Trivia & Anecdotes: Slavers

(Trivia & Anecdotes is a series of blog posts about weird and sometimes funny behind-the-scenes facts about various books I worked on. I stopped doing them in 2015 when my life went off the rails for a bit, but I’m starting them back up again!)

(Lemme point out that this adventure was written in 1999, so it uses 1999 terminology–slaves are called “slaves” rather than “enslaved people.” Lemme also point out that the people who do the enslaving in this adventure are most definitely bad people.)

cover image of my Slavers adventure

Slavers is a Greyhawk adventure set in a part of the world called the Pomarj (basically the peninsula/coast to the southwest of the City of Greyhawk). The idea was that we’d take a look at the original AD&D 1st edition “slave lords” adventures (A1-A4) and update what had happened since then (the official timeline of the setting had moved forward a few years), including what the orginal “slave lords” major NPCs were up to now. Although the focus was supposed to be adventure stuff, I knew that we were unlikely to publish a geographical sourcebook on the area in the next few years, so the co-author and I decided we’d make it a sort of “sandbox” adventure that also doubled as a sourcebook–so you’d have a bunch of entries for the cities and towns, info on how things related to the overall adventure, and so on.

My co-author was Chris Pramas (who would later found Green Ronin with Nicole Lindroos). Chris was new to Wizards of the Coast at the time but already had a lot of cred as a designer in the industry, so I knew this would be an interesting collaboration. Due to scheduling, I think I wrote 3/4 of the book and Chris wrote 1/4 of it, with me doing the first two quarters and the last one, and he did the third quarter. Us working on this together is why Chris gave me the nickname “Greyhawk Boy,” which he still greets me with. :) I remember at the time that Chris put a drug den in his part of the adventure, and the PCs needing to meet someone in there would first have to get past the junkies outside who were “jonesing for a fix.” Needless to say, one of the more conservative people at TSR had that reference sanitized. :p

[Spoilers in this paragraph!] One idea I used for Slavers was that one of the original “slave lords” (Markessa) had a bunch of people turned into near-duplicates of her using magic and surgery, each of them brainwashed and enchanted to think they were her, to basically be her eyes, ears, and hands in extended parts of the new adventure plot. It also means that the PCs keep running into variants of the same woman (with different hair color, classes, and special abilities). So… fast forward a few years to when I’m watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and there are copies of each Cylon model, and I remember thinking, “hey, I did that for Slavers!” :D

Slavers was on the tail end of 2nd edition AD&D, and the 3e design team was already working on significant portions of the 3e rules. As I mentioned in my TSR Jam article, at the time we were doing adventure tie-ins for various AD&D books, and they decided that I should do one for Slavers (which I decided would have a piracy them and be called Crossbones and Crossbows). But because we worked so far in advance on the books, I wouldn’t have to write this tie-in adventure for at least six months (C&C was only going to be four pages, and we’d print them out in the office and mail them to stores, so we could get that done in a weekend instead of the months of sending them to an outside printer as a product, etc.), and being a lazy freelancer, I didn’t start working on it until about five months later. And in that intervening time, I started playtesting 3e (in the office, and in Monte Cook’s home campaign, Ptolus). And HOO BOY 3e was such a paradigm-changer for the rules that I actively resisted going back into the 2e part of my brain in order to design C&C. Lemme give an example.

If you’ve played 3e, you know that a PC using stealth means the character makes a Hide or Move Silently check against the observer’s Spot or Listen check. That’s pretty straightforward. 2e AD&D didn’t have anything like that. So in C&C, there’s a pirate cove where the pirates are hiding out, and the PCs can approach from along the beach or directly from the water. The 2e rules don’t actually tell you “this is how hard it is to spot someone approaching you in the dark,” it just has the GM (or the game designer) make it up. So I could say, “the pirate sentry has a 1–2 in 1d6 chance to notice a PC sneaking up along the beach.” And likewise, I might know that sneaking up directly from the water is harder for the sentry to see, but I don’t have any rules guidelines for how much harder that is. Is it 1-in-1d6 harder? 1-2 in 1d8 harder? Unclear. You just gotta pick one. It’s so weirdly vague to design like that in 2e, after having all the rules for how it works being so straightforward in 3e. Anyway, it meant that I was kinda late on getting the C&C adventure finished–because I was liking 3e so much that I didn’t want to go back to designing for 2e!

[There’s an additional trivia thing relating to this book, but I can’t talk about it at this time. Ask me about it in ten years.]

Completely unrelated to the text design, I gotta mention that this was my first cover art by JEFF EASLEY! Which I think is pretty awesome, as I had been seeing Easley covers on my game books for the previous 15 years as a young gamer. I also think this is my first book that had any art by Wayne Reynolds, who of course has made quite a name for himself doing art for D&D, Magic: the Gathering, Pathfinder, and more.

(Edit from 2023: The Reviews from R’lyeh site did an extensive review of Slavers with lots of notes comparing it to the original 1E module series, check it out!)

My next TNA article is about the Dark•Matter setting for the Alternity game!