More Notes on Adding A Clark Ashton Smith Campaign Veneer To B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (Basic) By Tom Moldvay, & Jean Wells

Tonight its been a busy day thinking over the crater that DM Steve has left in my collective brain about his own experiences with B3 Palace of the Silver Princess by Tom Moldvay & Jean Wells. We've been talking about using the adventure as a sort of showcase for an almost Ravenloft style Fey romp into the The Shadowfell.



We've been going over some of the particulars tonight & how there could be rival groups of adventurers from different worlds entering into B3. If you've been following some of the ideas that put forward a few days ago in this blog entry.  I wondering if I should go the route of Tim Brannan's take on Rpg Pundit's Cults of Chaos? Expanding the empire of elves & Fey to help reflect the mythological nature of B3 Palace of the Silver Princess by Tom Moldvay & Jean Wells. I'm only now just starting to get the barest bones of a mini campaign together.



The real trick is gonna be connecting all of this with the plane of Nighmares which one of the players has an incredible fondness for. I'm thinking that the kingdom of Haven might be trapped between these two realms. In fact if it was up to me I'd connect both B3 Palace of the Silver Princess & X2 Castle Amber (Château d' Amberville) By Tom Moldvay.

I know that this module is heavily inspired by the works of Clark Ashton Smith, & once again I'm reminded exactly how powerful Stephen Amber (La Tombe Étienne D'Amberville)  really is. The whole adventure module reeks of the stuff of nightmares.
"Trapped in the mysterious Castle Amber. you find yourselves cut off from the world you know. The castle is fraught with peril. Members of the strange Amber family, some insane, some merely deadly, lurk around every corner. Somewhere in the castle is the key to your escape, but can you survive long enough to find it?"
I'm reminded once again of Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne stories: 

• Beast of Averoigne, The (1933)
• Colossus of Ylourgne, The (1933)
• Disinterment of Venus, The (1934)
• Enchantress of Sylaire, The (1941)
• End of the Story, The (1930)
• Holiness of Azédarc, The (1933)
• Maker of Gargoyles, The (1932)
• Mandrakes, The (1933)
• Mother of Toads (1934)
• Rendezvous in Averoigne, A (1931)
• Satyr, The (1931) [Variant Conclusion to "The Satyr"]

What Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne stories do is set the tone for canonically for the modules & it provides the perfect excuse to get B3 into shape. All of this ties directly into the very nature of B3 The Silver Princess into line for a campaign still taking into account the weirdness of such a campaign. Events that surround such an undertaking will have both the nightmare but hard core fans. The sum of the parts of such a campaign is greater then the parts that are presented in the modules themselves.