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Endless Armies
Deep within the heart of the jungles of Far Payit is a city lost to time and the modern people of Maztica. Long ago abandoned by its people, it holds a deadly secret deep beneath its ruined surface, a secret held safe by a tribe of inhuman guardians.
A secret that has remained inviolate until now.
A cleric of the church of Helm has disappeared. A piece of a map to the lost city of Ixtzul has been found. Great armies of ants perform deadly assassinations. And in the jungle, a new leader has appeared, promising power to those who follow her into the forbidden vale.
Now the heroes must follow as well, to uncloak the mystery and prevent the unleashing of a deadly force on the surface world of Maztica, a force that threatens both the people of Payit and the newcomers' civilization in Helmsport. Should the heroes fail to defeat the endless armies of their foe, all in Maztica should perish!
A secret that has remained inviolate until now.
A cleric of the church of Helm has disappeared. A piece of a map to the lost city of Ixtzul has been found. Great armies of ants perform deadly assassinations. And in the jungle, a new leader has appeared, promising power to those who follow her into the forbidden vale.
Now the heroes must follow as well, to uncloak the mystery and prevent the unleashing of a deadly force on the surface world of Maztica, a force that threatens both the people of Payit and the newcomers' civilization in Helmsport. Should the heroes fail to defeat the endless armies of their foe, all in Maztica should perish!
32 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1991
About the author
Jeff Grubb
199 books195 followersHe is an author and game designer.
See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Grubb
See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Grubb
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December 19, 2021A review of four items -- one box set and three adventures -- for the Maztica sub-setting. (All of which I own in physical form, though two are recent additions.)
Maztica
Catnip for me in the 90s: historically-inflected fantasy based on non-European cultures + new character options!
Many of the nations/regions of the Forgotten Realms are historically-inspired — sure, there’s the wonder-working priests of the mechanical Gond, but there’s also the Arabia-inflected Calimshan (and later Al-Qadim as its own sub-setting), the Aleut-themed people of the Great Glacier, Egypt/Mesopotamia of… I don’t recall, but they’re there. (Actually I’ve just learned that Ed Greenwood, original creator of the Realms, disliked having 1-to-1 comparisons with real historical cultures, but they’re all over.)
So the idea of making a sub-setting based on Mesoamerican civilizations seems very in keeping with the Forgotten Realms style.
But Maztica is not just Mesoamerica — it’s the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire as a D&D campaign.
This seems… problematic. In fact, when they publish this material now on DMs Guild, Wizards of the Coast adds a disclaimer about some of the problems with depicting a historical event leading up to some real atrocities. (They also include the disclaimer on their Al-Qadim stuff.)
You can see how they try to avoid some of the problems of history with fantasy: rather than heroic conquistadors against evil heathens or noble Aztecs against rapacious plunderers, they present a world in which some of the natives and some of the conquistadors are evil, and in fact get turned into orcs by the evil god of the Mazticans. (Reading up more on this — why? — it seems like maybe it was the drow goddess Lolth who turned the people into monsters.)
This is all told in the trilogy of novels which precede this boxed set, and which I’ve never read, so maybe I’m wrong/misremembering, but that seems to me to be clever and bland solution: you get a whole new world with new character options, but you also get to play any of your old characters who make it over the ocean.
(This 2nd edition book is very much of its time in D&D products: there’s a lot of attention to new kits to help give flavor — and powers — to old classes; and one of the books here has several Battlesystem stats for reenacting large-scale battles.)
I’ve talked before about how in my old age what I like most in RPGs is some POV — which is probably why my favorite campaign settings for D&D are Ravenloft (“everything is doomed, rage rage against, etc.”), Dark Sun (“boy, we really fucked up the environment, didn’t we?”), and Planescape (“dude, if you think about it, how do we know your blue is the same as my blue?”). But Forgotten Realms is not interested in providing that, it’s just a big sandbox, with occasional explosions of metaplot, mostly to explain some rules/edition changes. And Maztica is also clearly not interested in that: this is just a new world, full of new monsters to kill and take their stuff.
