U1 Alliterative Secret of Saltmarsh

Not as sinister as you might think.

I haven't had much to say for a while which has me thinking that I may need to obsess about an old module again.  But for the time being I feel that I've plumbed as much as I can from the depths of Hommlet and Restenford; perhaps I'm ready to move on to some new old material.  Which is why, over the weekend, I dug out TSR Dungeon Module U1: El Siniestro Secreto de la Marisma, first of the modules to come out of Merry Ol' Inglaterra back in the 80s.  This oldie but goodie is famous for giving the PCs the opportunity to roll up to a haunted house in their own Mystery Machine and play the role of meddling kids who foil the plans of the nefarious bad guys.  Extra points if you split up the party. 

As I recall from my run through this module as a youth my old chum Byron the Chaotic was at the helm--he was the go-to module guy in our group. Though without a significant town component to the adventure--more on this later--the chaos factor barely cracked the Richter Scale.  Also of note: my halfling fell through the floor and died early-on in the affair.  Then my replacement character, a feeble MU born with only 1 hit point, bought the farm on the Sea Ghost in what would end up being a TPK; a fairly typical outcome of that encounter I'm told.  

Now this looks sinister.

But on reading U1 now, 82 years later, the module exudes a sense of missed opportunity. Whatever points this thing earned for Goth and Gloom and all that Britishy stuff it loses because of one crucial, glaring, egregious oversight that will forever keep Saltmarsh off the list of super-awesome mega-raddest modules of all time: despite all the action that's supposed to go down in the town of Saltmarsh, the authors didn't bother actually creating the town.  

The module pretty much demands that you interact with numerous townspeople including members of the town council, the local guardsmen, and some idiotic poacher, meanwhile insisting that the townsfolk stonewall the party for a few days before they set out for the haunted house. Indeed, the text of the module indicates that the PCs should be dealing intimately with parties in the village not just at the outset of the adventure but repeatedly throughout this and future adventures. For all that interaction between town and dungeon locale you'd think they would have accommodated the DM by actually providing a friggin' village!  Nope. And by not including so much as a map indicating where the town is in relation to the haunted house, the module design actually discourages the DM from engaging the town at all.  

Compare this to T1 where the moathouse and the nearby village need not have any interaction whatsoever; if you cut the module in half and handed the moathouse portion to one DM and the Hommlet portion to another DM, neither would know that he was missing any material.  And yet no one has ever once taken a run at the moathouse without first dallying at the Inn of the Welcome Wench. 

Now, at least one optimist will tell you that the town of Saltmarsh is "given glorious life through its many NPCs". Reviewers of this ilk are obviously more imaginative than I, cuz in my opinion just saying that there's a "web of intrigue" in a town that exists in name only doesn't actually do much to conjure said web. There's no map, no NPC descriptions, no names of establishments to visit... sigh. What there is in great quantity is wasted potential  because even some very basic info on the village and its denizens would have given the DM's creativity some traction to get started. Instead the authors hand you a clean slate and tell you to get to work. Don't get me wrong, I can deal with a clean slate; but I like modules for the opportunity to see other people's ideas on adventure, not to do homework. 

Furthermore, given that at least 4 pages of the module were occupied by meaningless fluff that was clearly intended to do nothing but fill space--2 full-page illustrations--unheard of in TSR modules at the time--as well as the moronically pointless visual aids on page 31 and the entirely blank page on the back of the worthless visual aids, not to mention the out-sized plan and section drawings of the ship that fail to occupy the entirety of the tri-fold jacket maps--there was easily enough room in the book for the authors to squeeze in at least a rough depiction of a town had they been inclined to provide such.  With little effort they could have tightened up the dungeon maps on the jacket leaving enough space for a 1 page map of town. And they could've ditched the space-wasting illustrations, instead providing a keyed list of significant locations, and maybe a table providing summary info on a few prominent NPCs: names, titles, maybe some useful stats, and a tidbit of info. Something like "George Weasly, Human, MU2, shopkeeper at Zonko's Joke Shoppe, twin brother of the Ostler at the Three Broomsticks" could easily have fit into the space vapidly occupied by the aforementioned fluff. 

