Retrospective: Secret of the Slavers Stockade

The "Slave Lords" series of AD&D modules consists of four modules, beginning with  Slave Lords of the Undercity , about which I have fond, if complicated, feelings. Truth be told, that's true of all the modules in the A-series, They're a mix of compelling ideas, some memorable encounters, and contrived situations in order to serve their purpose as tournament scenarios. When TSR published them, the designers cleaned them up for more general use, to varying degrees of effectiveness. 

The second module in the series, Secret of the Slavers Stockade, by Harold Johnson with assistance from Tom Moldvay, is, in my opinion, one of the better ones. Its premise is that the characters have a map to an old fort in the hills that is really a front for the salvers. Their goal is to investigate the fort and, if possible, disrupt the operations of the slavers within. It's a solid basis for an adventure, one that demands stealth and thoughtful action to succeed.

The fort (the titular Slavers' Stockade, which gets an apostrophe in the text but not on the cover) is large and well defended, with plenty of guards whose presence makes it difficult for the characters to move about. In fact, the place is so well defended that the tournament scoring system operates under the assumption that, after three hours of play, the characters will not make it very far into the fort. In addition, there's a section specifically devoted to "hill fort strategy," detailing how the guards will respond once it becomes apparent there are intruders in their midst. That's not even factoring in wandering monsters. In short, the characters have their job cut out for them.

Ultimately, to put an end to the threat of the Stockade, the characters will need to find and kill its overseer, Markessa, an evil female elf fighter/magic-user, who keeps a pet owlbear and is guarded by goblins. Here's Jim Roslof's illustration of her and two goblins.

These goblins look a lot like Roslof's depiction of them for the AD&D Monster Cards in 1982, the year after the publication of this module. Once again, I find myself absolutely fascinated by the variability in the way some humanoid monsters are drawn in Dungeons & Dragons, with goblins having some of the greatest variability. 
The module includes some of other interesting illustrations, such as that of a new monster, the boggle, drawn by Jeff Dee. I draw your attention to the boggle because he's not terribly dissimilar in general appearance to Roslof's goblins. Of course, he also looks a bit like Gollum from the 1978 Ralph Bakshi The Lord of the Rings animated film, so what do I know? The module includes several "tactical maps" for major encounters, which are decorated with illustrations of some of the monsters found in the Stockade. Both of these figures are drawn by Jeff Dee: the upper left being a goblin and the bottom right a kobold. Both look very similar to those drawn by Roslof for the Monster Cards. That makes me wonder if perhaps there was some level of art direction at TSR during this time or if it's simply a case of a group of artists who all cribbed from one another when drawing these creatures. I simply don't know the answer at this point, but I must confess that I'm now of a mind to see if I can find out.
In any case, Secret of the Slavers Stockade has the potential to be a fun module, if your players enjoy sneaking around and avoiding drawing attention to themselves. If not, it's probably going to turn into a huge combat slog and will likely result in one or more character deaths. The latter was my own experience of refereeing it in my youth, but, in those days, we were much more tolerant of gigantic slugfests than I am today. Even careful players will likely find this a difficult module, so I won't be surprised if many commenters don't share my largely positive opinion of it, which is fair. For me, I appreciate that Johnson didn't make the Stockade easy to overrun. This is, after all, the headquarters of a powerful evil organization; it should be a dangerous place and it is.  Have a blurry orc by Jeff Dee