S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth is a Gary Gygax adventure module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It is the fourth and last in the S series; followed up by the more-explicitly Greyhawk ("WG4") module, The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun.

This is a dungeon-crawl. Recommended PC levels are 6-10.

Backstory

Nine or ten decades ago - says the backstory - the mage-ette Iggwilv conquered Perrenland, holding it for about a decade. To put it in George Martin's terms, her economic policy was best described as "extractive". She spent the money on demonology. Whilst she was here she corralled no less a fiend than Graz'zt, demon prince of three (3) Abyssal layers.

Aaaand that's what did for her short-lived regime. A later experiment of hers freed Graz'zt. After some struggle Iggwilv succeeded in banishing that one right back down there, but at such cost that her own "henchmen and slaves" found it in themselves to scurry out with most of the treasury. (Turns out that Chaotic Evil is a bad fit for henchmen, and that slaves don't like their masters either.) Perrenland freed itself easily after that.

The runaways didn't abscond with ALL the treasures; for a start, they left alone a lot of the magic, given how much of it was baneful as f@ck. The March of Bissel has now found Iggwilv's bastion. Bissel wants some of that sweet sweet loot, especially Daoud's Wondrous Lanthorn, before its rivals (like Ket, and of course post-occupation Perrenland) get it. Enter the PCs for a good old-fashioned burgle.

The Adventure

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

This starts with a wilderness section, through the rockslide-prone and monster-infested Yatils. Some encounters are keyed; some are wandering. Most of these wandering monsters have lairs with beaucoup treasure, so the DM might consider choosing the lairs in advance.

The Caverns don't have random encounters at all. They are divided into "Lesser Caverns" near the surface, then a stairway leading 900' down and 2700' west to the "Greater Caverns". Both caverns expand to fit a 10.75" x 7.75" board inset cover: so, 330' x 420' area. The top caverns are just lairs for whatever has showed up here, except for the stray golem and maybe the marid and the dao created and summoned by the dark mistress. It's all very boxy. Not on the maps, the former caverns fall over a 400' cliff to a lake below to the west, and the marid's chamber sits over a larger flooded cave-complex.

The lower caverns are where Iggwilv did most of her work and where the real treasure (and monsters) live - like her daughter Drelnza, now a vampire. This layer is full of demons and constructs - and a hill giant, who got here who-knows-how.

Legacy

S4's dungeons are forgettable, even by 1982 standards. They lack the character of Tomb of Horrors and have none of the majesty of the Drow Trilogy's underdark.

What S4 did have, was new items and monsters. The chasme, behir, and bodak were mooted here first, before the second Monster Manual. Same with the Lanthorn and the Demonomicon. Any many more.