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D&D 3rd ed. Adventures #2
The Forge of Fury
What waits in the ruined dwarf stronghold?
Two hundred years ago, the great dwarf smith Durgeddin the Black built Khundrukar, a hidden stronghold for his war of vengeance against all orckind. For years Durgeddin labored, until the orcs discovered Khundrukar and stormed the citadel, slaying all within. Legends say that Durgeddin's masterful blades and glittering treasures were never found.
The Forge of Fury is the second in a series of eight stand-alone adventures for the Dungeons & Dragons game. It details Khundrukar's five extensive levels of fierce tribes, dangerous obstacles, diabolical traps, and monstrous creatures.
To use this adventure, a Dungeon Master also needs the Player's Handbook , the Dungeon Master's Guide , and the Monster Manual.
Two hundred years ago, the great dwarf smith Durgeddin the Black built Khundrukar, a hidden stronghold for his war of vengeance against all orckind. For years Durgeddin labored, until the orcs discovered Khundrukar and stormed the citadel, slaying all within. Legends say that Durgeddin's masterful blades and glittering treasures were never found.
The Forge of Fury is the second in a series of eight stand-alone adventures for the Dungeons & Dragons game. It details Khundrukar's five extensive levels of fierce tribes, dangerous obstacles, diabolical traps, and monstrous creatures.
To use this adventure, a Dungeon Master also needs the Player's Handbook , the Dungeon Master's Guide , and the Monster Manual.
32 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2000
1 person is currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Richard Baker
84 books226 followersA best-selling author and award-winning game designer, Richard Baker is known for his novels in the Forgotten Realms setting and his work on the Dungeons & Dragons game. His Realms novels include Condemnation (book 3 of the War of the Spider Queen), the Last Mythal trilogy, and the Blades of the Moonsea trilogy. He is currently working on a new military-themed science fiction series centered on the character Sikander North; Valiant Dust, the first book in the new series, debuts in November 2017 from Tor Books.
A native of Ocean City, New Jersey, Rich graduated from Virginia Tech in 1988 and went on to serve as a surface warfare officer in the United States Navy. When he's not writing fantasy or science fiction, he works in game publishing. He's the founder of Sasquatch Game Studio, a small game company based in Auburn, Washington.
Rich currently resides in the Seattle area with his wife, Kim, and their daughters Alex and Hannah. His interests include gaming (naturally), history, hiking, racquetball, and the Philadelphia Phillies.
A native of Ocean City, New Jersey, Rich graduated from Virginia Tech in 1988 and went on to serve as a surface warfare officer in the United States Navy. When he's not writing fantasy or science fiction, he works in game publishing. He's the founder of Sasquatch Game Studio, a small game company based in Auburn, Washington.
Rich currently resides in the Seattle area with his wife, Kim, and their daughters Alex and Hannah. His interests include gaming (naturally), history, hiking, racquetball, and the Philadelphia Phillies.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 5, 2019
I began playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1982, when I moved to Houston to live with my brother Gerold for a while as I got my feet under me and learned my new city. He had a group of friends who had a longstanding game going, and I joined in with a low-level character and had fun. The game meetup was pretty much an every Saturday night thing, and we worked our way through various dungeons over the course of the next couple of years. D&D was later traded in for the live action version of the game (Google the Society for Creative Anachronism if you’re curious about that), but the experience introduced me to the whole world of role-playing games.
It was the norm for our group to play our own games based on the invented universe that our characters inhabited. The idea of playing any of the pre-written game modules didn’t hold much interest for any of us at that time, though we may have dabbled with one or two of the modules at one time or another. The old modules dating back to the mid-80s can now fetch some princely ransoms on eBay and at used bookstores and the like. If you have a stash of these laying around it would behoove you to explore the idea of cashing in on your cache.
