A Sense of Doubt blog post #4131 - SoD Reprint of 1073 from 2018 - The Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4131 - SoD Reprint of 1073 from 2018 - The Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons

Seemed like a timely reprint as tonight is Dungeons and Dragons night!

Thanks for tuning in.

LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

BLOG VACATION #1 - 2026 - Taking a blog vacation for a couple of weeks, until at least June 26th, 2026. Mostly reprints. A few simple shares (not that simple shares are out of the norm) and THAT ONE THING. Need time for other things.

The link to the original post I am reprinting below:

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1073 - Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons

Of all the Dungeons & Dragons quests out there, finding a copy of "Palace of the Silver Princess" may be the hardest.

 

GETTY IMAGES

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1073 - Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons

Hi Mom,

Working to catch up on the blog, which seems to be a constant theme.

I want to get caught up and get ahead and start putting time into entries with more original content.

But goals are not always met.

In other news, I have considered ending the daily production of the Hey Mom feature at three years total, on July 6th 2018, which will get me to about entry 1095. It seems a shame to stop short of 1100, but then, I am considering retiring Hey Mom from daily production but not stopping daily production. Also, I am considering featuring Hey Mom at least once a week (Throwback Thursday) possibly twice a week.

I haven't made any decisions yet.

Meanwhile, this article caught my eye, and since my posts about Dungeons and Dragons tend to get more views, here you go. :-)


https://www.wired.com/story/racy-dandd-module-oral-history/

• IM MCLAUCHLIN
• CULTURE
• 06.12.18
• 04:17 PM

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RACY MODULE THAT ALMOST RUINED D&D

By Jim MCLAUCHLIN

AN EPIC DUNGEONS & Dragons campaign, any player will tell you, can take many hours. It’s not just a few rolls of the dice. Yet there is one D&D quest that’s more difficult than even the most fiendish homebrew game run by the most sadistic dungeon master: Finding an original copy of the module known as "Palace of the Silver Princess."

"Palace" wasn’t your typical pre-packed, ready-to-play D&D module. It had dragons, sure, but it also featured an illustration of a woman tied up by her own hair—not too family-friendly, especially considering that the vaguely erotic image came at a time when parent company TSR was trying to get the role-playing game out of hobby shops and into big toy stores. The module was yanked almost immediately, doomed to become a piece of fabled D&D lore.

"Palace of the Silver Princess" began its life in 1980. Back then, the RPG was on the ascent, becoming the new hip thing on college campuses. It was also starting to attract the attention of religious groups and worried moms who painted D&D as a literal tool of the devil. So even as the game was on the rise, life at TSR headquarters in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin was plagued with fears that moral outrage could end the good times at any moment.

And so, to ensure Dungeon Module B3 never became the spark that started that blaze, it was scrapped. Now that D&D is once again cool, we asked some TSR veterans to recount the story of what really happened with "Palace of the Silver Princess." Like all good adventures, the story involves sex, blood, and thievery. And a backhoe.

The Beginning

What became the “Palace of the Silver Princess” started as a project created by writer Jean Wells in 1980.

Kevin Hendryx, TSR game developer and designer, 1980-81:In essence, the philosophy of management [at that time] was that it was better to have anything to sell today than something of higher quality later, because the market was so hot and the demand so great that TSR was losing money by any delays. So crank out that product and damn the torpedoes.

That sort of outlook in TSR’s flush days was the poison that caused problems like a B3 module, and got up the nose of the product development people.

Lawrence Schick, TSR game developer and designer, 1979-81: Upper management regarded employees as second- or third-class citizens. They were obnoxious to work for. They were in another building uptown; we were downtown. Off by ourselves, it was a fun place to work. But management was high-handed, and not much interested in feedback that contradicted what they had in mind.

Kevin Hendryx: We had a very us-against-them attitude. As much as we were hot-headed little snots and not always the most professional, management was not the most professional either. Most of them were new to being in positions like that. They tended to treat it like a game, like we were just non-player characters being moved around the board.

