Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Free OSR Download For S4 "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth" For Your Old School Campaigns

So last night I was going through the Vaults of Pandius website for some research into one of my all time favorite modules S4 "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth". Over the Easter holiday a fellow old school dungeon master clued me in on "Original Lost Caverns of Tsojconth - found in Karameikos? by Paleologos" 
article.

The basis of the article is very interesting to me,
"The original version of module S4 "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth" was actually published for OD&D (see "The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth" ('76 Tournament Edition)) and as such, holds a tenuous connection with Mystara. In fact, the first page of the adventure states that "the caverns of Tsojconth are a nexus in probability, where several alternate worlds touch" and so a location on Mystara is quite plausible.
In searching The Piazza, I found a previous thread discussing Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth placement but this only concerned the AD&D version of the module, which added a substantial wilderness portion to the adventure. The earlier version was limited to a description of the lost caverns, only.

I've long been intrigued by an unlabeled cave symbol from the Cook/Marsh map of Karameikos. Could this be a suitable location for the lost caverns of Tsojconth?"
This basically takes one of the finest examples of AD&D sword & sorcery adventure & makes it into a bridge gap into several campaign settings at once. The author also has a sixteen page sourcebook that changes and mixes several classic TSR adventure modules into a unified whole.
This means that the evil of the terrifying Tharizdun as a setting-spanning elder evil of Lovecraftian proportions!

Let me try to explain very quickly why this is an incredibly wily feat of old school DMing. It takes the threat of  Tharizdun and expands it across the planes something that was implied but never delivered upon. Now that's changed. Her evil could spread across many planes of existence including Hyperborea and the module S4 "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth"or at least this version of it could be used to bridge gap your PC's into a multitude of worlds if they survive. The question is will her evil spread? And will your PC's help it to or stop it dead in its tracks?



My thanks to Paleologos for this because S4 "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth" happens to be one of my favorite classic TSR era modules & the Fatal & Friends website has some scans from the  The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth ('76 Tournament Edition) for further history.

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