RPG Retro Review: Temple of Death 

A 37 year old module. Man, I remember buying it brand new back in 83. Think I will need a potion of youth soon.....

Please continue with reviewing 1st ed D&D Basic/expert modules. myself discovered my old D&D stash from 30 years ago and want to get back in to it and include involving my family. I find your series invaluable as I absorb the info needed to start RPG again. Don’t Stop!!!

I'm loving your reviews. I hope you plan to do B10: Night's Dark Terror at some point. That was one of my favorite modules of the old B/X era.

I wish they would re-release the Mystara setting. It was my first Campaign setting back in the early 90's. This adventure sounds vaguely familiar. Not sure I ever ran it, but I collected every D&D book I could get my hands on and I'm pretty sure I owned this at one point or another.

This was the very first D&D product I ever bought in the summer of 1983 shortly after playing the game for the first time (the DM ran X2 Castle Amber) before I got the BECMI basic set at the end of the year.

I just read this one in the past 2 weeks, and man are those tunnels through the mountain fun. This one did a great job of mixing those kind of weird fantasy elements (a well can make a ladder to the friggin moon for no reason) and the "behind enemy lines" feeling Cook captures so well. Agreed, the ending is a very sudden roll credits sensation.

The reason I love your channel so much is because. Every time you do a review I become a kid again!! Thank you Cap 😊 👍🤘

About the abrupt ending of the adventure, Cook provided two ways in the temple for PCs to teleport back home, the teleportation closet and the House of Zebulon magic item. But in addition to that, anyone who would like a follow up adventure to this one written in Cook's style can find on the pandius website an adventure called Escape from Hule that was published in the last year in Threshold Magazine issues 22 and 23. It provides three routes for players to make their way back to their homeland and uses the B/X Moldvay/Cook rules.

This is a rockin' old module. I might re-run it again and expand heavily on it.

Another great review, another module I will try to get on pdf. Thanks.

Is this the one with the cool spectral hounds? I have the original somewhere. One of my favorite modules as a kid in The 80s.

Would you consider reviewing CM9 Legacy of Blood? Besides being a neat module, it focuses on a style of play (domain building) that Basic did so well and has been lost to suceeding generations of D&D. That could be an educational episode for the uninitiated.

Great video, the temple map looks great, very inspiring to make me wanna make my own temple of death. I shall add a giant cauldron that if the pc’s are captured end up tossed into it to boil, thats a fitting end to those pesky adventurers messing with the masters plans... 🙂👍🏻

Great review as usual.

Hi. I really enjoy your reviews, especially of the old D&D and AD&D module. Any chance you can review I11 'Needle' sometime?

Funny that they made the temple pseudo Cambodian but then in X10 the Master is clearly the Ayatollah Khomeini.

I've always liked this module but have also always felt that its cover art didn't do it any favors.

Have you reviewed "Quagmire! "?

6:42 What is the true nature of the Master?

Hey Cap'n, any idea why some monsters (both old and new to this module) have an asterisk next to their name. There's no explanation that I can find.

If for some reason the group accidentally or intentionally go to the Moon, how would you resolve it? I understand from a previous video that the moon gate is a one-way. If the party doesn't have planar travel spells and you don't want to TPK the group outright, perhaps one idea would be to leave a Spelljammer type ship crashed on the moon, that they need to retro engineer Gamma World style that crashes on atmospheric re-entry(Revenge of the Sith style)? Or leave bodies of other unfortunate adventures there that happen to have a spell book with some rudimentary spell that a wizard was working on that gets them to the Astral Plane above Mystara (at which point they will see that the planet has holes if they inspect it well enough) but not back on track to where they were.. or an item with a Wish? I mean its all very Dues ex machina to do something like that, but maybe it might create new campaign ideas outside the module.. idk. I guess if someone in the party has a type of mass teleport spell it might solve it though, but that is a pretty high level spell for the module..

WotC should put out a giant hardbound Mystara setting Cyclopedia.

Very cool lol

I don't know how to play dnd can you help me captin

I’m looking for a 1st or 2nd Edition module to introduce D&D to my 11 year old nephew and my 9 year old son. Neither has ever played so it would need to be a low level campaign. Any suggestions?

Way too many ads...

I love the old modules text and art work it's so nostalgic!! I LOVE IT💚🇮🇪

Will you do the 3rd in this Trilogy? Red Arrow, Black Shield?

And of course X5 and another great review - thank you! Playing these modules provided some very vivid memories even though we never ever finished one! TPKs all round in those days.

Great review. I recently got X5 as a POD and can confirm it's a good product. Recommended (despite the strange lack of a POD option for X4). Your advice on how to run the module was really useful. I agree it should do a bit more to help the DM. There's a possibility of escaping the Temple using the Master's skyship (crewed by skeletons), and another using a pocket dimension to transport back to the Abbey in X4, but neither are very obvious. Killing the Master without fighting him is also possible, but it's not clear how anyone can be expected to work this out. Perhaps adding some additional (subtle) clues in the Magden village encounter would do it? It would be interesting to hear your views on X10 at some point. Although it's meant to be a sequel, it could almost be an alternative way to tell the Master's story. You could even adapt it as a prequel, fleshing out the war mentioned in X4 (not my idea BTW - I think I saw this suggested on the Dragonsfoot Forums).

i miss the old hex maps. i have a coulple of apps that let me make hex maps for my games.

He home brewed this . Great but I loved nomad more

If you have Indy, that would be a great review, (TSR) Thanks for your videos, Always fun

Outstanding overview of an interesting sounding module. Always look forward to your videos and my wife says your voice is soothing when I’m watching your videos while she’s going to sleep. 😄 For all that I’m updating my Patreon to top tier for you. May you keep making awesome content for years!

Good review Sounds like an interesting module.

I wound up buying the package deal (shown in your last vid) for $40 on ebay with the desert nomad adventure plus this one. I will probably steal a bunch of ideas from both and modify the theme somewhat to fit in my Irish Celtic based campaign (no desert, for example). In 1983, I would never have bought these because AD&D was the shyte back then, so why would you bother with B and X? Duh. I got the Basic box for Christmas 1981, read it and went out and got the Expert set a week later. My friend goes, 'Oh we play Advanced D&D.' So I wound up playing AD&D and buying stuff for that with my limited money as an 8th grader and through high school. But I still have to say that I learned just about everything I needed to know for adventure design from Keep on the Borderlands & Isle of Dread. Anything I learned after that was gravy. These dungeons seem to be right in line with those. esp. the hex crawls of the Expert set. :D

They finally made both X4 and X5 available on POD. I just grabbed both of them and Drums on Fire Mountain

BECMI Mystara is simply the best.

Seriously, who is the one loser who disliked this video?

You should review Gaz 2 it goes with this module.

Thanks, been waiting for this one :)

i love the intro these vids

Talking about campaigns on mystara. Do you know calidar? It's writen by Bruce Heard, I think he wrote Voyage of the Princess Ark. I have the first calidar's book on PDF, and I liked it very much. But I would love to watch you do a review on the setting.

Me and my friends played through this module in 5e, and we discovered one critical flaw in the architecture of the temple that made the battle against Master and his forces a cakewalk. We stealthed our way through the temple with disguises and poisons and deception, until we got to the final area. There we basically fooled/killed a few people, explored the area, and once we got to the second floor, started killing people outright. After killing everyone else upstairs, we came across Master and he fled downstairs. By this point I realized that out of the several different staircases throughout the main temple, only ONE of them led to the main room of the upstairs. As the downstairs began to fill up with goblins, bugbears, ogres, crab demons, ogres, clerics, holymen, and giants, I poured several flasks of oil on the stair case. We then positioned ourselves in front of the stairs, tanks in front, mages and ranged attackers in the back. With the stairs being difficult terrain and forcing them to make Dex saves each turn, it was very hard for the large armies to come up and swarm us. Most who tried died from fall damage. The two tanks held back the few monsters who got upstairs while the magic casters firebolted them to death. Only the Holymen managed to get through and hid behind the secret door next to the stairs, but we managed to flank them. After 8 rounds, our DM had to say, "The blood of your enemies washes away the oil." Eventually the only ones left were the Crab elephants, the Master, and his Wizard friend. It was a reasonably tough fight but we managed to defeat them, mostly because our Druid, two Wizards, Sorcerer, and Artificer all had their spell levels unused. And then defeated the master again.