They were warned. But management did not take these things seriously until the ["Palace of the Silver Princess"] module had been printed and somebody at the other office actually looked at it and flew into a fury.

Why the warnings and strong reaction? The original B3 module featured "The Illusion of the Decapus," a S&M-styled illustration showing a woman bound by her own hair and tortured by nine demonic-looking characters. And in a time when the "Satanic Panic" was gaining momentum, claiming that D&D was a gateway to devil worship, the image posed a very real threat to the company's bottom line.

The illustration that caused all the fuss: "The Illusion of the Decapus."

 

TSR

Kevin Hendryx: They didn’t want anything that could be seen as or interpreted as in bad taste. They didn’t want anything that could be held up on a TV screen with someone saying, "Parents of America! Look at what your children are reading and playing!" An illustration like that was not going to fly.

The second problem? The original "Palace of the Silver Princess" had a full-page illustration the higher-ups couldn’t figure out at all. Management knew they were likenesses, and they thought they were being made fun of, but they weren’t sure.

Lawrence Schick: They were caricatures of people in development, not management. There were a lot of in-jokes in there. And if you aren’t "in" on the in-jokes, it can be easily misinterpreted. So it's perilous to do that sort of thing. If you didn't know who the caricatures were of, you might guess, and you might guess wrong.

Kevin Hendryx: The illustration alluded to recent terminations and employee unrest. Upper management was very sensitive about mutiny in the ranks at the time and took all these perceived slurs or snoot-cockings as an insult and a challenge.

The third problem? The module was navel-gazing pseudo-porn.

Bill Willingham, TSR artist, 1980-81: I was first to read the damn thing, and I was just shocked at how ridiculous it was. It was clearly the private fantasies of the author [Jean Wells, who died in 2012]. The Silver Princess character was also her persona in the Society of Creative Anachronism—a hauntingly lovely woman who destroyed hearts. I called it to the art director's attention, and we went upstairs to editorial and Lawrence Schick. And at some point Lawrence, being the head of creative, called over to the business side and said, "Are you sure we want to do this?" And someone from the business side essentially said, "Hey, my wife plays mahjong with her, and she’ll give me shit if we don’t let her do her module. Just publish it. Don’t give us any more crap about this."

Kevin Hendryx: Some of the people thought it was too suggestive. There was a lot of subliminal, Freudian-level erotica in there.

Bill Willingham: I used to call it "Phallus of the Silver Princess." It was unprintable. It was badly written.

Stephen Sullivan, TSR editor and artist, 1980-84: Jean kind of straddled two camps. She was a good friend of mine, and very friendly with most of the designers. But she was also kind of part of management, and she was a good friend of [D&D co-creator] Gary Gygax’s. So when Jean sent this through, it came through with the same edict as Gary’s modules, which was, "Don't touch this language."

So when this thing came through, and the development people wanted to edit it, Jean went to Gary and said—and I know I’m going to make this sound more harsh than it actually was—"They’re changing my stuff, tell them not to do it." And Gary reminded us all that we were not to change the designers’ word or intent in the work. We were just to proof it, do the production line, get it done. The artists didn’t want to work on it; it was so bad.

Kevin Hendryx: Most of us asked for our names to be taken off of it. That’s why you don’t see my name in the credits.

Bill Willingham: I quit TSR halfway through it. Someone else finished my illustrations.

Rolling the Dice

Ultimately, B3 was printed. It was given an orange cover and copies were distributed to the staff. Then chaos set in.

Lawrence Schick: There were some text passages that were deemed problematic. There was a tone to many of the illustrations, [staff artist] Erol Otus' in particular, that were darkly humorous in a way that management didn’t like. But they would have overlooked that if it wasn’t for that one illustration with bondage overtones. D&D was under attack by religious conservatives at the time, and TSR thought that releasing the original B3 would be just throwing red meat to the mad dogs.

Kevin Hendryx: My vague memory is that the module came out late in the week, management caught wind of it over the weekend, and by Monday, they were recalling it. They were seizing the warehouse copies and grabbing the undistributed stock. It happened very, very fast. One day they were handing out our office copies, and one day we were told that supervisors were collecting copies, telling people to turn theirs in. Most of us, having got a whiff of what was going on, were busy squirreling ours away.

The land rush was on. D&D was aboil in the zeitgeist, and everyone knew the "banned" module would be a collectors’ item. Editorial staff members hid their single copies, and rumors persist to this day that management liberated cases at a time. The print run was ordered destroyed.

Stephen Sullivan: I don’t know how many were printed. My guess is between 5,000 and 10,000. I do know someone—who I’m not going to name now—that had direct knowledge of what was going on. The person I talked to said, and I quote, "The modules were buried at the Lake Geneva landfill along with all the rest of Lake Geneva's trash. This I know for sure." And I know that they made sure that someone was standing there, watching them get buried, and that person was [late TSR handyman] Dan Matheson. Now whether they had to hire another backhoe other than the usual one that would have been there at the landfill, I don’t know. That’s been a persistent rumor for a long time.

Kevin Hendryx: I find it funny that management was so concerned about anyone filching copies of B3 that they had employees like Dan—who was a big, imposing bear of a fellow, burly and bearded—riding shotgun on the garbage dump. But I don’t think there was a sacrificial pit with glyphs of warding put over it. It was more mundane than that.

The Great Quest

The module was totally rewritten, and four offending pieces of art were replaced. A new version of "Palace of the Silver Princess" was printed, this time with a green cover, in 1981.

By 1984, copies of the original, orange-covered version started sneaking out, selling at auction for as much as $300. By the 2000s, copies were trading for $1,000-$3,000. A YouTube video references a Jean Wells-signed copy that sold for $5,860. Soon fans were starting quests to find more of the modules.

Stephen Sullivan: The rumor was that they buried them behind the [management] building out on Sheridan Springs Road. And this person who I’ve spoken to, who has more direct knowledge of their fate, says that they were definitely buried in the landfill along with all the other garbage.

Mark Finn, author of Chance of a Lifetime: I was a hardcore Dungeons & Dragons player back in the 1980s. When Bill [Willingham] was in Austin, we started a weekly meetup group for fiction writers. One day, when telling TSR stories, Bill said, "I'll tell you about the worst module we ever had to deal with," and … I didn’t even remember "Palace of the Silver Princess." But he launched into this whole thing, a backhoe, burying pallets of the module. The story bounced around in my head like a pachinko ball. For a brief moment, I thought, "We should go there! Dig ’em up! We should totally do this!" Ultimately, I chickened out. But I wrote the book.

You know, those are shrink-wrapped. I’ll bet they’re still there!

Stephen Sullivan: I suppose you could excavate the Lake Geneva landfill, like an archaeological dig. I suppose you could try.

TSR has largely made peace with its "Palace" past. The official D&D website even briefly had a full version of the original module you could download. And time provides perspective.

Lawrence Schick: I think that the reaction to the module is more interesting than the module itself. The actual content of it is only mildly eccentric by current standards. It’s more a matter of what a light it shines on the management reaction at the time, and the "Satanic Panic." It’s like Bigfoot, except the first edition of this module actually exists. It can be seen.

Kevin Hendryx: Too much of this gaming history is liable to be lost if journalists weren't recording at least a little of it. Thanks.

Mark Finn: It’s very inside baseball. You have to know what this is to go looking for it. That said, I’ve had more than one person give me some iteration of this story: "Hey, I heard about this crazy module they had to destroy. You know anything about that?" I love this piece of gaming history. Nice that you're giving it a folklorist's treatment.

Bill Willingham: I call shenanigans. You call this an oral history. But you’re writing this down. This is an oral history in the sense that foothills are made of feet, or that a tiger shark is part tiger, part shark. Come to think of it, that could be a cool D&D creature.

Upper management at TSR couldn't figure out if they
were being made fun by this illustration.

 

TSR

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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
- Days ago = 1075 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1806.13 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2606.09 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3995 days ago & DAD = 649 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4100 - Gillen on What Makes me Want to Run a Game?

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4100 - Gillen on What Makes me Want to Run a Game?

Anti-climactic milestone of post 4100, but I am not derailing to do something more significant.

Visual above and the map at the bottom from - https://oldmenrunningtheworld.com/the-mythic-bastionland-gm-oaths/

Last week, I played games with a friend on Saturday and then, as usual, am playing D&D on Tuesday.

I don't think I want to run any of these games Gillen writes about either. :-)

Fortunately, I am not.

https://oldmenrunningtheworld.com/what-makes-me-want-to-run-a-game/

What Makes Me Want To Run A Game?

Written by

Kieron Gillen

in

blathering

Or, to give it its true clickbait title, “Why I have absolutely no interest in running 7/9 of the games Quinns Quest has reviewed.”

You see, you can tell I’m a Jedi Knight Still Pining After His Age Of Lightsaber, because if I was properly clickbaiting I’d say “Why 7/9 of the games Quinns Quest has reviewed bore me to tears” but I can’t, because that’s not true.

They don’t bore me to tears. I watch them and think “that sounds great” or “Vaesen exists”. I love hearing Quinns talk about them. I love their strengths and weaknesses and ideas. I like to consider them. I would certainly play in a game of any of them, if there was someone who wanted to get them to the table.

It’s just that I have absolutely no desire to run 77.777 recurring of them.

There’s probably an essay on Quinns’ impact on the RPG scene – he’s essentially someone who has learned skills as an pop-critic in a more monied area and then brought them to bear in a medium where no-one has had the money to support the development of those skills. That’s when he launched Shut Up And Sit Down. And then he did it again, moving from the relatively bounteous space of Boardgames to indie rpgs. Indie-rpgs! No wonder he’s been a sensation. It’s like if Pele has turned up to your five a side kickabout, and asked if he can play.

However, seeing an old friend go out to bat for these games they (mostly) love has really made me drill down on my own tastes, and where they’ve separated, and ended up in a different place. If you’re reading this blog, I suspect it’s worth showing where my present biases are.

So… when I see a game, what makes me want to get it to the table? Why 7/9 of Quinns’ choices will be left on the shelf choke under the dust? What turns me on? What turns me off?

The most basic criteria is actually the easiest.

I will flick to a games’ average NPC stat block. I will compare it to the length of my index finger. The more knuckles it covers, the less chance there is I can be bothered. If the game assumes you need to know every random bozo’s ability to identify clouds, you can assume it’s way too much work for me to handle. Life is too short, and my index finger is too long.

This is what happened when I was going through a Runequest-curious stage a year or so back. I was thinking I could handle this, and then saw the NPC stat blocks and realised the level of detail for the lead characters was applied to everyone, and oh, no, definitely not.

None of Quinns seems to trip up on that – with the possible exception of Delta Green, but I’m not going to check that, as it fails on another count in a minute. Arguably Lancer, but that’s more a level of crunch generally.

The next step is actually it failing on strengths, not the weaknesses. The things which people say to excite you? In advertising or reviews? Sometimes they just don’t excite me. That’s not a problem. They excite a lot of people. If you did math, I suspect I’m in the significant minority. That’s fine, but it’s also true.

The first of these is that the game’s strength is outside the game itself. The game is primarily a serving device into which the real appeal is poured: the setting, scenarios, or campaigns.

No interest whatsoever. This is where Delta Green drops. This is where Mothership drops. This is a core one for me, and should be considered foreshadowing of where this is going.

The second is that a game’s appeal is who you are playing or the world you’re exploring. Some really cool fiction, or unusual characters. Maybe we’re dimension skipping Jet-Set-Radio-esque teen adventurers? You in?

Nope. More interest, certainly, but not enough to make me wrestle with my google calendar and see when the nerds can all hang out. Most of them go here: Slugblaster, the Wildsea, even Triangle Agency starts to wobble.

Third, if your game does something really cool in session eight, I’m out. This is an extension of my aesthetic as a videogame journalist – if your game gets good after twenty hours, it sucks. This isn’t exactly 1:1 that, but if a key element which makes the game interesting is way off? No, I’ll spend my time on a game which excites me from session 1, thanks. So Triangle Agency bounces into the void.

(I suspect I’ll be playing that one in the new year – looking forward to it. But I just won’t run it, guys.)

Which leads to what does excite me?

I realised it was pretty simple.

It’s whatever the thing which I tell you excitedly whenever a game is mentioned.

It’s always a single fact.

This article was originally going to be a list of these one cool things. But since then, I realised that my 101 Favourite Games Ever series is going to touch on a bunch of them, so I don’t want to repeat myself.

But anyway. A single fact. And with my present tastes, it’s probably a mechanic. It’s not always a mechanic, but usually is.

I am firmly of the corner that a system that gets out of the way can just get out of my way. The only point of a system is that it takes me to a place where I wouldn’t reliably get to by myself.

This certainly includes an element of formalist neophilia: I just like new ideas I haven’t seen before. However, it’s not just that. I have no interest in games which change mechanics to something novel for the sake of it, as if cool math is a turn on. This isn’t boardgames.

What I am mainly interested in is a mechanic which shows profound understanding of the fiction of the game, and has been designed to enable and magnify that fiction.

You see, you can throw a huge world of cool stuff at me, but I’m going to be taking it on faith you actually understand what any of it means. What a mechanic does is show that you understand your fiction, as you are capable of abstracting it.

The second I see a mechanic which does, I can trust the book. If I’m going to spend time with it, I need that. It excited me, because I feel safe, and I feel excited as I can see the implications of a mechanic spinning off into play-space.

My indie-TTRPG journey really started with Monsterhearts. Why was I attracted, when I spent the 90s dodging playing World of Darkness. Yes, I’m a (blood)sucker for a more explicit queer theme, but that certainly wouldn’t be enough for me now.

But even over a decade on, I read this…

…and I’m as all in as I ever was.

This absolutely understands something about its genre, and has created a mechanic to ensure it happens. This is a story about people’s messy, confused sexual awakening, and you can’t run from it. The game won’t let you.

RPG critic sorts may have sensed I’ve been resisting mentioning System Matters, even though it’s floating there. I don’t need to go that strong, even though I clearly have sympathies for that position. I don’t think it matters most, but it’s certainly there.

I’m also aware that my neophilia may be biting me with some of the above – there’s mechanics in the games I’ve rejected which certainly show how the games understand their genre. But, at least in terms of what I’ve seen, they’re not the incandescent brightness of Turn Someone On. There’s an implicit caveat there – in that if I actually went through myself maybe I’d find one, as it’s what I care about most. Perhaps if my copy of Slugblaster wasn’t stole on the train to Sevenoaks I’d be writing a different article?

Which leads to the two of the nine I am attracted to.

Firstly, Heart. I’d already ran Heart, and it exists as the meniscus between what I think primarily interests Quinns and what primarily interests me – it’s got all this berserk worldbuilding and excellent classes and all that for him, and for me, it’s got the Beats system which turns Stars & Wishes into both the GM prep and the XP system.

And then there’s the second game, Mythic Bastionland.

You know from The Skim that Jim and I dig its vibe from across the bar. I actually include the One Thing I Tell People About Mythic Bastionland in that feature.

It’s this rule…

Why on Earth would the ageing rules excite me?

Firstly, they’re just beautiful. People may improve from their youth. People age in an unpredictable, but inevitable fashion. People die. They change meaningfully, with a few moving parts. This is a designer who really knows what they’re doing.

Secondly, it also shows exactly how Mythic Bastionland knows how to engage with its theme. It’s a micro-Pendragon, doing a story about knights adventuring across a longer time period. As such, it wants to compress some of the thrills of the Great Pendragon Campaign‘s 80-year 100-odd-session game into a OSR-format.

That it’s a game of dynastic knights fighting myth means that the ageing rules are just a great test for how well McDowall gets it.

He clearly does, and I wish I could play a game of it right now.

Which is lucky, as our Mythic Bastionland campaign starts tonight.

We will report back, and probably go on about the ageing rules some more. They’re nifty.

Kieron Gillen

Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2605.09 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3964 days ago & DAD = 618 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.