WGR3: Rary the Traitor

Rary the Traitor is a second-edition module for Greyhawk, tagged WGR3. Lorraine Williams' grip on TSR was strongest at the time, so as with the Sun of London you have to flip to Page Three to see the important stuff: here the names of the "designer", Anthony Pryor, and of his editor Anne [née Grey] McCready. It came out 1992 so contemporary with From The Ashes.

As Sargent-era nuGreyhawk goes, WGR3 is best rated "tolerable".

Here is where Brian Blume's Rary character ended up after the Greyhawk Wars metaplot. That would be the Bright Desert, whose lore is divulged, if somewhat confused: as of -1500 CY / 700 FT, it was either an irrigated desert or else a semiarid prairie. The fourth chapter details the mine, ruin, and tower you'll be siccing your 8th-level party on. So it's a sandbox but not, allowing the DM and his/her group some latitude to move events.

For backstory, Rary and his BFF Robilar have come to this empty land to found a new kingdom. Except... it's not empty. It is full of angry nomads, not all of them human; Rary needs to knuckle them under, somehow. Rary has already made a deal with a powerful beholder who oversees a duergar mine: for once, the grey dwarves are under the whip which they so readily use elsewhere. Rary is having a good deal less luck with the manscorpions, easily the most pesty of the locals and hereby introduced into 2e. It would help his adventure no end if he could track down an ancient Flan artifact, said to control them.

For players, here's the bad news: that fourth chapter recycles the backstory from Thomas' and Sargent's "Crown of Corruption" cycle from GAZ13, The Shadow Elves. In GAZ13 and WGR3 both an unwise sorcerer long ago donned an evil artifact in the shape of a crown, which turned him immortal and twisted the area for miles around into a desert. The sorcerer is Shattados here; Shattariel in GAZ13. Seriously, WGR3 isn't even trying.

In additional hilarity, Maps #10, 11, and 12 went missing from the module and we all had to download them from TSR's website. Or was it Gopher or FTP, 1992-4?

Lorraine did not permit Pryor and McCready to provide "acknowledgements" but we can all assume that Sargent was aware of the plagiary, assuming he hadn't submitted the revisions to the two himself.