Greetings! Thanks for stopping by. Not much new to report in book sales, but something pretty cool is coming up soon for my day job as a writer for Elder Scrolls Online: our new Gold Road chapter, which will be released next month. I did a lot of work in the zone story for Gold Road, so I’m anxious to see what the fans make of it!

In recent reading, I just finished A.G. Riddle’s The Atlantis Gene. If I’m not mistaken, it was his first publication. I liked his Winter World series a lot, but I can tell he was still finding his footing in The Atlantis Gene. I admit, I’m not in a rush to continue the series, but we’ll see. I’m also re-reading The Day of the Triffids for the first time in something like thirty years. My wife’s book club read it, so I moved it from her bedstand to mine when she was finished. It was written in 1951 but holds up surprisingly well, anticipating the “zombie apocalypse” genre that’s been so popular in recent years.

Okay, on to the topic of the day!

50 Years of D&D: The Forge of Fury

As a game designer it’s easy to think of new campaign setting or a high-visibility rulebook as the stage where you make your biggest splash. You built a world! You invented a new character class! And they are high-profile assignments, to be sure. I was always excited for the chance to work on something like that. But it turns out that some of your smallest assignments can be just as important.

The Forge of Fury was the second adventure in the 3^rd Edition “Adventure Path,” a series of eight loosely linked adventures we decided to publish early in our new D&D edition. As designed, the adventures would take a party from level 1 to 20, providing Dungeon Masters with a great example of the game as we intended it to be played. I honestly don’t know who came up with the idea of the Adventure Path—it might have been Ryan Dancey, or Ed Stark, or maybe even Monte Cook. (Edit: I have learned it was Bruce Cordell. Good work, Bruce!) “Adventure Path 2” appeared on the product schedule and I was assigned to write it, so I did.

Now, here’s my secret shameful admission as a designer: I hate writing adventures.

That might be a little shocking, because I’ve written a lot of adventures and I’m generally pretty good at it. I don’t like writing adventures because I’m lazy, and they’re hard. Writing an adventure is like writing a story when you don’t know who the characters are, what motivates them, or what choices they’re going to make. You know who the bad guy is, and you can choose the setting. What happens next just isn’t up to you. You take a guess, try to provide the DM with material for the most likely scenario, and hope for the best.

As a result, I wasn’t super-excited about getting tapped to write “Adventure Path 2,” but I recognized it was important to do it right. I’m a professional—I can do good work on projects I’m not immediately enthused about, and I’ll learn to love it as I go along. So, I settled down to think about what Adventure Path 2 needed to be.

The first thing I decided was that I wanted something “right down the middle of the fairway.” By that, I mean an iconic D&D experience—a dungeon crawl built around the classic tropes of the fantasy RPG. We wanted the early adventures of the new 3^rd Edition game to showcase what the game was supposed to be about. I noodled around a bit, and came up with the pitch of an old dwarven stronghold now overrun by monsters. Not remotely original or groundbreaking, but the sort of adventure that any DM could use. Adventure Path 2 became The Forge of Fury, and I was on the job!

Interestingly enough, one of the dungeon’s most recognizable adversaries—the dragon Nightscale—was a relatively late addition to the work. Our brand team decided to make a point of featuring a dragon in each of the Adventure Path modules, so I had to think of a way to get a dragon into the adventure. Turns out, they were right: the Black Lake is spooky and fun, and Nightscale wound up as the star of Todd Lockwood’s great cover painting!

There are some things I could have done better with The Forge of Fury. Editor Miranda Horner pointed out that the adventure had almost no female characters or opportunities to talk to monsters, so she came up with the succubus. I also managed to include a “TPK” in the form of a roper. The idea was to show players a monster too tough for them, an encounter they should run away from. I thought the roper was perfect—they can barely move! But I overlooked the fact that ropers grab their victims, so running away can be . . . hard. Er, sorry.

So, what was the impact of The Forge of Fury?

I mentioned earlier how campaign settings or rulebooks are prestigious design assignments. But the Birthright Campaign Setting sold about 45,000 copies. Assuming that everyone who bought one ran a Birthright game, maybe 200,000 players got to play Birthright. The adventure The Forge of Fury sold several times as many copies . . . and it was updated to 5e in Tales of the Yawning Portal, and sold even more. At a conservative guess, a million D&D players have confronted the daunting defenses of the front gate, faced down Great Ulfe, or fought Nightscale in the waters of the Black Lake. These are now touchstone D&D experiences—every gaming group’s got a story about The Forge of Fury.

Back in 2004, Dungeon magazine ranked The Forge of Fury as the 12^th-best adventure of all time. (Admittedly there have been a few more adventures since). High praise indeed! For something I wasn’t initially stoked about writing, I guess it turned out well.