Freedom

Dark Sun Quest #DS1

by David Zeb Cook, Timothy B. Brown (Contributor), J. Robert King (Editor)

Enter the ancient and corrupt city of Tyr, whose tyrannical sorcerer king has ruled for a millennium. As you wander the city, from the wreck of the elven warrens to the sanguine splendor of the arena, you realize that the citizens of Tyr thirst less for water than they do for freedom.

Now, after a century of slave labor, sorcerer king Kalak's great ziggurat nears completion. He has spectacle in Tyr's long history. Rumors abound as to the nature of the spectacle: some believe it will bring with it the longed-for manumission of countless slaves; others fear the annihilation of Tyr and her people as a sacrifice to Kalak's hunger for power; and a secret few believe it will be a day of revolution--a day of freedom!

Designed for four to seven players of starting levels, the DM's Book and Player's Book inside this pack provide the Dark Sun™ game DMs with a campaign base in Tyr, and give PCs a brutal introduction to Athas.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

David "Zeb" Cook is an American game designer best known for his work at TSR, Inc., where he was employed for over fifteen years. Cook grew up on a farm in Iowa where his father worked as a farmer and a college professor. In junior high school, Cook playing wargames such as Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg and Afrika Korps. "I was primarily a wargamer, but there wasn't any role-playing available then," although in college, he was introduced to the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game through the University of Iowa gaming club. Cook earned his B.A. in English (with a Theater minor) in 1977. He married his high school sweetheart, Helen, with whom he had one son, Ian. Cook became a high school teacher in Milligan, Nebraska, where his students gave him his nickname of "Zeb"; the name derives from his signature, which is dominated by a stroke resembling a 'Z'.

Reviews

[Benjamin]

2/32 of my Dark Sun reread/self-flagellation.

After falling in love with the core book for Dark Sun, I'm sure I bought this just because it was Dark Sun, because I rarely ever bought adventures--partly because I hardly actually played, partly because I thought I could write my own.

What makes this doubly-surprising is not just that I bought it, but I remember one day running it--with a very light system--for some drama club friends. I remember so clearly how the players looked far up when I described them meeting a giant, and how, when I corrected to say it was a half-giant, they all lowered their eyes to look at a slightly less tall imaginary being.

(This is also why my copy has the character pages pulled out of the book, so that these friends could use the pre-generated characters. This is why I don't think I could get the $45 that Noble Knight Games is currently selling a complete copy for; back in '91, it was $12.95.)

Anyway, the adventure here is a little odd, which gets into the topic that I hinted at in the review of the core box: though the core book offers a snapshot of a complete and hardly-varying world, the novels that were coming out (which I won't be reading and reviewing) introduced a huge setting shift: the assassination of the king of Tyr. Is this the biggest meta-narrative in TSR's history? ("Meta-narrative" is when the game company introduces/advances their own history of the game world, which might complicate or contradict what you have in your game.)

What that means is that, just a few months after the introduction of the game world, the core box is already a little out of date with the canon.

Freedom is an odd little adventure for the reason that it largely takes place during this massive upheaval that the PCs cannot really interact with. It is largely a vibe piece: the PCs get captured and enslaved, learn about different parts of life in the city of Tyr, and see the assassination of King Kalak. In some ways, this is a great intro to the world; on the other hand, it's very hard to be interested in this as an adventure.

Looking back on this, I kind of love parts of it as an introduction to Dark Sun and how the PCs may not be the world-saving heroes they are in other worlds, but just people trying to survive massive historical shocks. But I feel like it needs a lot more DM advice and hand-holding, even though it does a pretty good job in each section of helping the DM. But still, the double-whammy of "making the box you just bought outdated" and "preventing the PCs from doing a lot of stuff" makes this a hard adventure to run (even as, again, I kind of like how free-form it is--for instance, offering five different types of scenes to capture the PCs, and multiple scenes in the slave pens for the PCs to meet new allies and enemies).

This adventure also follows in the footsteps of the adventure in the core box in terms of form factor: two flip books, one for the DM, and one for the players, which includes pictures and maps and other info for the PCs/players. This is an interesting form--though I find it a little funny that they made these with stands as if you would prop it up. In my experience, however, these don't really fit into the slim box so well.

All of which probably helps explain why this is the only Dark Sun adventure I bought back in the day. The other reason, of course, is that I started to buy the sourcebooks and stuff. And what's a D&D campaign world without a sourcebook on monsters.

[Brian · Rating 1 out of 5]

All aboard!

It's pretty ironic that an adventure with that title has so little actual freedom or choice contained within. It starts out with a requirement that the PCs be captured, forced into slavery, and prevented from escape until the appointed time. There are five different ways provided to capture them, including being shanghaied in an inn, rounded up in a random sweep of foreigners and other undesirables, or pissing off a passing noble. Once captured, they're loaded onto the railroadpacked off to work on Kalak's ziggurat, where they remain for the rest of the adventure.

Yep, that's a declarative for a reason. The PCs can't escape unless they run into one of the specific adventure conditions that allows it. Freedom specifically says "all their attempts should fail" and further suggests that if the GM is feeling excessively lenient and lets the PCs actually succeed with some kind of escape, just use one of the capture methods that didn't get used to round the PCs up in the beginning.

Seriously, if the adventure absolutely requires the PCs to start as slaves, just make that the game pitch. "Ladies and gentlemen, you'll all be starting as slaves." The adventure in the main Dark Sun boxed set did that, and it's pretty much the archetypal generic Dark Sun campaign hook, so it's not like it's even a stretch. Freedom flat out says that it's supposed to be the start of a campaign, so skipping all that stuff at the beginning wouldn't hurt anything.

Anyway, the PCs work on the ziggurat and have to deal with slave riots, Kalak enslaving nobles for the lulz, being on short rations with inadequate water and having to get or steal more, beatings, escape plots, being taken aside and asked to inform on escape plots...but no way to escape, of course. After a few days of being jerked around and abused by The Man, Kalak has his great games in the arena to celebrate the completion of the pyramid, at which the events of The Verdant Passage occur, and the PCs have to survive Kalak's transformation attempt and the ensuing riots. The end.

That's it.

I kept thinking that at some point the adventure would open up. That the PCs would have to deal with the results following Kalak's demise, or become power players in the city, or at least have some effect on anything, but no. They're literally just there to observe what happens in The Verdant Passage, while unable to affect any of it, and then sent on their way. There's some brief notes that maybe Sadira and Rikus and Tithian can make the PCs lieutenants or something, but nothing more than that.

I have my own opinions on the changes made to the setting with the novels, and I won't go into them here, but I will say that there's a reason novels and RPGs are different forms. It's possible to have RPGs that are specifically crafted to create a single storyline--Fiasco or The Mountain Witch or Dog Eat Dog are good examples--but AD&D Second Edition is not one of those games. There's a lot of effort put into forcing the PCs to be on the front row of events they can't do anything about, and the only effort put toward the possibility of action outside the module's scope is a note that the GM should be ready for anything during the escape from the arena.

Freedom specifically says that Kalak makes attendance at the great games basically mandatory, so it seems like it would have been a better adventure just to have the PCs be present in Tyr during this, go to the arena, and then do the actual exciting part of escaping after the assassination. Using that as the beginning, and having the second part be the followup and how the city and the PCs deal with it, would have been a much better adventure, and certainly more fitting with the name. As it is, just giving the players copies of Verdant Passage and asking them to read it between games would probably be a lot more fun and require less of the GM jerking the PCs around or shutting down their ideas. It's pretty much the worst qualities of adventure design all in one place, and even reading it is a waste of time.

[Jon Goranson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Freedom

by David "Zeb" Cook

[I don't know why this is listed as a hardcover, 210 pages or by Troy Denning as this seems to be the module by David Cook.:]

This module is the sum of every bad module, which is most of them for 1E and 2E DND. This module is the type of module that sets up the "players vs DM" attitude that was so prevalent in most of the games I saw.

In this module, the players are not the main focus. They are allowed to watch as the real heroes, the ones from The Verdant Passage, do as was said in that book. Instead, they are relegated to slaves. Not just slaves but the lowest of the lowest slaves, workers.

The first parts of this module are all "railroading" as it's called, to get the player characters (PCs) as slaves. There are several ideas but it all means the same thing, forcing the outcome. Once they are slaves, they are supposed to stay slaves and meet contacts that way. The module again blatantly says that they should not escape and always put them back as slaves.

It isn't until part three that they have a few choices of what they can do but still forced as slaves. Further, the PCs can only watch as the "real" heroes of the story do their thing in part five. Part six goes back to the PCs for a bit and gives them choices but they aren't good ones. At the end of the adventure, the PCs are supposed to be glad that they got their freedom.

This is a terrible module. Terrible. They PCs aren't allowed to be heroes. They aren't allowed to do great deeds. Instead, they are forced into slave labor and held there. The idea is that they meet people in there that help them escape and after that come to the attention of the Heroes.

I don't know how often I had to read things like the following.
"Don't let the PCs escape."
"If they do escape, use another encounter to capture them again." "This shouldn't work."
"Don't let the PCs do X."
If I was a DM, this would be hard to do. Players don't like it when they can't do something or when they aren't the heroes. That's the point!

I think this type of module was typical of modules and is not a good module design. While the story of the module is interesting, in that it gives some more glimpses into Tyr and what is happening around The Verdant Passage, the module itself will be hard to do. I mean, it's as if the writer wants the PCs to feel like crap, helpless and unable to do anything. I can only guess that the author thinks the PCs will feel that much better when they do rise up and free themselves, becoming smaller scale heroes in their own right. Assuming the DM has any players left at that point.

jdg