The adventure itself is presented in three parts. Arik's power has driven some of the palace's residents insane, attracted many monsters, and imprisoned the princess within the ruby. The ruby, it turns out, is linked to an evil extradimensional being called Arik and is being used by him to forge a passage between dimensions. The players are tasked with entering the palace and finding a way to save the kingdom. Shortly thereafter, the entire palace was imprisioned within a ruby glow, and the valley over which the princess ruled was struck with disease and decay.

Where the original was a typical for the time delve into a castle simply to hunt treasure, the new version had the adventurers summoned shortly after the castle has fallen victim to some sort of curse so that they can try to break the curse and rescue the eponymous Silver Princess.Īccording to the backstory a giant ruby was recently found by dwarves while mining, and they presented it to the princess as a gift. Whatever the reason for the recall, Tom Moldvay heavily rewrote the module to create the version that was eventually released. In the original version, however, it's capable of producing an illusion of itself as a beautiful woman being taunted by nine ugly men.

In the second version of the adventure it's simply a sort of forest dwelling tree-octopus. One of those disturbing monsters is the decapus, shown above on the cover of the adventure.

Stories differ as to why the original edition was immediately recalled, but blame is usually placed on both the quality of the adventure itself, disturbing elements regarding a couple of the new monsters presented in the adventure, and 'questionable art'. What I have here, however, is the second version, which credits both Tom Moldvay and Jean Wells as writers.

Palace of the silver princess pdf