RPG Retro Review: A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity 

Omg this one brings back memories. One of the rare times where player rolls were off the charts and our DM was actually rooting for us even while throwing good challenges at us. 🍕, 🥤, and potato chips while playing all weekend. Almost no sleep 😊

What I remember from this module, back in the early 80s when I owned it, was the male dwarf on the cover. Then one day I realized it was a female dwarf with a beard.

I always considered the Slave Lord series as the perfect template for a cinematographic adaptation with the production value of Lord of the Rings. People love vengeance films and it does have a "low fantasy" plot in which you can progressively introduce weird elements as the film advances.

Gosh I feel old now. The first Gencon I went to was Gencon 13 in 1980. I played the Slaver tournament at Gencon. And holding it at the college made it so fun. The rules were so much looser back then. There were people sleeping on the floor in the student union. I can't imagine a campus allowing people to run wild like we did any more. My friend and I camped out in a tent at a local Jellystone camp site to keep costs down since we were still in high school. Those are great memories.

One of my favorite module series.

I DM’d this right after it was released...Oh so many years ago! All hail the Aspis Queen!

Love your vids, they take me back almost 40 years now. 1st edition is the only edition to me!

LOVE your work. Please keep it up. Your videos are incredibly informative and nostalgic; you inspire me, and help me be a better DM.

Thanks Cap, you timed this perfectly! I've been running the U1-U3 Saltmarsh adventures and had been seeding stories of pirates and slavers marauding the Wild coast to the players throughout, in order to set up the A series as the next chapter.

"Here in Maryland"... I thought I recognized the accent. ;-)

The Slaver Series is one of the few classic modules I haven't played, DM'd, or read with an intention to DM.

A friend of mine in Boy Scouts, used this module to introduce me to AD&D, i played a Gnome Thief and i was able to avoid the traps and pitfalls from going in the back door! I agree that it is the weakest of the 4 modules !

This was a popular module that everyone seemed to have in the 80's and was standard in many campaigns but I found it so hard to deal with. PC's got battered and bloodied so easily and so early on from constant melee, and back in those days it was hard to heal. You didn't just rest where you were standing for 8 hours and wake up at full hit points like now. It was especially bad if you honestly "rolled" hit points at every level without fudging it and there were like 5th level fighters with 13 hit points (although we always cheated).

Great video and review Cap. I totally agree with your scoring. Keep the good stuff coming.

I bought this module when it first came out and still have it 8)

One of the first modules I played as a young kid was in the Dungeons of Slavelords. My dad let me read some of it ahead of time....we still didn’t make it out lol. Great amount of fun.

I’ve run A1 as the original tournament module scenario for at least two Gamedays, once as AD&D, and once as a 4th Edition conversion. It surprisingly held up in both times, and I probably want to one day run it as a 5e version.

I just started doing and this is the first story I’ve ever used so I’m exited

Can't wait for the Paizo conversion of this. Fingers crossed!

Super job on an oldie!

Thanks for the memories and for connecting the dots about the reprints

I just today acquired a copy of this module for $15.00 at my friends comic book shop.

Great review as always, Cap! I've modded this one for NWN too. My friends and I played through the whole Slave Lords saga back in the 80s over a week of living on pizza and rc cola lol.

I loved A2 The Slavers Stockade

I love the art from this module.

I recently purchased the pdf of the hardcover slavers series and reread the adventure. It was much more convoluted than I remember.

Cool! I had no idea that the special hardcover edition has a bonus Skip "The Sage" Williams module in it.

Nice! Looking forward to the next 3.

A great module, I am currently running a Campaign for my group that is going through the Temple of Elemental Evil and will them move into the slaver series. None of them had ever been exposed to the old classics so I wanted them to have the pleasure finally.

I never played any of the Slave Lords modules in the old days. Thanks for this look at the first one. I really like your use of the adventure intro to start the video. I thought that was a nice touch.

Despite the tweaking I'll have to do I am looking forward to running this and the others in my setting. As always you had a great review and I'll be checking out your other reviews in the series.

I bought this one in the Against the Slavelords beautiful reprint from a couple years ago!

i ordered A0-A4 Against the Slave Lords (1e) from drive-thru rps, dungeon masters guild. i can hardly wait until it comes in.

We must have attempted to play the full sequence a dozen times. Only once did we make it through ToEE, the Slave Lords, and Against the Giants -- only to die in the Demon Webs. Rest of the time we would have to make 8th-level characters and start in Against the Giants. I found Slavers to be one of the better series as with the combined book there was enough backstory and the fact you met the villains repeatedly worked well. By the end of the series every player always hated them. Having the players defeated, captured, and their items taken away completely changed the game and made it more personal than the other series. I wish we played it more, but we seemed to always either to low-level or skip it for the Giant series.