Instead, the DM is asked to prepare the town "quite thoroughly" and to "be guided by any small south-coast English fishing town of the 14th Century and with a population about 2,000."  A few factors our friendly modulists failed to realise:

• In 14th c. England only 8 towns in the entire Realm had a population of more than 3,000, and that's including London.  A village of ~2,000 people would have cracked the list of top 20 largest metro areas in the land; this is not a small town.  By way of comparison, the 19th and 20th largest metro areas in England today are Stoke and Wolverhampton.  Which is to say, a town of 2k in 14th century England might very well have supported the Medieval equivalent of a mid-table Premier League soccer team--excuse me--football club. [Update  Aug. 2025--When I first wrote this piece back in 2014, of the two cities Stoke was the one hosting a premier league team. They were relegated in 2018 but, fortunately, Wolves were promoted in 2016 and have remained up ever since, keeping this bit relevant. Though now that I've put it in writing, I have surely jinxed them to relegation in the '25-26 season. My apologies to any Wolverhampton fans reading this after that has come to fruition.]  By the standard of the time, a town of the recommended size would have been a regional cosmopolitan center, not the sleepy backwater the text suggests. 
• Making this guideline even more ridiculous: we are informed that Saltmarsh is a significantly smaller town than the neighboring towns of Burle and Seaton.  Needless to say, there were no urban clusters of this nature along the shores of southern England in the 14th century on which to model your sleepy Saltmarsh.*
• Far more important than either of the previous two points: at the time U1 hit the market the maximum population of municipal areas in D&D modules was about 300 (see: the Keep [B2, 1980], Hommlet [T1, 1979], and Restenford [L1, 1981]; the soon-to-be-published towns of Garrotten [L2, 1982] and Orlanes [N1, 1982] were also in this neighborhood).  Could you reasonably expect amateur DMs who just paid money for an adventure so that they wouldn't have to prepare one on their own to now go ahead and "quite thoroughly" design a friggin' town that is 6-2/3 times larger than any town the professionals had yet produced?  With all due respect to Messieurs Turnbull and Browne: if you didn't think creating the town was worth the effort then why should we?    

Which is why, without exception, every DM who ran this module back in the day skipped all the published hype-material and kicked this thing off by reciting the following:

"Your party is walking along a road when off in the distance you see a run-down house on a cliff overlooking the sea."

*  According to the Wikicensus of 1377 Plymouth (pop. 1700) and Exeter (pop. 1560) were the two largest towns on the southern coast of England though the Black Death of 1348-49 probably brought these numbers down a fair bit from the first half of the century.

 

A3 Aerie of the Slavelords: Bring the Chaos

It was mid-December of 1982, Donkey Kong reigned supreme at the arcade, Toni Basil's Mickey was rockin' the airwaves, and my old friend Byron the Chaotic was once again stationed behind the DM screens. Five months had passed since the infamous firefight in Hommlet and this time he was serving up A3 Aerie of the Slave Lords for our adventuring fare. Like V. of H., there's a town encounter area in A3, this time it's the hidden metropolis of Suderham. And much like our experience with T1, there's no way that anyone could have planned for the way things went down.  

I don't remember much of the subterranean activity in this module--another similarity to our experience with the V. of H--just something about riding down a salty slide on a toboggan made of beef jerky and finding an invisible sword in a tub full of vanilla pudding. Did that module have a pronounced food theme going on or was I just really hungry at the time?

What I remember most clearly is that, once we walked into Suderheim, some douchebag sidled up to the party and muttered some mumbo-jumbo about going to the “alabaster paladin” or somesuch meaningless bullshit and then slipped away before we could interrogate him further. As most of you know, this is a scripted encounter that is supposed to be just the first leg of a goose chase that the PCs must complete before they can get on with the dungeon.  But we didn't know what was up so we were all “Huh?! I ask him what the hell he's talking about.” and Byron was all, “He’s already gone, lost in the crowd” which annoyed us all, but especially my brother.  You wanna' piss off my brother, toss one of these gingerbread man encounters into your dungeon.*

Now, all of us players thought that we should have a reasonable chance to grab this dirtbag and smack some useful information out of him and, on a normal day, Byron would have agreed wholeheartedly.  But clearly the module said otherwise and, back then, defying the printed word of the Prophets of TSR was considered blasphemy--it was the DM's sacred duty to protect the work of the author be it Lord Gary or, as in this case, Sir Allen of Hammack whose machinations needed preserving. I could sense that our evening was about to be derailed by a prolonged and fruitless debate between DM and players when I suddenly heard myself saying “Why’s this prick gotta’ be so cryptic?  He wants us to go somewhere, why can't he just tell us where we're s'posed to go?**

 

Two arms, two feet, one eye: Chaos!

I don't want to take credit here for Byron's propensity for anarchy, but it was as if he suddenly realized the potential for mayhem in ignoring the text of the module and allowing us to run this jerk down. The expression on his phace changed from stony resistance to mischievous glee as the 8-pointed sigil of chaos flashed in his eyes and, instead of engaging my brother in verbal combat, he turned to me and said “Dread Delgath spots the bum slipping through a door in a building down the street.”***  The chase was on.

 

What ensued was a running brawl through the backrooms, alleys, and rooftops of Sonderholm as a mob of angry store clerks, unpaid taxi drivers and humiliated plate-glass deliverymen hopped on our trail seeking redress for our trespasses.  Ultimately, the chase concluded with a showdown in the parlor of a brothel--excuse me, "house of ill repute"-- where we escaped through a trap door with the assistance of the very same cryptic messenger who started this whole fracas in the first place.  When he eluded us again moments later--still without edifying us as to the significance of the "ivory paladin"-- we were too thrilled by what had transpired to notice.  

Which, as it turns out, is just as well because, only on reading the module now, 31 years later, do I find out that this is the very tunnel that the "ivory paladin" clue was, in its circuitous way, intended to lead us to in the first place.  But, rather than wandering around Sodergard, guessing the meaning of the clues, interrogating and bribing our way through a labyrinth of informants, we'd cut to the chase, quite literally.  Once again, Byron pulled off a vast departure from the "script" of the module that put us in exactly the right place to continue the adventure. Maybe it was just a happy accident, or maybe he was a brilliant DM disguised as a 13 year old kid. 

* I think the term was coined on the night in question.  As my sisters were in the next room cooking up a gingerbread house, the association seemed obvious. 
** I was trying out a Brooklyn accent back then.
*** Yep, that's the Dread Delgath of the classic, A-series pre-generated characters; I'm pretty sure the A series was the only published module anyone ever used the pre-jens for.

Mayhem & Moathouses: How to handle a bloodthirsty DM

...and mayhem ensued.

Thanks to a patch of peonies in my neighbor's yard and a blog post by James over at Underdark Gazette [sadly, James has packed in the old blog {Far more sadly, James has since passed away, my condolences to his family and friends}] I feel compelled to do a write up about good ol' Village of Hommlet.  James, as you probably already know, posted a couple of times last week about everyone's favorite old school village adventure. But why the peonies, you ask? Well, the first time I played T1 it was 4th of July weekend 1982--yes, I remember this kind of crap--and my mom had just picked a bunch of peonies from the garden and put them in a vase on the dining room table which, that weekend, doubled as our gaming venue.  To this day, when I catch a whiff of the distinctive, peppery scent of peonies, I am reminded of the Village of Hommlet. 

Smells like trouble!

Anyway, the DM at the helm--we'll call him Byron--though fresh out of 7th grade at the time, was the most murderous referee in our gang.  Definitely aligned with Chaos, he liked to force the players out of their comfort zone. This outing would quickly prove to be no exception; indeed it may have been his crowning achievement.

Our very first encounter as we wandered into town was with an exceptionally belligerent Elmo who--though outnumbered 8 to 1, wearing no armor, and packing only a dagger--picked a fight with our paladin. For those unfamiliar, Elmo, though posing as a moronic farmhand, was actually an enormous ~5th level ranger with some bitchin' magic armaments, including the aforementioned dagger.

