Editing A1-4: Scourge of the Slave Lords (section)

=The Development=
As early as the 1970s, Dungeons & Dragons had a problem with crappy unoriginal [[Dungeon crawling|dungeon-crawls]]. In 1979 the gamers at [[Gen Con]] [XII] rose up in revolt and petitioned four TSR designers - Zeb Cook, Allen Hammack, David Johnson, and Lawrence Schick - to come up with better. (These four were too polite up to 1986 to tell us which was the offending adventure. We do know that Len Lakofka ran ''Deep Dwarven Delve'' there - which wouldn't see the light of publication until 1999, as "L3" in the ''Silver Anniversary Collector's Edition''.)

Johnson, to punish the others, on "one cold evening" the following winter dropped the other three's first-level party arse-and-boobs naked into a minotaur's labyrinth. (They did get a loincloth each.)

The four agreed this should be the LAST encounter for a tournament, not the first. Fortunately the loss of an equipment-advantage serves to put high-level adventures on almost the same even keel as low-level, excepting maybe hitpoints. And so the adventures which became A1, A2, A3 were born, to lead to that last dungeon; and brought to the public at the very next Gen Con. The ensuing A series proved popular so they were brought together, and expanded, into ''Scourge of the Slave Lords'' published May 1986.