So it’s 2018 now, some 35 years since I begin playing D&D, and my college-aged daughter and some of her friends decided that they wanted to start a dungeon of their own. Apparently there is a burgeoning trend amongst the younger set to discover the joys of non-video game pleasures and the genuine delight of unscripted human interaction. So we played out one of my own adventures culled from my memory. The kids had a great time and quickly began clamoring for another adventure. Honestly, though, this last year has been a bit rough on me and I just didn’t feel up to the task of wholesale world-building and game adventure design. So I wandered my butt down to my local Half-Price Books store and dug around there a bit. Some of the really old (circa 1980s) modules were fairly expensive, but there were a few from later years that were priced a bit more reasonably. I ended up with a module entitled “The Forge of Fury” that looked like it might be fun, filled with the usual cast of ogres and troglodytes and gnomes, etc.
The other big advantage to this particular adventure was that it was a stand-alone module, unconnected in any way with other universes or ongoing series. That way if my group lost interest I wouldn’t be out much in terms of time or cash. As it turns out, though, they LOVED it so much that I have gone out and bought another module for them to play through. From the back cover:
“Two hundred years ago, the great dwarf smith Durgeddin the Black built Khundrukar, a hidden stronghold for his war of vengeance against all orckind. For years Durgeddin labored, until the orcs discovered Khundrukar and stormed the citadel, slaying all within. Legends say that Durgeddin’s masterful blades and glittering treasures were never found.”
So what you have here is a very basic fantasy that takes players deep within the mountain fortress, where they encounter a fairly standard set of evil villains to do battle with as they creep ever closer to what they assume is the hidden stash of weapons and valuables. You get the basic feel of one of the “Lords of the Ring” movies complete with a dragon to test your mettle against. It was all very comfortable and familiar terrain and the players ate it up like fantasy candy.
What I enjoyed about it from the perspective of being Dungeon Master was how easy it was to modify the game play according to my whim. I was able to skip sections that I wasn’t crazy about and add in stuff from my own experiences in ways that didn’t disrupt the flow of gameplay at all. Thus one of my players has a character that now has a troglodyte baby to raise as his own, another has a rat familiar to train, and another has a large black bear to tame and teach. There were many opportunities for inventive and creative players to gain experience points, and the breakdown of play gave us lots of chances to take breaks and have side chats and just generally have a good time. The improvised dance contest with the Troglodyte King alone was worth the price of the module.
For my first true crack at a pre-written adventure this was pure gold. I was able to throw my own hacks in and enjoy the fact that I didn’t have to dream up an entire adventure for the kids. I can heartily recommend this particular module as a good starting point for nascent D&D groups who would like to get an idea of what a full-fledged dungeon is all about. It was a fun taste of the game that should provide hours of fun for Dungeon Masters and players alike.
It was the norm for our group to play our own games based on the invented universe that our characters inhabited. The idea of playing any of the pre-written game modules didn’t hold much interest for any of us at that time, though we may have dabbled with one or two of the modules at one time or another. The old modules dating back to the mid-80s can now fetch some princely ransoms on eBay and at used bookstores and the like. If you have a stash of these laying around it would behoove you to explore the idea of cashing in on your cache.
So it’s 2018 now, some 35 years since I begin playing D&D, and my college-aged daughter and some of her friends decided that they wanted to start a dungeon of their own. Apparently there is a burgeoning trend amongst the younger set to discover the joys of non-video game pleasures and the genuine delight of unscripted human interaction. So we played out one of my own adventures culled from my memory. The kids had a great time and quickly began clamoring for another adventure. Honestly, though, this last year has been a bit rough on me and I just didn’t feel up to the task of wholesale world-building and game adventure design. So I wandered my butt down to my local Half-Price Books store and dug around there a bit. Some of the really old (circa 1980s) modules were fairly expensive, but there were a few from later years that were priced a bit more reasonably. I ended up with a module entitled “The Forge of Fury” that looked like it might be fun, filled with the usual cast of ogres and troglodytes and gnomes, etc.