Looking forward to a Slavers series!

Love your videos. You've got yourself a new patron.

I've actually been waiting for your review of this one. For me A1 has a special place in my heart. It was the first module I ever played through while The Veiled Society was the first module I purchased but had no idea how to run...the module was incomplete and I didn't realize it initially. Ironically, I had a female noble woman who was captured by the slavers as the main goal to the characters. What the characters didn't know was she suffered from Stockholm Syndrome and when they rescued her at the end of A3, she stabbed one of them and killed him just before they were captured from the Slave Lords in A4. They were tortured slowly for months until the volcano erupted. I vaguely remember the modules A3 and A4 being a bit of a mess and remembering that I wished that I had read all of the modules before starting the whole campaign when I finally purchased and read A4. After that I wouldn't start a series until I read them all, I wanted the whole campaign to be more cohesive so that they would flow better. The A series taught me how to plan out and entire storyline, while allowing players to explore my sand box of a world that I borrowed from Gygax. Great video, as always. When it comes to D and D channels, you are my first, and still the best. You sparked my interest in Cthulhu. Here's a question have you ever played The Goblin's Lair, The Dragon's Den or The Haunted Tower? I found The Haunted Tower at a second hand store for five bucks a couple years back and it's still sitting on my shelf waiting to be played. My friends and I all wish we had the time to game but it will always be something we will do some other day. I sure miss gaming.

Loved this one. Cracked me up how the orcs have their "tech" blow up in their face on occasion.

Good video, and... Oops, like me (I also made the same mistake in my review video of the A1 Mod), you forgot to mention that the Temple Ruins Level map of the A1 Mod has a mistake. The Main Courtyard (rm # 16A) and Inner Courtyard (rm # 9) are not connected. "Scourge of the Slave Lords" fixes this mistake and has the two Courtyards connected, thus connecting the Left and Right Halves of the Temple Ruins Level. Funny thing is, WOTC forgot about this correction, and made the same mistake of not having the two rooms connected in their "Against the Slave Lords".

Never had a chance to run this. I think a good number of the early TSR adventure modules will all need some fleshing out, especially the tournament ones.

If you had an evil druid,, evil cleric,, and evil wizard as the slave lords here, it would explain how they keep the monsters in line.

Excellent review

This is definitely one for the more experienced DM and Player. In theory, the PCs have had several opportunities to prove themselves and if this is going to be run as part of an ongoing campaign (like I did) I had to sit on the module for a while until I could get my PCs into the areas affected and make some friends/necessary relationships so they have so.e investment in the outcome. Due to the tourney nature, there was quite a bit of modification I did with regard to encounters and events. I could always imagine bad guys using some of these monsters as tools, throw them slaves and useless workers as food. There were enough evil clerics to keep the undead in control. Thanks Cap, you have amazing insight to these modules and I love hearing your take on them.

We ran this right after keep on the borderlands. Our DM replaced the ant-people with NEOGI because chaos and slaves (wink wink nod nod) and we then moved on to against the spider queen!

Back in the good ole days we used to play AD&D campaigns with a pretty predictable series of modules: Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Village of Hommlet, Slavers series, White Plume Mountain/Dwellers of Forbidden City/Ghost Tower of Inverness/Hidden Shrine, Giants (possibly followed up by D1/D2), and finally Tomb of Horrors(where everyone dies so we can start over XD)

Great and very informative video.

After hearing your Leather worker rendition, have you ever tried a Connery? I think you're almost there. Ha.))

Having a copy of the individual A modules, and the A1-4 Scourge, I also saw the supermodule just cobble the 4 individual modules together, rather than fix the issues you mention. Ah well, some homework for the DM.

As always, great review!

I remember DMing this in 1982 I was 13 and probably did a poor job but man was it fun except for that wight early on. Tpk and then restarted

Played it once then ran it later when they repackaged it and put it in the series with Temple of Elemental Evil & GDQ. I even bought the recent repackage with A0 though I haven't gone through that yet.

A friend of mine ran us through this as a one shot for 5e. It was cool

1:05 I admire your commitment to the role but it's a bit of a challenge to make out what you're saying. 6:03 I did some research into the pronunciation of D&D nomenclature if you'd like to check it out, I was mispronouncing 'basilisk' too!Thanks for the review I'm hoping to run this for my group but converting to post apocalyptic rpg

Wasn’t some of the interior artwork controversial? I could swear I read that there was some nudity that caused some parents to freak out.