And to make it as palatable as they could in the 90s, they literally make monsters out of the people (remember those evil folks who get turned into orcs?) rather than ask your PCs to look at their own actions. After all, as author Douglas Niles said, conquistadors are about as close to D&D PCs as we have in history — which should be an indictment of your PCs that cause you to question your murder hobo ways, and yet, this is not the setting that will ask that question.
Fires of Zatal — in the podcast Writing Excuses, some of the authors talk about mixing the usual and the unusual to just the right degree, which is what this seem to be doing: take a typical D&D adventure (quest for a magic artifact) and put it in a new setting, which also lets you sell this as a little supplement to the world (here they detail the big European-style port).
Endless Armies — there’s very little reason why this should be my favorite D&D adventure that I’ve read in a while. It is fairly standard: a mad priest thinks she can control a god-monster from the star and so is trying to undo the old wards keeping it asleep. That’s pretty standard, but whereas Fires of Zatal takes an old plot and just adds in the new setting, Endless Armies add some fun new pieces to the plot, like the ant guardians of the ancient temple who have been suborned by the mad priest. (I mean, just look at that 50’s B-movie cover! I love it.) But what I really like here, and feel like stealing, is that the book opens with the backstory, as many adventures do, but gives out that backstory in four episodes from the POV of different characters involved in that: the man who discovered the monster; the last human priest who — knowing his city would fade away as all cities do — creates the first guardians out of ants; the historian who writes down a raving person’s account of the abandoned city ruled by giant ants; and the conquistador priest who is tasked with destroying native records, but who realizes this one account might lead to her own fame and fortune.
City of Gold — credited to John Nephew (president of Atlas Games) and Jonathan Tweet (game designer for Over the Edge and other classics of weirdness), this is a rather straight-forward exploration adventure most of the time: can the PCs helps a conquistador find the City of Gold. A lot of this book is given over to supplementary material on this new area and the new culture of Pueblo Indians, which again raises some questions: was TSR just planning on doing all of the Americas as game supplements? There is a little weirdness here and there — like once the PCs find the hidden city, they have to defeat a demon in order to open up the path to the land of the dead and then meet the god of death, who is a relatively benign figure (and who also tells the native folks that they need to learn bravery from the explorers). This whole idea is now where I would have gone with the Maztica line, but this was also the last product for it, so hard to say what could have saved it — or even if it was worth saving in the current form.
(Note: In the store for 3rd-party developed books, there’s a few books updating Maztica for 5e and for more modern understandings of history.)
Maztica
Catnip for me in the 90s: historically-inflected fantasy based on non-European cultures + new character options!
Many of the nations/regions of the Forgotten Realms are historically-inspired — sure, there’s the wonder-working priests of the mechanical Gond, but there’s also the Arabia-inflected Calimshan (and later Al-Qadim as its own sub-setting), the Aleut-themed people of the Great Glacier, Egypt/Mesopotamia of… I don’t recall, but they’re there. (Actually I’ve just learned that Ed Greenwood, original creator of the Realms, disliked having 1-to-1 comparisons with real historical cultures, but they’re all over.)
So the idea of making a sub-setting based on Mesoamerican civilizations seems very in keeping with the Forgotten Realms style.
But Maztica is not just Mesoamerica — it’s the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire as a D&D campaign.
This seems… problematic. In fact, when they publish this material now on DMs Guild, Wizards of the Coast adds a disclaimer about some of the problems with depicting a historical event leading up to some real atrocities. (They also include the disclaimer on their Al-Qadim stuff.)
You can see how they try to avoid some of the problems of history with fantasy: rather than heroic conquistadors against evil heathens or noble Aztecs against rapacious plunderers, they present a world in which some of the natives and some of the conquistadors are evil, and in fact get turned into orcs by the evil god of the Mazticans. (Reading up more on this — why? — it seems like maybe it was the drow goddess Lolth who turned the people into monsters.)
