As I’ve written about elsewhere, my journey with D&D started with 2nd edition AD&D—specifically the First Quest box set, which a good friend of mine found in a charity shop. We played it quite extensively in the summer of 2001, and probably a bit before that as well. Then we dived into 3rd edition, and the rest is history.
But when we started running games as twelve- and 13-year-olds, we didn’t really know what we were doing. Our adventures were largely inspired by video games and stories, and maybe the occasional film. We hadn’t really read any D&D modules. And the very first module I picked up—it’s extraordinary to think, looking back, how fortunate I was to start with this one—was Richard Baker’s The Forge of Fury. It was the second instalment of the 3rd edition adventure path, which began with The Sunless Citadel (also, of course, a classic) and finished with Bastion of Broken Souls.
I ran it a tonne. In fact, whenever my patient brother agreed to play D&D with me, it was almost always The Sunless Citadel or The Forge of Fury. We rarely finished either of them, but we always had a good time.
I still have a copy, and it’s a precious little thing. Just 32 pages, blue cover, with gorgeous artwork by Todd Lockwood: a black dragon and four of the iconic characters attempting to cross a treacherous-looking rope bridge. It really is one of the best covers of 3rd edition. (Baker has since said the dragon was a late addition, because the brand team wanted one in every module in the adventure path. Imagine that cover without it!)
So here’s the question I’ve sometimes asked myself. Do I admire this adventure so much because it was my first? Because I’m nostalgic for it, and it has a special place in my heart? Or because it’s actually, objectively, really, really good?
What maaybe vindicated it for me was its reappearance in Tales from the Yawning Portal (2017), an anthology that collated some of the great adventures of years gone by and updated them for 5th edition. Seeing it there alongside The Sunless Citadel, White Plume Mountain and the Tomb of Horrors—adventures widely considered to be classics—made me think: oh, OK, I’m not alone. Clearly I’m not wrong and it really is a good adventure.
So what makes it so good?
‘Right down the middle of the fairway’
At this point I should point you towards Rich Baker’s own retrospective on the adventure. He finds it somewhat ironic that something he deliberately pitched as a generic setup—’right down the middle of the fairway’, as he puts it—has become so loved. By his reckoning, around a million players have been through it, many times more than ever played his Birthright setting. (And incredibly, he says he hates writing adventures!)
Anyway, at face value, you can see his point. Forge is clearly Moria-inspired: a forgotten dwarven stronghold, treasure buried deep, lots of danger, orcs. You could be forgiven for looking at it and assuming it’s going to be generic and unoriginal, or even dull. And yet I think it’s fantastic, and I want to explore some of the reasons why.
The premise is simple. Durgeddin the Black was a master smith (and a dwarf, obviously) and famous for forging legendary weapons. Forced to flee his home, he carved out a secret stronghold: ‘Khundrukar’. (Even after a quarter of a century, I still love saying this name out loud.) Then the orcs took it. It fell into ruin, and now people don’t even seem to know where it is.
The adventure starts near a small mining town, Blasingdell, and there are a few simple hooks to get you going quickly. If you’ve run The Sunless Citadel, the party may already have found a map marked with the name Khundrukar, which sets them up perfectly. Or it can be as simple as speaking to a noble in town who’s heard the legend of Durgeddin’s blades and will pay handsomely for each one recovered.
I think there’s a lot to be said for this kind of adventure design. You don’t need pages and pages of backstory. You want the adventure to start quickly, at the adventure site, and get going. Maybe it seems old-fashioned or cliché to some more modern players, but it works, and I wish more 5th edition adventures followed it as an approach.
Meaningful player choices
It all begins with the approach to a mountain called the Stone Tooth—actually, let’s pause, because here, straight away, is where we see one of the best qualities of this adventure, and the reason I’ve played and replayed it so many times. It’s the holy grail of roleplaying: meaningful player choices.