They could just have an Evil cleric who controls and managed their undead lines of defense, undead don't need to be paid after all to stand guard.

I have the super version of this module I ordered up on eBay years ago with the intention of running it in an old 2e campaign. Never got the chance to run the whole game.

I rmember when A1 scourge of the slave lords cost like 10 USD. back in the late 80s.

Yes, the temple map on the ground level is divided. This is a huge flaw. This pissed me off greatly as a young DM. And the stairs in the graveyard was also a big flaw. These flaws ruined this adventure for me, as again I was a very young, and very inexperienced, DM.

A1. where all it began, really, And obviously

This is part of a trilogy isn't it ? update: 20:04 oh, a quadrology !

Have you see the Three Little Books Adventures from Rob Kuntz?

4:03 (Description of Highport) I love modules that provide a city -- esp. as a source of ideas to loot. Safeton looks useful, but i don't understand why humans would live in Highport, a city filled with goblins and orcs. And why would goblins and orcs let humans hang out with them? It makes no sense to me. 8:53 (Terrain at the Slave Pits) But, why would the characters go out into dangerous terrain (i.e., the beams) to fight when they could just used ranged weapons and wait for the fancy-pants ants to come to them? 17:47 (Presentation Rating) Yes, tournament info was always annoying. I remember back to like 9th grade looking at that stuff and thinking, "What do I need this stuff for?" It is definitely a problem with old AD&D modules that TSR should have though about when marketing stuff that was once used in tournaments. 19:16 Unfortunately, when i first started playing I was a very young teenager (13) and we didn't know how much prep you had to do regarding modifying stuff. So if we got something from TSR (instead of making our own), that was how it was. If there was nothing between the gate of Highport and the temple written down, then it amounted to just a description with no real action. You just pass through a city filled with orcs and goblins like it was a routine Star Wars cantina and then you're at the temple.

I don't even remember if I bought the Scourge of the Slave Lords booklet. I might have. It's been a few decades. I agree, the series isn't that great, ...due to it tournament nature. The best thing about it is Jeff Dee's artwork. Finally(!) the Goblin orcs/goblins/ etc. looked realistic. I copied those pages and used those pictures for a few years as encounter pictures for the players. I also remember how hard it was to get copies of these when they first came out. They had stopped selling D& D in my area because of the whole "devil-worshipping" scare sweeping the soccer-moms at the time.

It was trying to play this module that taught me that not all gamers are decent people. I was joining a game group in my HS and they conspired with the DM to kill off my character in the very first room. I never played with them after that. I never found the premise of this module that bad. My primary problem is with the map. I am sure the wrecked half was supposed to link with the intact half of the temple somehow. How they drew it you were forced to go out through the damaged roof of the garden or the double doors near it and walk around the front of the building to reach the main gate. In which case -- why go through the secret entrance into the wrecked temple to begin with? I am also certain that the first staircase was originally supposed to lead to the basilisk den and not the sewer.

Is it just me, or did this just start up in mid-sentence?

Now I know what Donald Duck and Sméagol lovechild sounds like.

Hi capt-c....where did you learn this from at 6:46 "Gygaxian naturalism, whereby one presupposes a world influenced by the things the rules suggest."

I understand your critiques but at the same time they are easily resolved by an intrepid DM - especially the plot devices and motivation. A simple example would be to add a merchant or similar VIP captive in the pits for the PCs to rescue. Done.

Classic module

We didn't enjoy these modules. I think eventually we had a total Party Kill when we tried it as a campaign. It was a little darker than I enjoyed. It always felt like the solution to these Slavers was a military campaign by one of these countries' armies. The party seemed woefully underpowered to deal with this. We did enjoy the escape from the dungeon module but we played it as a one of and did end up in another total party kill. Maybe it was just us. I give this series an 8. I think maybe a ten for this module.

A3 Assault on the Aerie of Slave Lords is worst of the series. The finale A4 is a bit different - very fun. The players start as prisoners.

The weasel lord

Where can you get a 5th edition conversion of this module?

Safeton?

A1-4 also has a terrible piece of railroading before getting into the actual modules that will infuriate players, especially if this is being run as a continuation from the Temple of Elemental Evil super-module. I ran it back in the day, and it killed the campaign.

Was the 7th level thief given a name??? No, as you mentioned he was unnamed. Pathetic. And why giant weasels? Why were Aspis needed? Aren't Orcs sufficient as guards?? They are the quintessential guard in the fantasy genre. This was the weakest of the A1-A4 modules.

Please don't do that voice again :(