The other big advantage to this particular adventure was that it was a stand-alone module, unconnected in any way with other universes or ongoing series. That way if my group lost interest I wouldn’t be out much in terms of time or cash. As it turns out, though, they LOVED it so much that I have gone out and bought another module for them to play through. From the back cover:
“Two hundred years ago, the great dwarf smith Durgeddin the Black built Khundrukar, a hidden stronghold for his war of vengeance against all orckind. For years Durgeddin labored, until the orcs discovered Khundrukar and stormed the citadel, slaying all within. Legends say that Durgeddin’s masterful blades and glittering treasures were never found.”
So what you have here is a very basic fantasy that takes players deep within the mountain fortress, where they encounter a fairly standard set of evil villains to do battle with as they creep ever closer to what they assume is the hidden stash of weapons and valuables. You get the basic feel of one of the “Lords of the Ring” movies complete with a dragon to test your mettle against. It was all very comfortable and familiar terrain and the players ate it up like fantasy candy.
What I enjoyed about it from the perspective of being Dungeon Master was how easy it was to modify the game play according to my whim. I was able to skip sections that I wasn’t crazy about and add in stuff from my own experiences in ways that didn’t disrupt the flow of gameplay at all. Thus one of my players has a character that now has a troglodyte baby to raise as his own, another has a rat familiar to train, and another has a large black bear to tame and teach. There were many opportunities for inventive and creative players to gain experience points, and the breakdown of play gave us lots of chances to take breaks and have side chats and just generally have a good time. The improvised dance contest with the Troglodyte King alone was worth the price of the module.
For my first true crack at a pre-written adventure this was pure gold. I was able to throw my own hacks in and enjoy the fact that I didn’t have to dream up an entire adventure for the kids. I can heartily recommend this particular module as a good starting point for nascent D&D groups who would like to get an idea of what a full-fledged dungeon is all about. It was a fun taste of the game that should provide hours of fun for Dungeon Masters and players alike.
November 30, 2014
In my project of reading (more-or-less) every title in my library, I decided to re-read some things I normally wouldn't have read in the first place; The Forge of Fury, the second in the core series of adventures for 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, is one of those books. Looking back at my star review when I originally added The Forge of Fury to Goodreads, I rated it with five stars out of five, and a re-reading confirms that assessment.
First off, designer Richard Baker clearly knew what he was doing; by the time he designed The Forge of Fury, he was already a D&D veteran, having co-designed (with Colin McComb) an entire award-winning campaign setting for 2nd Edition D&D, and he would go on, very shortly after this, to spearhead the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Indeed, for the 30th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the editors of Dungeon magazine named The Forge of Fury the 12th best adventure of all time, the only one of the core 3rd Edition adventures to so rate.
To that effect, The Forge of Fury succeeds in what it sets out to do: It's a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, where decisions the players make in-game matter and with real rewards to be had for seeing the adventure through. Take too much time to go through the adventure, and an already challenging adventure gets real hard, real fast, and take too little time, and players will miss some nice details that will help them down the road. Add to that that The Forge of Fury stands on its own, independently, without a connection to a larger story—as later adventures in the 4th Edition core campaign fell victim to—such that a Dungeon Master can fit it in anywhere into his or her larger campaign, and Wizards of the Coast had a winner on its hands.
First off, designer Richard Baker clearly knew what he was doing; by the time he designed The Forge of Fury, he was already a D&D veteran, having co-designed (with Colin McComb) an entire award-winning campaign setting for 2nd Edition D&D, and he would go on, very shortly after this, to spearhead the 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Indeed, for the 30th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the editors of Dungeon magazine named The Forge of Fury the 12th best adventure of all time, the only one of the core 3rd Edition adventures to so rate.
To that effect, The Forge of Fury succeeds in what it sets out to do: It's a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, where decisions the players make in-game matter and with real rewards to be had for seeing the adventure through. Take too much time to go through the adventure, and an already challenging adventure gets real hard, real fast, and take too little time, and players will miss some nice details that will help them down the road. Add to that that The Forge of Fury stands on its own, independently, without a connection to a larger story—as later adventures in the 4th Edition core campaign fell victim to—such that a Dungeon Master can fit it in anywhere into his or her larger campaign, and Wizards of the Coast had a winner on its hands.
January 8, 2012
Finished this one, my group enjoyed it!!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews