RPG Retro Reviews: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth 

I read this module in my tent with a flashlight at camp in the 80's, and it scared the hell out of me. Good times : )

I played this as Gamma World Alternity, with characters trying to take it over. I made it an antimatter power plant, with interdimensional anomalies, from misaligned gear. The characters eventually open a way for the dragonturtle to get out. I also made oozes nanite pools, like Terminator II, that could reform, take shape, and attack, but not for long, because it was weakened and malfunctioning security nanite clouds. The Vampire woman was in a nanite medical case, with repair nanites making her alive and in need of vital organs and blood, because the nanites needed raw materials. I worked it. Including antimatter and spoiled-nanite contamination.

You had me laughing at the start. Yeah, Tsojcanth is a mouthful.

S series were some of the best modules ever made. This one including the Demonomicon of Iggwilv supplement was just icing on the cake.

I am so humbly grateful for Grandmaster Gygax for giving this to us. This game saved me as a kid during a time when things were crazy. I still have all of my books from the 70's and now have 93% of 5th edition, (They have some crazy add on type books!) Thank you for creating this game and thank you Cap for taking us back through it.

YES! YES! My all time favorite module from the old days. An adventure with a MMII highlight smack dab in the center.

LOL. Love the way you tried to pronounce Tsojcanth! Also love the last room / final boss of this Module. Very evocative of "Sleeping Beauty". I need to get around to also reviewing this Module. Cheers!

I’ve only ever played 5e, but I can’t help but be fascinated by your videos! Keep up the awesome work :D

30 second soapbox rant: Despite all of the argument and the recent documentary about how Dave Arneson is the "true" founder of fantasy role-playing, this module is Exhibit A in why, at the end of the day, Gygax will always be "considered" the founder. The qualitative difference between this module, Hommlet, Tharizdun, Giants series, etc, with Temple of the Frog is striking. Rant over.

Love this module, glad to see it get an in depth and quality review. Also loved seeing a shout out for Jon Pintar's maps. They are great and I'm using the caves of chaos set to run Keep on the Borderlands right now.

LCoTsoj is probably my favorite 1e module that I never played or DMd. Igwilv’s daughter was just awesome , I loved and have been inspired the teleportation traps, and the menagerie of new monsters that made their way into the 1e MM2 are second only to the likes of (maybe) Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Dwellers of the Forbidden City.

I DM'ed this module back when it was released. Ahhhh the sweet, sweet memories! Thanks for the nostalgia!

I love how one of the booklets is really a preview of mm2 and unearthed arcana

Hi captain c....i remember going through this in like the summer of 1982 with some friends that lived up the street from me that loved AD&D....my fav part about these old modules is that they show you ways of doing hex crawls, and i did something based on these old things for an adventure i did for 5e a few summers ago and the players loved it! it seemed like a game within a game for them -- an alternative to this narrative of "it's a nice cool day and you walk for a few hours and then ." Instead there were a few "set encounters" and then every hex they moved there was a chance for something to happen (encounter, find something, etc.). Because the (lame) 5e DM Guide does not tell DMs how to do this, one even gleefully and approvingly asked, "Did you make this up?" I said, "Yes, based on what I know from the old days of playing!" ... By the way, "bas relief" is a French word, so it is pronounced "bah relief" (as in "bah humbug"). It's a word that comes from art, and is found in the vocabulary of HP Lovecraft and weird tales gang that Gygax lists in Appendix N.

2nd time through the video, once last night and again now this morning. I love these old modules, that’s how my dad DM’d for me and my buddies back in the 90s. I never noticed the randomness back in the day, but we loved it, and usually ended up dead somewhere :)

Probably the most fun our group ever had with a published module. It was also one of the most deadly, mind you! lol Love this one.

One of my personal favorites as both a player and, later as a DM.

Ran this in 3.5 Ed with a combination of the original module (which I own) and the updated version from the WOTC site. Was a lot of fun.

Personally I think the Value on this module deserved better than a 17. At the time this came out, this was like buying a (top notch, as it turned out) module and getting a free mini source book included. Worth the price for the adventure alone, but with the added monsters and spells info this was a must-have.

Really beautiful art in this module. Totally enjoying all of these module reviews. You probably already know, but Goodman Games will (hopefully the way things are going) be producing 3 hardbacks this year, The Lost City, Castle Amber, and The Temple of Elemental Evil. Of course this will be printing all of the old content, as well as 5e rule updates, and maybe some new content. I've been DMing the Isle of Dread, and that's been a blast. Hopefully you'll be checking those out. It would be nice to hear what you think. As always, thanks Cap'n!

Keep bringing up old memories. Yet another module I still have, and it was a deadly one. Shame I no longer have the time for pnp games. ☹️

I always pronounced it with the T silent. Soj-canth. While I love reading modules by Gary Gygax, B2 being my favorite, as always with Gygax's modules, the randomness of it can drive you nuts sometimes, but not always, and, as with just about all of his modules, if you cut the monetary and magical treasure in half, your party will still be rich with more magical items than they know what to do with when they finish. Gary seemed to, at times, just place random monsters and treasure in random caves, just so the module could have a large variety of D&D monsters and treasure within, yet despite that criticism, there's just something magical about the way he writes modules. Once I start reading one, I usually can't put it down. I'm trying to imagine all these monsters in here living in these caves and never running into each other and killing each other, lol. I could make sense of B2, because of the Evil Temple, and the Giants series worked too, pretty much, but am I to really believe that all these monsters just cohabit these caves and are all chill with each other? Yet, all that said, I too love this module. It's just FUN.

Nice history lesson and review of the module. Good video

One of our all time favorites too, but thanks to the first unmarked path leading right to the Caverns, we went straight there w/o needing to explore the other locales, having no idea they were even there. We always thought ut should have been deeper in the mt. paths and not so easy to find so quickly.

Awesome review, as always, Cap!

Absolutely loved the art. I truly miss the early days when D&D was more Conan and Lovecraftian horrors than Lord of the Rings.

Thanks for a great review as usual.

Great review Cap as usual. I was curious as to why your theme music sounds modulated up a few keys?

Another great review this was my favorite mod.

The ISOTU realistic map is great, I have it on roll20 right now, fully kitted out :)

Where was the mallet sound when you announced the final rating? My family always waits for that when we listen to your reviews while driving. :) Keep up the great work!!

Still have this module!

Surprise! WotC is reprinting the module, so this video is great again.

I'm always amused when I hear, this video contains spoilers of a 40ish year old adventure module.... Were these caverns ever lost, though, and do they look like a lair where Iggwilv might have sprung from to conquer and then rule her short-lived reign of Perrenland? I never thought so. It was a tournament though, and an early on at that. I think it was always meant to be a preview of the Monster Manual 2, but I do like the the finale, though. Informative, enthusiastic, and energetic, as always. Thanks!

That villainous mage might make a good campaign thorn as I tend to do with published adventures. In L5R 5th edition I took a dark magic user and made her the arch villian that's still causing trouble.

I have the PDF of the Winter Con 1976 version with hand written notes. It is interesting to put them side by side and compare.

Right at the end you pronounced it the way we always said it Tso-Joe-Canth, as if it were missing a O Lost Caverns of Tsojocanth. I don't know why this is, but I blame the gnomes.

A great review maybe time to have a group try it. Oddly after seeing this review I realize that I have never ran this one despite buying and running the rest of Realms of Horror the year it was released.

I think Gygax was a master of trolling, long before the term existed. All the names in this module (and many of his others) are deliberately hard to pronounce and seem to be making fun of fantasy literature (including Lovecraft).

There was something really confusing about Daouds Wondrous Lanthorn I seem to remember when playing this module. It was something to do with the number of lenses and the descriptions. I'll have to dig it out and reread it. One of my favourite dungeon crawls though.

Hey brother! Are you planning on covering WG4? I’ve never read through that module but the cover alone and it’s strange color scheme makes me wonder what Gary cooked up for as a side quest for this.

I recently discovered your page and I love what you do! Question: I am trying to find the maps from John Pinter on Drive Thru and I can't seem to locate any. Do they still sell them or is there another way to access them?

Fantastic review! But I believe overall this is a critical hit...I wish it was a raid in DDO

Ah the memories......

Hey Cap! Could you do a review on B4 The Lost City? I'm planning on running it in my homebrew campaign and would love your opinions on it and how best to run it :)

"guarded by what appears to be a eunuch" Ok but I'm pretty sure there's only one way a person could "appear" to be a eunuch, so I gotta wonder what was that guy wearing?

Speaking of pronunciation, Erol Otus's first name is pronounced as a long A (error, aero), like Errol Flynn.

Seth Skorkowsky did a review about four months ago. It prompted me to purchase a print-on-demand copy. Almost half of it is indeed a mini Monster Manual. Some of the art was re-used in 2nd-edition. No idea when I'll run the module. Buying it was a completist impulse. The "j" could be pronounced as an "i" or "y" making it Tsoicanth - not really an improvement.

10:04. This is what you are fighting for.

Has anyone ever connected the Lanthorn from this module and the 333 black gems from WG4? It seems to me there was meant to be a connection due to gemstones powering the Lanthorn and THARIZDUN’s theme of darkness and cold. Could the artifact be used to wake the dark god or even perhaps banish it entirely from the material plane? The ending oof WG4 is so ambiguous it begs for a DM to expand it.

Can you review Lost City? Goodman games are releasing the 5e hardcover soon. Thank you!

Sir Otus did an amazing S4 module conversion for NWN: neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/module/s4-lost-caverns-tsojcanth

Cool review. Just a small correction though: S4 was the last of 1st edition Special "S" modules but there was one more. S5 The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga for AD&D 2nd edition in I think 1995. A TSR module. Your ranking of its value a 17 seems low based on what you said of its value and 10.50 price point.

Have you got a new mic? Sounds great!

Going to do Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun?

REALMS OF HORROR:STRANGE THINGS THIRD SESSION..

A4?

We always pronounced it Sahj-a-Canth. Good as any, right?

I always pronounced it "So-canth", the T being a silent T. tee hee

I always pronounced it wrong, apparently

Captain Courageous would be easier to find with a google search than capcorajus Also, Ts oj can th

Actually I personally dislike the practice of converting old graph or hex maps to the "realistic" color. I find them harder to use in play and just plain noisy. Swords & Wizardry did that in their reboot of Tegel Manor. While the new color map is pretty enough, I'll be using my old map from the original when we actually play because it's easier to read at the table.

Bump

Tsolkampk. Is an ABBEY...TSOJKAMPH=AN ABBEY.

I'm assuming it's pronounced So-I-can't.

You pronounced it differently every single time you said it

White plume mountain was a poor combination of Gamma World and AD&D in my opinion. I played fantasy rpgs. Not into the sci-fi stuff.

INCINERATE.