[Review] Wee Warriors Reprints, Part II: Dwarven Glory

The cool original cover...

Not to be mistaken with the unfortonately named Judges Guild classic Glory Hole Dwarven Mines, Dwarven Glory is the second Wee Warriors Dungeon Master Kit originally released in 1977. The module got a facelift when Pacesetter Games reprinted it in 2013 with an additional AD&D rewrite included.

V3 Dwarven Glory is 44 pages long, with color covers, and black and white interior. Visually the book is quite a disappointment. My biggest gripe is the cover - I have absolutely no idea why the excellent original illustration was replaced with something that looks like a cheap caricature of it. It's not only a downgrade aesthetically, but also feels disrespectful. The obvious answer would be for legal reasons, but as far as I know Pacesetter did reprint the book with the original cover before. My other issue is the obsession with the Vampire Queen. She is on the back cover of the book, on the first page, and she is glaring at me with her smug face from every page header. I know Palace of the Vampire Queen was a huge milestone and the first kit in the series, but she has absolutely nothing to do with Dwarven Glory - it's only good to mislead customers and hurt the module's identity. Let's give her a rest, shall we? Otherwise there are barely any illustrations within other than the maps, and those few pieces range between okay and meh.

The adventure takes us into the semmi-abandoned dwarven caverns within the mountain chain on the island of Baylor. The background  is summed up in less than a half page: the once thriving dwarven community was besieged and conquered by Mortoc and his 10 Orc Tribes, but there are still rooms they didn't penetrate, and survivors they didn't slaughter. It's a great setup, not only because it goes against the usual cliché of dwarves digging too deep, but because it also promises opposing factions - one of the cornerstones of turning your dungeon into a dynamic environment.

The caverns have 7 sections and 64 keyed rooms. Their presentation is unusal: the maps use hexes instead of squares, they are marked by letters ranging from B to G instead of numbers (curiously, there is no A), and there is no set order to them, although the introduction offers a sequence for beginners, and another for medium strength parties. The maps can be connected through their north and south ends, resulting in a long tunnel of thematic segments instead of the classic vertically aligned set of levels. Each section has branches and loops of their own, but due to their small size they don't make a meaningful difference in the exploration's overall flow.

The room descriptions in Dwarven Glory are a huge step forward compared to PotVQ. Each section has a theme outlined in one or two sentences, followed by terse summaries of the room entries which deliver more information than the predecessor's tables ever managed to. Of course the new approach is far from perfect: the entries often turn into a laundry lists of trivial objects, some of the details are unnecessary, and there is zero highlighting. Still, it's an improvement!

...and the crappy remake.

While it had a minimilastic presentation, PotVQ packed quite a punch with its varied and imaginative entries. The caverns of Dwarven Glory follow suite as its parts get introduced from the once busy cities entrance, through its monster-infested mines, to a desecrated temple of heretic stunties. The environment is the least interesting part of the module though: it's the NPCs where Dwarven Glory really shines. They have interesting relationships with each other, they have their own goals, and are mostly shameless opportunists who will try to take advantage of the adventurers. Some highlights include the thieves in the first tavern who want to poison and loot the party, pixies who blatantly lie about the magical properties of the clothes they sell, an ogre chess player who is a sour loser, heretics who summoned the Elenoin (see a Gods, Demi-gods, and Heroes or Deities & Demigods with the melnibonéan pantheon in it) to assassinate their own high priest, and so on.

My absolute favorite is the mess in Section F. There is a minotaur who will put a geas on the party to recover his son, two ogres in the neighbourhood who hate him, the minotaur's lost son with a gem of insanity around his neck on his way to kill the ogres, twenty ghouls working for the minotaur, ten lizardmen on friendly terms with the minotaur and a cave troll (to whom they will try to lure the party the bastards they are), and a lich who will put a geas on the visitors to recover the young minotaur's head. It's fucking brilliant. Shit like this is what make a dungeon come alive. When the players arrive the whole level is in the middle of a chain of events that unless stopped will make the place explode in a wave of violence. There is so much opportunity to roleplay and get slaughtered it's amazing. It makes me even forgive the relative small size and simple design of the level.

