At the Dungeons & Dragons forum ENWorld, contributor (un)reason has been systematically filing through old issues of Dungeon and reviewing the adventures within. This week, he/she reached issue 58 containing my initial publication in the magazine, “The Baron’s Eyrie,” and had only good things to say about my work from… *does math* twenty-six years ago!?
Things get more interesting once you get inside the castle itself, as the infected lycanthropes hate their master, and would love for you to destroy him & free them, maybe cure them as well, but their magical compulsion means they can’t do anything directly against him. This does still mean they’ll be surprisingly civil if you don’t attack everything on sight, giving you the option to play the adventure in a more political way with various twists and turns as you uncover the various personalities of the place and their secrets. Some of those twists are sufficiently sneaky that I’m not going to spoil them here, and there’s enough of them that it’s unlikely your group will discover all of them, making this both an interesting read and of well above average replayability too.
“The Baron’s Eyrie” was my first big sale. I was paid $580, which was more than my monthly rent — an enormous sum of money for me in 1996. I would go on to contribute two more adventures to Dungeon in the late 90s.
I fell away from D&D for decades before starting a pandemic group in 2020 that includes my sons, my nephews, and my brother. As a DM I generally try to provide an avenue for the players to resolve encounters by talking their way out of it, even if nine times out of the ten they wake up and choose violence. Having forgotten the particulars of “Eyrie,” it’s gratifying to see I was using that same approach last century too.