Anyway, he killed our paladin with a single, massive blow from the dagger, so the rest of the party jumped him.  We had 3 fighters and the cleric facing him while the MU blasted him with magic missiles and the halfling thief snuck around for a backstab.  Even so it was touch-and-go for a few rounds, but thanks to some crappy rolls by Elmo, we took him down without any more casualties on our side.

However, by this time a bunch of villagers had taken up arms and were coming at us.  We ran for it, eventually finding our way to the Inn of the Buxom Wench* where we commandeered the 2nd floor, barricaded the stairs, and launched a fusillade of arrows at the militia, sending them scrambling for cover behind the wall surrounding the inn.  Leading the militia was a revived Elmo who was clearly not quite as dead as we'd hoped.

*T1 devotees will note that this is not the real name of the establishment. The actual wench was known more for her welcoming demeanor than her cleavage but it was the name we used at the time and it has stuck.

We were terrified that the entire town was as tough as Elmo, though this did not stop us from "errantly" lofting flaming arrows into neighboring houses.  But good-natured Ostler Gundigoot talked everyone down and, against all reason, managed to negotiate a cease fire.  After a hearing with Rufus and Byrne, we floated a canned apology for all the death and destruction we'd wrought and promised to pay reparations to include fees for raising all the dead townsfolk as well as rebuilding the razed houses.  Since we were cash-strapped 1st level n00bs, it was suggested that we go to the moathouse to secure the weregild.  Much to our dismay, R&B insisted that a fully healed Elmo accompany us; partly as punishment for his part in inciting the fracas but mostly to make sure that we didn't lose our way.

At the moathouse I only remember a few encounters: the murderous frogs who killed off two of our party including the halfling thief and another, less memorable character; the puncture-resistant zombies--they only took 1 point of damage from piercing weapons as I recall--and the final meetup with Lareth, who was kind enough to take out Elmo for us.  For that we were very thankful.  In fact, when I look back on T1, to this day I think of Lareth not as a malignant disciple of evil but as one of those respectable bad guys who, under the circumstances, turned out to be a valued ally.

Meanwhile, our hatred for Elmo was so intense that we cheered when Lareth bashed his head in with his staff of striking; though we were equally glad that Elmo had, by then, relieved Lareth of the vast majority of his hit points, allowing us to parley a peaceful settlement.  Not satisfied with Elmo's death, his corpse was dismembered by the surviving party members and tossed into the swamp as frog food.  To add further insult, instead of returning his possessions to his grieving parents, they were parsed out amongst the party along with the rest of the treasure haul.  But, true to our word, we paid off our debt to the town and were feted as heroes of the realm before shuffling off to our next adventure; this was 1982 remember, we still had a few years to wait for the continuation of the T-series.   

At the time I remember being furious with Byron the DM for coercing us into such a chaotic scenario in town, but also a little ashamed that I was taking such pleasure in terrorizing the villagers with flaming arrows.  Byron loved this sort of mayhem and if the players went along with it, he would be happy and our mayhem-seeking would bring us prosperity and happiness.  If, on the other hand, we had refused to fight Elmo and/or the villagers, instead relying on our faith in a just humanity, I'm certain that within 30 minutes we would have been rolling up new characters as the corpses of our PCs swung from the gallows.  Instead, for the far more sinister crimes of mass murder, grand arson, and public mayhem, we were given a hefty but not insurmountable fine and sent off on an adventure.  I don't think we were conscious of it at the time--though we would come to be aware of this tactic in later years--but we were totally playing in a manner to placate Byron and therefore protect our characters.  And we had an incredibly fun outing--if a somewhat sociopathic one.

On hindsight, the whole thing turned out to be a pretty clever set up to get us to the moathouse that we otherwise knew nothing about and had no reason to visit--other than the usual "thar's gold in them hills" excuse.  But more importantly, by "forcing" us into such a chaotic flurry of morally ambiguous action while simultaneously killing off the only lawful member of our party (the paladin), the behavior of that  party was ever-after skewed toward chaos in a way that we could not have done intentionally.  Or perhaps I'm giving the DM too much credit; he was, after all, only 13.