The loot is nothing extraordinary, but at least it's varied. The upper levels offer mostly gold and mundane valuables, but as further one ventures gems, magic items, and magic gems become more common. The module rewards exploration with some ludicrously precious hidden treasure, while other times it punishes with traps and cursed items. Needless to say, the descriptions of traps and new magic items is vague. A chest has a 6-hex chlorine gas trap on it. What does it do? No clue. Probably save or die, but at least you get a book that tells you the value of gems, which is nice.

Dwarven Glory's tone feels more lighthearted than PotVQ's, mostly because it lacks gory and disturbing scenes - no children drained dry or grinded into blood pudding this time. It has plenty of old-school quirkiness and humor, even some juvenile, like the former night club with posters of dwarven go-go-dancers, or the two bookcases of X-rated materials in the dwarven high priest's chambers. That wasn't meant to be criticism - I leave a healthy amount of naughty magazines and kinky statues in my adventures too for the sake of immersion and verisimilitude.

The AD&D version pisses me off even more than PotVQ's. Dozens of rooms were replaced with empty holes, encounters were watered down, the eccentric elements were mostly thrown out the window. The conversion strips down the charm of the original module and sacrifices cool roleplaying opportunities in favor of run-of-the-mill encounters. The only good idea is the extra detail the heretics receive: they are deviants who want to live in forests with elves, which is actually an idea fitting to the spirit of the original.

This time it's a no-brainer which version to choose if you want to run the adventure. The conversion is just deadweight to the original edition - it adds nothing of value while increasing the page count. Dwarven Glory is by no means a masterpiece, but it is a good module and an interesting historical curiosity, with some qualities many modern adventures should envy and take note of.

Part III: The Misty Isles coming soon (hopefully in less than two months).

Tl;dr: A solid old-school dungeon crawl with exceptionally well done NPCs and factions, accompanied by a weak conversion.

Where to find it: You can find the module in print and pdf in the Pacesetter Games & Simulations webshop. Some of their modules are alse available on DriveThruRPG in pdf, so I wouldn't be surprised if the above mentioned three would surface there in the near future.

Other parts of the series:
Part I: Palace of the Vampire Queen
Part III: The Misty Isles

Disclaimer: The DriveThruRPG links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something through the link we'll get some credit for your purchase too.

[Review] Wee Warriors Reprints, Part I: Palace of the Vampire Queen

The palace on the cover doesn't have much
in common with the maps.

Wee Warriors was a publisher in the late seventies who released all kinds of supplements and accessories for Dungeons & Dragons, which were distributed by TSR itself despite being unofficial. Wee Warriors sold character sheets, cardboard tiles, even a boardgame, but in the old-school community they are remembered first and foremost for publishing the first ever stand alone adventure module (or as they called it, Dungeon Master Kit), Palace of the Vampire Queen. They released two other adventures before vanishing from the market: the dungeon module Dwarven Glory, and the hex crawl The Misty Isles.

Needless to say the original Dungeon Master Kits are nowadays exorbiantly priced collector items. Fortunately, you can enjoy them without selling your kidney: Bill Barsh of Pacesetter Games & Simulations (not to be confused with Pacesetter Ltd) has secured the rights to the Wee Warriors Dungeon Master Kits a few years ago, and revamped them with the intent to support the North Texas RPG Con from the income. The following review is the first part of a series that is meant to give you some idea about what to expect from the PG&S releases of these classics. While there were expansions released for them, I'm not familiar with any of them, thus I will avoid that topic until the status quo changes (i.e. I buy and read them).

V2 Palace of the Vampire Queen is 36 pages long, has a cool front cover about the castle, and an even better back cover with the titular buxom vampire queen enjoying the company of some shady figures and hanging corpses. The book offers two versions of the adventure: both an exact reproduction of the original, and an AD&D conversion done by Bill Barsh. It has the original maps and texts, some sweet new black & white illustrations by Matthew Costanzo, and new text using a solid two column layout with lots of white space, which actually came handy for taking notes.

The adventure takes place on the dwarven island of Baylor. The palace is actually a tomb, raised by grieving shipwrecked humans to bury their beloved queen. Or at least that was the plan, but for unknown reasons the site turned into a nest of evil, and since then vampires and other children of the night have been preying on the locals. One of the latest victims was the dwarf king's daughter. The king promises fabulous riches and land holdings with titles to the rescuers. It is a damn fine offer if you ask me, I have seen adventurers risk their lives for far less.

Despite being the first of its kind, the original module does a great job at setting the tone and telling the backstory in a single page. It also has some sweet old-school maps full of loops, branches, secrets, and even cool illustrated borders - not as busy as in DCC RPG modules, but they are still aesthetic in their simplicity. So far so good! The room descriptions on the other hand are very bare bones. After each map you get a chart with columns for room number, creatures encountered, max damage (i.e. their hit points), and contents of room. And I thought the original Tegel Manor's descriptions were spartan!

The two guys on the sides love hanging out
with the queen.

At least the rooms are colorful, show plenty of creativity behind them, and lack any semblance of game balance, reminding me of Tegel Manor once again. The five levels of the dungeon have a great variety of creatures, traps, treasures, even if they are usually mundane - trolls, skeletons, spiders, slugs, etc. There are some potentially memorable encounters, like a madman with a bunch of cats, an owl that alerts bandits a few rooms aways, a chest that once opened starts spawning wights until closed, the kitchen where ogres are slaughtering dwarven children for blood pudding, and a random balrog guarding a mace of disruption because fuck the player characters. It's a huge horror funhouse, and as such it doesn't have to make sense, but boy isn't it fun to come up with explanations for all its weirdnesses!

The latter is exactly what Bill's version tries to accomplish: expanding the original entries into something more useful and reasonable. Unfortunately while converting PotVQ into an AD&D module, the author took plenty of liberties with the source material, and made the adventure more balanced, and less wacky. Some of the gonzo elements were thrown out, often replaced with yet another boring empty room. The madman with the cats is gone, just like the chest of infinite wights, and the balrog is changed into a lame Type I demon. He also downtoned the disturbing and gory elements, so instead of a room full of dwarven children drained dry we end up with one where dwarven children are hiding from ghouls, and instead of butchering them the ogres are just preparing the children for the cooking. It's not all bad what he does of course. His terse descriptions give some much needed character and purpose to the NPCs and rooms, and sometimes he even turns otherwise boring rooms into interesting ones. E.g. in the original level 4 room 17 has just four mummies hanging around, while in the revision there is a locked sarcophagus with one of the Vampire Queen's minions placed inside as punishment. I think it's obvious whether I would choose a filler encounter, or an NPC that can be turned against the main villain as a DM. Still, I feel too much of the fun stuff was thrown out. Their lack makes the conversion's approach feels workmanlike, unambitious, and while the end result is fine, it feels less exciting than the original.

Which version should you choose if you want to run the adventure? Both. Last November I ran PotVQ on Kalandorok Társasága for four players, using OD&D and some house rules. I printed the pdf, took my pencil, and started taking notes to create a hybrid from the two renderings of the adventure, while also adding my own content and ideas to the mix. It is a Dungeon Master's Kit after all, and it works even better as such with the two variants. The session was a lot of fun by the way, full of careful exploration, parleying with monsters, abusing random magic items, surprising deaths, and shocking near-deaths. In the end the party left some valuable treasure with the Vampire Queen, in exchange for the dwarf princess, and decided to leave the island once they are paid, because they don't want the kind of neighbourhood Baylor has to offer. All in all, I recommend getting PotVQ not only as a historical curiosity, but also as a module worth running.

Tl;dr: You get the wicked cool but overly terse original version, and a tamer but more useable revision of one of the original funhouse dungeon for the price of one. Shake it well before serving.

Where to find it: You can find the module in print and pdf in the Pacesetter Games & Simulations webshop. Some of their modules are alse available on DriveThruRPG in pdf, so I wouldn't be surprised if the above mentioned three would surface there in the near future.

Other parts of the series:
Part II: Dwarven Glory
Part III: The Misty Isles

Disclaimer: The DriveThruRPG links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something through the link we'll get some credit for your purchase too.