GDQ1-7: Queen of the Spiders

The official cover art. Amazing this wasn't sold in a brown paper bag or a trashy metal music store.

Queen of the Spiders is the super-omnibus format for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition Adventure Path, spanning a set of seven individual adventures that collectively make up a mega-campaign; Against the Giants, the Drow Trilogy, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

First, let's not discuss That Cover.

There's a new prologue. First, there's the lead-in from Scourge of the Slavelords, where the surviving slavers are gaslighting the PCs. This part is artificial and contrived. Then there's an overview of giant-occupied Sterich. This bit is... pretty good. Carl Sargent's 2e From the Ashes Greyhawk revamp uses that for its Sterich, and it further inspired the "liberation of Geoff" arc in the Against the Giants expansion.

The main text of GDQ went hardly touched. Its narrative mistakes, like revealing to players that big ghoul cave too late in the adventure to matter, are still here. They did take the icons away from the Player's Map, which was damn lame. The largest change was to the wandering-monsters which take on Monster Manual II additions like the marlgoyle.

Also there's an appendix in case anyone wanted to visit elsewhere in this underdark, or to other planes from the Demonweb Pits. Here is introduced Dra-Mur-Shou, the illithid city. Which is... too powerful; it's easily a rival for the Vault itself. The fans at the Dragonsfoot forum have accordingly ruled it off-map.