Retrospective: A2 Secret of the Slavers Stockade 

I made Markessa a drow, a protegé of Edralve, and used her as a recurring villain with casl modules. She´s also a link to the GDQ series. In casl's A5 module she has a map that shows her strongholds and other slaver's sites, so I added possible locations of Temples of the Eye (ToEE, G1, G3). Also one of her many clones was behind Lareth activities.

I have a special place in my heart for A1 and A2. I wish Goodman Games would add the Slavers series to the Adventures Reincarnated list. Prior to these modules most of the dungeons I explored were full of twisting hallways and rooms with scores of monsters all living side by side with seemingly no issues. A1 and A2 were some of the first adventures I experienced that made sense, architecturally and with how the enemies reacted to the players.

Great module! I enjoyed playing it!

This module is soooo hard especially when the alarm is raised. I loved this module back in the day though. Thank you for doing these, great videos.

This is one of my favorite modules. Had great fun DM'ing this for my son.

We followed the caravan road as per our map, disguised as slavers, with a band of npc dwarven mercenaries in chains for sale. They had keys to the manacles stashed in their beards and body crevices. The was that they would free many slaves and rendezvous with us that night. Unfortunately, the fortress was manned by more hobgoblins than we had bargained for, And we discovered in the initial negotiations for price that this was Not the slaver headquarters we were searching for. And the hobgoblins did not offer us sanctuary beyond a few stiff drinks and wishes of good luck. So we abandoned our shorter comrades to their fate and rode back to Highport with all haste through the dead of night. The next few meetings were cancelled due to various reasons, so slavery is still a social norm in the Pomarj, I am told.

Thanks for the video! Paul Stormberg managed to get Harold Johnson to become the president of Dragon Days which will continue as an annual festival in Lake Geneva, WI, the second weekend of October. It was great fun this year and with the opening of The Wizard of Lake Geneva exhibit at the Geneva Lakes Museum, there was a lot of Gygaxian goodness to be had. I can't wait until Gary Con in March!

I always thought this module had a lot of similarities with Top Secret’s Rapidstrike. Busting into a heavily fortified base with a female big bad. Love this one!

⚠️ SPOILERS. I love this module and love Markessa as a repeat villain - the casl modules are great material for extending Markessa’s evil, and I love how Carlos used a version of Dread Delgath, one of the original tournament PCs, to kick off the adventures. I usually remove the ankheg encounter, as I find that encounter is too much, too soon for most players and puts the whole fort on alert too quickly - I just make it a mud trap. I also make more of the mad man as an ally and his area as a place of temporary refuge. The drow merchants have always intrigued me - if I was to run it again I would repurpose the rather undeveloped Earth Dragon cult in S3/S4 as an EEG sect, thus linking the Slave Lords to the Eilservs. But I would keep Markessa as a separate baddie, too self obsessed with her experiments to bother much about the cult of a long lost elder god.

I found this module to be fairly challenging even for an experienced party It’s really hit/stealth and run with quick decision making and a reasonable amount of luck My favorite of the series There are so many things that can go wrong for the players Hot grease anyone?

I ran this in 1990 with my group but we never finished it. I’ve been meaning to do the full series. I love that the Slave Lords are the evil foil to the PCs.

There is such great individual bad guys in that module! Between the blind fighter, and the evil Naziesque elf experimenting on her prisoners, it was great!

We entered as a slave caravan, one that we had captured.

Of the A Series, this one was my least favorite since it is a long slog theough room after room full of monsters. Most times the module doesn’t get finished, and ifnit ever does, Markessa is quickly terminated with extreme prejudice by the party. I really have to play her carefully. I can definitely use the “Tournament Mode” on these modules for their abbreviated style of play. Since I have been running mostly one-shots at my local game store. A2 is the longest and might require me to start a timer to discourage dawdling.

On dangerous old modules, I'm a little bit worried. Been running the party through Silver Princess and they are almost dead. Keep falling down pit traps (hey, at least I know they haven't been cheating, they are honest). The foes they are handling well, but it is looking like the traps are making mincemeat of them. They need to break out the ten foot poles. Perhaps I will warn them about old modules and traps. What do any of you suggest?

Thought it was a sequel for TOEE. I have the campaign version.

🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉🐉

The playability of tournament "modules" in general is marginal (IMO) by design. In a tournament, the characters are disposable and the objective is to generate some winners and some losers in 3-4 hours. There are always some newly invented monsters to prevent meta-gaming and random traps that may or may not make sense for the denizens of the locale. None of these factors make them suitable for a more sustained campaign. There was an introductory dungeon to the A series that was published in Dungeon magazine 221 called Lowdown in Highport. It's quite good. The playability of the A series drops off exponentially (again, my opinion) the farther you go. (A1 pretty good, A2 usable, A3 and A4 I pretty much scrapped and reworked from scratch.) I had two basic problems with A2. First, from a story perspective, half of the fort is unnecessary. Players can get the information they need to locate the slaver bosses from either half of the module. No need to run both halves. From a tournament perspective, my understanding is that in the second round of the tournament any given party would only run the top or bottom halves, not both. The second problem I had is with the top half of the hill fort. It makes no sense for the bosses of an operation to live at the back of a warren of trap-filled corridors. The front of the fort is populated by a haunt and an ankheg. How are they (the bosses) supposed to get to work in the morning and deal with slave caravans? The logistics of the whole set-up seems dumb. When I DMed A2 in 2019, my players found the secret entrance around back (party had a crack ranger) and we did the only the dungeons beneath the hill fort. It was pretty great. I did the drow trader encounter as a seed to possible further adventures. We never ended up pursuing that thread in the campaign.