Illustration:
The Halls of Tizun Thane (
White Dwarf 18, 1980)
Artist: It
must be Emmanuel
View attachment 351375
Must be nostalgia, but I fondly recall the second time I ever played D&D in the wild –
i.e., not with the group I’d been playing with until then – which was at an SFanatics convention, to which we traveled by train if you can believe it. When we got there, eagerly jumping up and down at the prospect of playing some D&D, it was this old (no idea how old he actually was but everybody seemed old to us in those days), somewhat pudgy, hardcore Napoleonic table-topper with a jovial streak to whom it befell to amuse the nippers, which he proceeded to do with some gusto.
The scenario was
The Halls of Tizun Thane, which he sort of ran without much regard for the rules – as was fairly usual at the time. When he showed us the illustration of the place when we got there, this was the start of a life-long love affair with the adventure.
Tizun Thane – a name to conjure with! The joy of speaking those immortal words to the strange statue at the gates! The palatial feel of the halls – and WTL is with the eyes of that painting!? The garden and the patios with the hookahs and the cushions! The mirrors! The shadow dancers! Even being attacked by those blasted stirges and almost being killed by them.
It was a marvel.
Funnily enough, while I’ve run the adventure many a time over the years, I only found out that it was based on the Robert E. Howard story
The Mirrors of Tuzun Thane, oh, a couple of years ago? This completely ruined my memories of the place, especially when it turned out that the shadow dancers were actually rather sinister, probably hawk-headed, shadowy figures rather than the elegant ebony dancers I'd always envisioned in my mind's eye.
However, at the same time, it stirred the undefined sense of..., well…,
je ne sais quoi that had always been in the background of everything I ever did with D&D since I discovered it. So I started digging into the pulp fantasy theme of the place, read Robert E. Howard’s
The Slithering Shadow, re-read some Clark Ashton Smith (a joy in itself), and this made the
je ne sais quoi explode onto the scene with compelling force.
So then I read the whole scenario again, now full of new-found knowledge of the pulp-fantasy era, and I had an utter blast in further fleshing out the adventure in that style, gathering all manner of weird plants to add to the garden at my whim; making a version of the map I could use during play; transforming the meek Izis into Zizis the Stygian, Priestess of Derketo, using the Houri character class as a basis and then adding the evil wiles of Derketo without the…, um…, cheese in each case, and leaving open the option that it is she who is actually running the place with Diker instead of just being his slave; expanding on the
raisons d’être of the various factions in the palace; upping the ante with Sega Thane by giving him a more evil-sorceror feel (yup, sorceror); throwing in some hints that could lead me to vaguely referring to some sort of (undefined) Cthulhu-like entity if I should feel the need; adding hints to all manner of exotica and places, dimensions, and planes not bound by the MotP; and doing a Monstrous Supplement just for the hell of it.
I guess that’s one of the advantages of how scenarios (mini-modules!) used to be put together in early D&D – they were frames rather than detailed affairs, handfuls of rough data one could interpret and do with what one wanted.
And then had an even utterer blast in running it (as did the players).
And so The Halls of Tizun Thane inspired me once again, to further ventures into the realm of pulp fantasy.
Add to this that I’ve always been fascinated by the elusive Emmanuel and that I think the illustration was probably done by him and I'd say that's a three-in-one.
P.S.: By the way,
@Nikosandros, I'm
really curious to know where you got the knowledge on the
Emirikol street being a street in Rhodes from.
