the theme of the product, but still...walling off options like that irks me. The presumption, lacking anything more concrete, is that they're basically human except for a few cosmetic differences, but that's an unsatisfying answer.

Still, far more notable are the antagonists here, which are the machines. Controlled by a genocidal A.I. known as the Overseer, the machines seem bent on the destruction of all organic life, which seems pretty ludicrous for something set in the AD&D multiverse. I mean, let's leave aside the question of how the Overseer would react to things like air elementals (which are basically living wind) or the Tarrasque (which can't be killed without magic). Does it also plan to wipe out the undead? What about when the gods finally decide to strike back at the machine that's killing the mortals who provide it with the worship that sustains them?

There's no good answer to these questions in the boxed set, because Tale of the Comet has several implicit assumptions that are necessarily incompatible with AD&D's default multiverse, something which made me frown quite a bit when I realized that. Namely, this presumes that space functions like it does in the real world, rather than AD&D's wildspace, and that magic is a rare phenomenon; or at least, rare enough that neither the Overseer nor the star-faring rael have ever encountered it before. And while it does seem to assume that the planes and the gods are real, it downplays them heavily despite the scope of the galactic war it presents.

Now, that's not to say that the setup is bad unto itself; if you've never been a fan of Spelljammer, prefer to downplay planewalking, and like your deities to be a bit less on the interventionist side, then Tale of the Comet is absolutely for you...especially if you prefer chocolate in your peanut butter technology with your magic.

Make no mistake, that's the big draw here: blaster rifles, stun grenades, incendiary missile arrays, and more are now in the hands of your PCs. The boxed set goes on at length about bringing these into your game, and (in what struck me as rather odd at the time), takes you behind the proverbial curtain in doing so, as author Thomas M. Reid openly addresses the players about his thinking with regard to balancing technology in a high-fantasy magical setting. While his reasoning works well enough (in that high-tech materials are far and away stronger than your PCs local weapons and armor, but that magic can make up the difference), the open discussion of the design philosophy feels odd for a supplement. I mean, I'd expect this in the DMG, or a related product covering how to run things, but in a mini-campaign setting like this? Maybe it's just me, but it struck me as odd.

Of course, there's more to this than just a discussion of how to bring in ray guns alongside swords and spells. The boxed set devotes a decent amount of coverage to Paradise Lake, a remote region where the rael and the robots crash-land. (Naturally, the sight of the crashing ship is the titular "comet.") It also includes an adventure, or at least a detailed outline of one, where the PCs react and respond to the initial invasion – did I mention that the machines will abduct people and forcibly implant cybernetics in them to turn them into a zombified fighting force known as the Doomed? That Borg reference I made earlier wasn't idle – followed by one where they push into an off-world arcology where the invasion is being staged from.

Interestingly, there's no real discussion of fighting the Overseer, as the PCs never encounter the big bad behind the machine invasion. I mention that because the final book in the boxed set approaches the idea of why it's almost impossible to kill the Overseer should the PCs be intent on trying, noting that it has multiple power sources keeping it up and running, has made multiple copies of itself (all working together in sync), along with hidden backup copies, including one ready to be shot into deep space if all else fails. And no, this setting doesn't have planet-busters, so that's out (otherwise the Overseer would have started using them itself).

Of course, if you want to continue playing a planet-hopping campaign against the machines, the boxed set closes out with a set of conversion rules to the Alternity RPG that WotC was releasing at the time...

Looking back, I found Tale of the Comet to be a very mixed bag. I liked the possibilities opened up by the introduction of expansive rules for technology in AD&D 2E, and while the Overseer and its mechanical minions presented a compelling new foe, the fact that using this required throwing out so much of the AD&D cosmology irked me. There was also no real discussion about the wider ramifications of introducing high-tech weapons and armor to your campaign world if you wanted to keep the terrestrial focus, though the fact that most of them needed ammunition that wasn't locally available made for a built-in control measure (and I guess if you were concerned about that, using this boxed set in the first place was probably not a good idea).

Of course, the meme value of bringing this level of sci-fi into your D&D game shouldn't be underestimated. The sheer number of quips re: "come with me if you want to live," "just nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure," and "resistance is futile" is guaranteed to last for several sessions.

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