http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Amber_..._%26_Dragons%29

I recently read the Wikipedia article on Castle Amber, a classic D&D module. It made me feel very nostalgic as it's one of my all time favorites. I actually acquired a copy back when I was in 4th grade and I was able to buy the 1st edition blue cover rule book and a few modules including classics like Palace of the Silver Princess and The Keep On The Borderlands at a garage sale. At the time, as a 4th grader, I often tried to play D&D with this one friend I had but I think our grasp of the rules could be a little weak at times...

Anyway, though, I always liked Castle Amber the best back when I was little, and looking back on it today. When I was a little kid I felt that Castle Amber had the most colorful setting and the creepiest perils.

I loved the magical banquet table where the characters could eat various items from a French banquet and experience potentially very powerful affects on their stats. For example, eating the salad would actually switcheroo your stats around, which could be quite horrendous if you were a fighter who, say, got DEX and STR swapped! Eating the bread IIRC could result in your character either not needing to eat, or needing to forever more eat twice as much. The wine cured HP (after all it's French wine), but the brandy forced you to do save vs. death ray or die. There was some mushroom sauce where you needed to save vs. poison or die, but if you made the save with flying colors you got permanent bonuses to future save vs. poison rolls, IIRC. The roast beef was safe and normal and tasty. (Phew!) At the time I probably didn't fully appreciate how statistically devastating eating at the banquet could be, but the general concept of the ghost's banquet with very scary food was a compelling one and it really stuck in my head. Looking back at it now that I'm older, the banquet table is so bastardly that I love it for that reason.

The events which the characters might find themselves in were pretty imaginative too and were in a vivid medieval French setting. For example, one possible situation was battling a huge magical giant that would attack a walled city. The trick was that the magician controlling him was in a little basket n the giant's back, so IIRC while it was very hard to take down the giant you could try and take out the magician instead. The whole enterprise was moreso doable if you had a Fly spell, but in the event that you didn't you could try to take the giant down from the spire of a cathederal, which while dramatic was also really likely to get you pwnt. Nevertheless, what a colorful scenario that was!

There were a lot of references to situations from kind of pulp fantasy fiction literature of ages past. For example, in one part, there was a noblewoman who had been buried alive due to a mistake. She was still alive, though, and she would eventually escape thoroughly insane from her ordeal and attack a NPC, who in turn was like a character from an Edgar Allen Poe story. That's classic Weird Tales type drama. I really like retro-styled things so to have that in a D&D module would make me really happy. In fact, the whole setting was based on stories by Clark Ashton Smith.

Basically, I really like more old-fashioned fantasy fiction than contemporary fantasy fiction, and I feel like Castle Amber manages to really keep the spirit of these sorts of stories. I feel like you won't get that sort of atmosphere in most RPG modules you see today which often are more influenced by modern fantasy fiction.

Ah yes, the Chateau d' Amberville.

My problem was I was never able to really grok the format of the old modules. I could never take the individual room descriptions and assemble them into a compelling story. (Not that that was necessarily the point of early D&D.) It worked for site-based stuff like the Caves of Chaos (B2 was so old-school the people in the Keep didn't even have names, they just had job descriptions), but that was always the stumbling block for me when I tried to look at the "Big Picture". If you run KotBL as a room-to-room combat exercise it's fine, but if you look at it as a delicate political situation between barely non-hostile humanoid tribes, it takes some interpretation.

I picked up Castle Amber in a big box of old modules and I've leafed through it from time to time over the years. My suspicion was always that there was an interesting adventure somewhere in there, but I never had the energy to dig around and put it in a format I could make use of.

Yeah, I actually have 2 copies of that around here. The funny bit was that lots of the creatures and encounters were ported over to 3.5 in the Epic Level handbook. I never got around to converting that, although it actually looks like the type of scenario that would have been good for epic levels.

You know what always cracked me up about The Keep? On the menu at the tavern or whatever there was a "joint of meat". Joint...70s....hmmm......

But, yeah, I never scanned any politics about that. Reading it as a child it really seemed about picking a different cave to loot every day.

That's really all it was. I mean, the NPCs didn't have names. It wasn't to make it easier for GMs to intergrate it into their world, it was no one was ever going to ask anybody their name at the Keep. The PC's were going to show up, buy rope, and get back to room-to-room carnage in the Caves of Chaos.

But B2 was one of the first modules I ever got (I think it was the second, after Castle Caldwell for OD&D, before I even knew the difference between AD&D and OD&D), and so it's always had a place in my heart. The thing that B2 did that I liked was it included little notes on which monsters could get along with which monsters. If the PC's left some goblins alive, these were likely top take up with the Ogre in the adjacent cave or something. It really pulled me out of the thinking that if the orcs were in Room 23: The Cistern, they would be in Room 23: The Cistern whether the PC's got there in the morning, afternoon or next April. What the Caves of Chaos made me realize was that if the characters screwed it up enough, they'd be fighting pretty much a combined force of monsters all at once. 2 orcs each in 10 rooms was not that hard. 20 orcs in one room could be fatal. It was a watershed moment for me.

Plus, I've always had a certain sympathy for the monsters. Whenever I pick up B2 and glance through it (say, about once a year), I always start thinking about how to define the tribal politics and how the monsters interact with one another. It's be fun to run an update of it, or a reversal. Monster PC's taking out the Keep. (Why include all the combat stats for the Keep if we weren't supposed to one day destroy it?)

Holy shit! That's genius! GENUIS! A giant Operation Flashpoint style combined offensive against The Keep! The players can either revert into Rousseauian noble savages and lead the charge, or they can defend the keep and conduct special-forces-style dawn raids against key strategic objectives. Think of the awesome! Think of the carnage! Think of the bodycount!

Good times! This was the first (and still one of the very few) module that I actually got to play instead of GM, and the one and only module my sister ever GMed. Our four (three plus GMPC) characters cleared out the caves, using many expendable henchmen along the way. We then turned around and sacked the keep, leaving no survivors. My sister didn't really have a handle on the game, and thought there was nothing wrong with this.

Yeah, I suggested that Keep reversal on a whim, but that would make a cool one shot. I have my original B2, and I have the 3.0 update which has updated stats for the module, including the Keep. So I basically have everything I need to run this right now. That makes it very tempting, particularly as a one shot for my group.