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WG12: Vale of the Mage (1989) is a jarring return to form after the three previous modules. The difference is immediately apparent just in the heft of the book — this is a 64-page booklet, a big full color map and a cover screen. Compare that to the 32 pages and nothing else of the “funny” scenarios.

The first chunk of the book is a sourcebook for the title region, one of the few spots mentioned in World of Greyhawk that was mysterious enough that I recall folks being excited when this showed up on shelves, though some material on the Vale and its inhabitants appeared in Greyhawk Adventures. The titular mage is a somewhat evil but reasonable fellow who is working toward becoming a shade. His best (only?) friend is Tysiln San, the drow woman on the cover. She hails from the Vault of the Drow and it is interesting how different she is both from the original (cartoonish) depiction of Drow and the newer, more elaborately developed Drow of Forgotten Realms. Chaotic Neutral and loyal and loving to the Mage, she seems more of a cultural outlier than Drizzt.

The rest of the book is the scenario, which is basically a hexcrawl through the Vale hunting necromancers who failed in a coup attempt and fled. The idea is to either eliminate them or beat them to the Mage and convince him to deal them justice. This is mostly an excuse to get entangled in emergent adventures in the Vale.

One of my favorite bits is a new monster, the Grist, also called a True Gargoyle, immediately recognizable because they have four arms and permanently attached wings. They feel like a direct refutation the dopey gargoyles of Gargoyle.

The World of Greyhawk (1980) folio is Gary Gygax giving in. In the beginning, TSR championed the idea that DMs would make their own worlds and adventures, which left the field free for folks like Judges Guild and Wee Warriors to publish their own. TSR didn’t get into adventure modules until 1978 and despite their success, Gygax resisted publishing details of his Greyhawk campaign setting, in part because he wanted DM’s to create their own worlds, in part because he didn’t want to reveal the secrets of his home campaign (which primarily played out in the ruins of Castle Greyhawk).

The World of Greyhawk was a half measure (and we know how well those work out). It presents a Greyhawk, designed for DMs to expand upon with their own ideas. It is not the Greyhawk, the secret proving ground of Gygax’s game design practices and, when it comes down to it, the thing people really wanted to read. There are similarities, of course, but those diminish over time, as retail products, many written without Gygax, expand and detail the world beyond this original conception. That’s fine! Necessary, even. But I think, perhaps, too much credit is given to this book as a masterwork because it is perceived to be a manifestation of the ur-campaign setting, when in reality it is a pale imitation.

I’ve always found it a bit dull and incomplete-seeming. It’s a gazetteer, listing all the kingdoms and their vibes, and to a certain extent laying out the lines of political intrigue between them. The next section concerns geographic locations of note. There’s a description of the world’s orders of knighthood. Some of the kingdoms are immediately interesting (The Land of Iuz, naturally) but for the most part, it is a litany of hard to parse fantasy names, a labyrinth of lore and a display of how many words for political organization Gygax can bring to bear (duchy, sultanate, archclericy, canton and on and on).

The real star is the set of gigantic, boldly colorful hex maps designed by Darlene Pekul. All of Greyhawk’s promise is laid out there, the names and features far more important to my imagination than Gygax’s explanations. But then, I’ve always been a map guy.

Passport to the Supernatural (1973) is probably Bernhardt J. Hurwood’s great work. Subtitled “An Occult Compendium from All Ages and Many Lands,” which I think speaks to the book's ambition.

Rather than organizing it’s topics by type, Hurwood here opts to go region by region — the Middle East, Greece and Rome, China, Japan and then two catch-all chapters for everything else. It’s a dense book and it doesn’t really have an overarching flow. Rather, it’s a collection of stories, similar to what a folklorist might collect, followed by brief commentary and context. Sometimes these stories are selected from other authors, as is the case in several that are reprinted from Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan. Others are familiar tales fictionalized by Hurwood, as with “The Soldier and the Vampire” (which features the vampire’s turning into a swarm of vermin to escape burning; and the villagers kill the vermin with brooms). It seems like the format and organization and even the font changes from page to page, but rather than being disorientating, I find it engrossing, like sorting through a disorganized library full of only the most wonderful books. If you had to have just one volume of supernatural folklore on your shelf, you could do a lot worse than Passport.

Hurwood’s whole body of work is like this, actually. I liked him least of the monster scribes when I was a kid, in fact, because his tendency to rework his stories into fiction, rather than presenting them in a more journalistic fashion, made them feel less true to me. Which, ironically, I find to be a delightful feature now (because, sorry Young Stu, they were never true). He also had a number of fiction anthologies that were easily confused with his folklore books and I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when I brought one of those home from the library instead of the umpteenth monster encyclopedia.

This is Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games (2023, I love that this came out the same year as Monsters, Aliens and Holes in the Ground). As you might suspect from the title, it is an exhaustive look at text adventures and other similar sorts of interactive fiction. He casts a wide net which often expands my understanding of the games and their descendants. Why do I accept games like Dragon Pass and Dwarf Fortress as text adventures more readily than Hack or Trade Wars 2002 or even dnd on the old Plato computers? There are lots of reasons, perhaps, but the bottom line is that I am grateful for all their inclusions, because they challenge my preconceptions. For the most part, it’s a bracing tour through the annals of what I deem to be an underappreciated (text has always been unsexy when compared to visual art) yet vastly important facet of videogames.

My lone bone of contention is Reed’s appraisal of AI Dungeon. I played that when it first appeared, before I was really cognizant of LLM “a.i.” I assumed the game was procedurally generated and was rather dull rather than revolutionary. None of the developments in the plot were terribly exciting or unexpected and despite playing several times, the action always seemed to curve back to the same loops.

That’s a quibble, though, for a book that is 600+ pages of meaty insight. It’s surprisingly well-illustrated, too, for a book about text. Lots of logos and advertisements and photos of floppy disks. If you’re a fan of text games and you can find a copy of this, you’ll get lost inside for weeks, guaranteed.

The Bronze Grimoire (1994) is my favorite of the Elric! supplements despite having perhaps the least inspiring cover. This was a moment in time when Chaosium was putting out a number of books with black and white covers (Ye Booke of Monsters comes immediately to mind). I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now, but it is better than some of the stuff that came out in the late ’90s.

Anyway, this brief book (80 pages!) is dedicated the expanding the game’s magic. First up is rune magic as derived from the Moorcock stories; these provide ongoing buffs or single use effects. Necromancy brings, well, necromancy into the game, which function basically as expected but with some aesthetic darkening. Much space is devoted to moving souls around in order to protect them. This section has an Earl Geier illustration of a Melnibonéan mummy that is maybe my favorite in the whole book. There’s also a selection of undead monsters, which is nice to have on hand.

There’s an expanded spell list. Most of them are a bit meh, others have narrative components that are compelling. I particularly enjoy the various spells for communing with great powers, as they are lengthy and seem to naturally lead to scenarios. There’s a selection of enchantments I would probably never use (they don’t have the right vibe to me, more D&D than I want, and I’m still salty about the lack of demon items). The tomes chapter has some Call of Cthulhu-esque grimoires that are interesting and probably good adventure fodder. Finally, a new batch of demons. They’re mostly generic and, I dunno, like I keep saying demons in the original game were unique, intelligent and interesting. These are mostly just targets for swords. Underwhelming.