This is all told in the trilogy of novels which precede this boxed set, and which I’ve never read, so maybe I’m wrong/misremembering, but that seems to me to be clever and bland solution: you get a whole new world with new character options, but you also get to play any of your old characters who make it over the ocean.
(This 2nd edition book is very much of its time in D&D products: there’s a lot of attention to new kits to help give flavor — and powers — to old classes; and one of the books here has several Battlesystem stats for reenacting large-scale battles.)
I’ve talked before about how in my old age what I like most in RPGs is some POV — which is probably why my favorite campaign settings for D&D are Ravenloft (“everything is doomed, rage rage against, etc.”), Dark Sun (“boy, we really fucked up the environment, didn’t we?”), and Planescape (“dude, if you think about it, how do we know your blue is the same as my blue?”). But Forgotten Realms is not interested in providing that, it’s just a big sandbox, with occasional explosions of metaplot, mostly to explain some rules/edition changes. And Maztica is also clearly not interested in that: this is just a new world, full of new monsters to kill and take their stuff.
And to make it as palatable as they could in the 90s, they literally make monsters out of the people (remember those evil folks who get turned into orcs?) rather than ask your PCs to look at their own actions. After all, as author Douglas Niles said, conquistadors are about as close to D&D PCs as we have in history — which should be an indictment of your PCs that cause you to question your murder hobo ways, and yet, this is not the setting that will ask that question.
Fires of Zatal — in the podcast Writing Excuses, some of the authors talk about mixing the usual and the unusual to just the right degree, which is what this seem to be doing: take a typical D&D adventure (quest for a magic artifact) and put it in a new setting, which also lets you sell this as a little supplement to the world (here they detail the big European-style port).
Endless Armies — there’s very little reason why this should be my favorite D&D adventure that I’ve read in a while. It is fairly standard: a mad priest thinks she can control a god-monster from the star and so is trying to undo the old wards keeping it asleep. That’s pretty standard, but whereas Fires of Zatal takes an old plot and just adds in the new setting, Endless Armies add some fun new pieces to the plot, like the ant guardians of the ancient temple who have been suborned by the mad priest. (I mean, just look at that 50’s B-movie cover! I love it.) But what I really like here, and feel like stealing, is that the book opens with the backstory, as many adventures do, but gives out that backstory in four episodes from the POV of different characters involved in that: the man who discovered the monster; the last human priest who — knowing his city would fade away as all cities do — creates the first guardians out of ants; the historian who writes down a raving person’s account of the abandoned city ruled by giant ants; and the conquistador priest who is tasked with destroying native records, but who realizes this one account might lead to her own fame and fortune.
City of Gold — credited to John Nephew (president of Atlas Games) and Jonathan Tweet (game designer for Over the Edge and other classics of weirdness), this is a rather straight-forward exploration adventure most of the time: can the PCs helps a conquistador find the City of Gold. A lot of this book is given over to supplementary material on this new area and the new culture of Pueblo Indians, which again raises some questions: was TSR just planning on doing all of the Americas as game supplements? There is a little weirdness here and there — like once the PCs find the hidden city, they have to defeat a demon in order to open up the path to the land of the dead and then meet the god of death, who is a relatively benign figure (and who also tells the native folks that they need to learn bravery from the explorers). This whole idea is now where I would have gone with the Maztica line, but this was also the last product for it, so hard to say what could have saved it — or even if it was worth saving in the current form.
(Note: In the store for 3rd-party developed books, there’s a few books updating Maztica for 5e and for more modern understandings of history.)
January 30, 2014
Straightforward adventure, but fun.
July 16, 2015
A nice little Heart-Of-Darkness meets Call-Of-Cthulhu style adventure. I imagine if the big baddie is prevented from emerging, the DM won't have quite as much fun :)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews