tldr; It runs well and the players seemed to have a lot of fun with it. I’ve had some issues with it, and some errata (see below), but it’s been much easier to run than Deep Carbon Observatory. It strikes a nice balance between traditional fantasy and high weirdness.
It’s hard to find authentic old D&D modules that you can be sure your players aren’t familiar with.
The old TSR line, from The Temple of the Frog to White Plume Mountain to those Graeme Morris TSR UK modules, is well-trod ground at this point. DMs delve estate sales for copies of the Orange version of Palace of the Silver Princess the way sneakerheads sniff out rare Nike Dunks. Meanwhile, the Judge’s Guild Line gets plenty of love — who doesn’t at least have Inferno or Tegel Manor or one of Jennell Jaquays’s adventures on their bucket list of modules to run? Serious grognards even venture out into the fringes of Dragon and White Dwarf in search of lost adventures.
So what’s left to uncover? Well, the Mayfair “Role Aids” line has received considerably less attention. But that’s changing. The nigh-forgotten Mayfair Role Aids module Swordthrust has generated some buzz amongst both Gygax-loyalist reactionaries and progressive artpunks in recent years thanks to reviews by OSR Influencers.
The module has a stupid name and an OK cover, neither of which convey the fun premise and strangeness of the module. The concept: PCs delve into the actual brain of an ice titan in search of some armor he forged long ago. The dungeon isn’t made of brain meat, but if magical ice and living thoughts and memories.
There’s a room full of tiny people that might attack you with tiny siege weaponry, another full of mermen, another with giant ants, and on and on. Most of these encounters are actually the dreams/memories of the titan as he contemplates the alien (to him) concepts of good and evil.
Like many others, I was fascinated by descriptions of this unearthed arcana. But these were only read-through reviews, not actual plays. I’ve read stuff that I thought was pretty cool, only to find it either falls flat at the table or is far more difficult to actually run than I anticipated (Patrick Stuart’s Deep Carbon Observatory is a good example of the latter).
Nonetheless, as I reviewed my list of modules I wanted to run, I kept coming back to Sword Thrust. So I decided to take the plunge last year and guide my group through this madhouse of a dungeon.
As mentioned above, I loved reading through Deep Carbon Observatory. Running it was another story. This is partly because of the presentation issues that have been pointed out many times before and are supposed to be fixed in the new edition. But another part of it is that the world of DCO is so idiosyncratic that I had a hard time executing on Stuart’s vision. Maybe I’d have an easier time if I were British? I had similar thoughts when reading Electric Bastionland. I like reading this stuff, but have no confidence that I could adequately fill in the many gaps the settings leave for GMs to exercise their own creativity. I like to fancy myself creative, but at the same time, I’m not sure I can just plug in stuff that fits within these very peculiar settings. Maybe I just overthink things. Maybe I underthink them.
Anyway, Swordthrust looked weird and different enough from a run-of-the-mill Tolkien-esque scenario, but not so far out in its own world that I couldn’t fill in the gaps. It’s weird and wild, but manages to stay just inside classic D&D territory.
(BTW, if the concept behind Swordthrust sounds familiar, maybe that’s because Stuart’s Silent Titans campaign book revolves around a somewhat similar concept. I haven’t read Silent Titans and have only played a very small fragment of it, so I don’t know how similar to Swordthrust it actually is, but Stuart himself acknowledged the similarities. “This adventure has bizarre pre-echoes of many ideas which I or my contemporaries have considered in our modern age,” Stuart wrote in his review. “What does this similitude mean? Well most importantly it means I am less special than I like to think I am…”)
That said, despite the similarities to Stuart’s work I’d say Swordthrust’s not artpunk in any real way. (Hypothesis: Planescape is the original artpunk D&D thing.)
Roses:
- Players seemed to like exploring the dungeon, which is the most important thing.
- This is a pretty cool way to create a “kitchen sink” dungeon. It bypasses the need for too much in the way of dungeon ecology while still making sense.
- The encounters are generally very good, including the random encounters. As others have noted, all the beings you encounter are doing something, which makes everything seem more alive and gives the GM a lot to work with.
- There are factions both within the dungeon and in the village, creating tons of potential for plot development as the PCs interact with things.
- There are a few cases where the inhabitant of one room wants something from another room, or where bringing something from one room does something cool. I wish there was more of that.
Thorns
- Especially coming off of N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God, the first thing I noticed is that way too many of the rooms had inhabitants that would either attack by default or attack at the drop of a hat. I ended up toning this down.
- I also skipped the giant 42 goblin fight before they reached the town. Seemed like it would just be tedious, again especially coming of N1, which had way too many tedious combats.
- I cringed at the red-headed NPC “Merrie Flamehair.” I replaced her with Racket, a thief/clown with ties to the PC party’s priest/clown. Seemed like an easier way to introduce the adventure in our situation.
- How the heck did a piece of the armor end up well outside the mountain? I ended up just planting it in the dungeon instead of starting Flamehair/Racket with it.
- Important things are often kind of buried in the text, like the fact that Morlean is conspiring with the renegade goblins to take over the village (only revealed, as far as I can tell, in an item description in one of the rooms) and the fact that the King of the Mountain wears a piece of the armor is only mentioned towards the very end of a rather long entry on that encounter. I missed how/why the titan armor is more-or-less human-sized on my first read-through and again when specifically looking back over the text for an explanation (Answer: it magically adjusts itself to fit the wearer). I only just found it looking one more time before complaining that it was never explained.
- I found myself wishing for a bit more “scaffolding” for the goings-on in the village. A countdown clock for events, maybe (ex: “The third time the PCs return from the dungeon, X happens”). There’s a lot going on, and it’s not immediately clear how it could and will affect the PCs. That provides the GM with a lot of flexibility, but I could have at least done with a little more support.
- It could use some encounter tables for going to/from the mountain (other than the King) (maybe this just assumes we’ll use DMG encounter tables?)
- Having “Do what thou wilt” carved on a statue was pretty cool and edgy in 1984 but feels stale now — an obvious ploy to give the module “real occult cred” by quoting Crowley. I tried and failed to come up with something better. I was gonna go with “Nothing is true, everything is permissible” until I learned that quote is used heavily in Assassin’s Creed. So I ended up just sticking with “Do what thou wilt.”
Errata
In case anyone else is thinking of running this hidden gem, here’s what I’ve found so far:
- pg. 20 flips the location of the right gauntlet and right vambrace
- Room 27: How is a merman supposed to wear a greave? I had him wearing it awkwardly on his arm, but I assume this is mistake and he should have been wearing a vambrace.
- There is no area 30 marked on the map. I think it refers to parts of the corridor between 29 and 31.
- The entry for 32 makes reference to the corridor between rooms 33 and 34, but I think it means 29 and 33 as that’s where 32 is marked on the map.
- 36 is not marked on the map but I think it’s the junction between rooms 34, 35, 37, and 40. This is important because there’s a piece of armor there.
- There’s a giant spider in 44, but for some reason its stats appear in the entry for room 47. Seems like this might have been deliberately due to space concerns, but it’s confusing.
- Room 54 mentions a secret door, but it’s not marked on the map.
- Room 61 refers to the Fantsie statue in room 30, but it’s actually room 29.