As the party approach the mountain, they see a little plume of smoke in the distance. They see switchback stairs leading up to the entrance. And they can go off-road and explore, maybe find a mountain tarn. All of these options are worth pursuing.
Take the lake. It has a secret underwater tunnel that leads to the very base of the dungeon—essentially to the final encounter with the dragon and its hoard. No one has ever found it in one of my games. But it’s such satisfying adventure design: an in-world reason why the dragon can come and go, which a very careful and imaginative group might discover, even if they probably never will.
Then there’s the smoke. If the party find its source, they find a safe route in: a chimney that runs deep underground into a little unoccupied cave where there’s some stew cooking over a fire—by far the safest way into the dungeon.
Go up to the front door instead and trigger the orcs there, and you’re going to have a rough time; it sets off a whole series of alarms and reinforcements. But even that is a meaningful choice, because the party can see the two orc guards from a distance. Do they try to negotiate with them? Attack them straight up? Take them out with stealth?
This is always fun to run as a DM and probably even more fun to play through as a player. I love this stuff.
Compact, but packed
It’s a brilliantly designed, dynamic dungeon. And yet, for all that, it’s still relatively simple to run. There aren’t too many stat blocks. On the first level you’ve got some stirges, an ogre, some wolves and so on, but for the most part you’re dealing with orcs—and that’s fine. The room descriptions are never florid or complicated; they’re clear, succinct, and easy to read.
The map, too, uses many of the nonlinear approaches Jennell Jaquays models: there are loops, secret doors, verticality, sublevels—all the stuff that really works. And it isn’t a massive dungeon. It’s 53 keyed locations, five levels, and some of these are quite short; the final level, for example, is basically the dragon’s lair with a bit of an approach.
But it feels big, because each level has a clear flavour and theme, so as you go deeper it genuinely feels like you’re exploring somewhere new. The second level reminds me of Blackreach in Skyrim: vast caverns, but weirdly beautiful. There’s a duergar stronghold, the Foundry, and an underground river, the Sinkhole. And yes, the Black Lake: the dragon’s lair.
Spiky verisimilitude
Within the dungeon there are some really fun encounters, and a few infamous ones. The roper is the obvious example: it’s extremely difficult, and most groups should probably just steer away from it. Justin Alexander has written about how encounters like this led Wizards of the Coast to move away from so-called ‘deadly’ encounters, and, like him, I think that was a mistake. If you create an adventure site where everything is perfectly balanced for the party, you take away those meaningful choices. You take away the spiky randomness that makes the game fun—and is always feels more plausible and realistic, too.
(There’s probably another article in there somewhere about how we should stop caring about challenge rating and just design encounters that make sense within the setting and the fiction. But that’s for another day.)
Forge taught me a lot about adventure design, though I didn’t necessarily see it then. I think it’s given me a lifelong love of adventures that feel grounded and have verisimilitude—it’s very much the approach I’ve taken in Tomb of the Grimlocks and Ridgeway Watch, for example (yes, yes, shameless plug). There are obviously fantastical elements: a young black dragon, the roper, troglodytes, stirges. None of these things is real, obviously. But so much thought has gone into their treatment and placement that the whole place feels like a real, living ecosystem that breathes and makes sense. I’ve always loved that in adventure design, and I’ve looked for it elsewhere ever since.
On adventure-writers
I wonder how many people reading this blog are familiar with Richard Baker. I absolutely don’t mean that as a slight, by the way. It reminds me of how most people who watch ‘movies’ don’t really care about the director; they care more about the actors. Apart from the very famous directors—Hitchcock, Scorsese, Spielberg—many of us often watch a film without paying any attention to who wrote or directed it, unless you consider yourself a bit of a film buff.
I imagine the same is true of adventures and adventure writers. Unless a writer has become well known in their own right—Chris Perkins, maybe, or Tracy Hickman, or of course Gary Gygax himself—it’s not something many people would even notice. And yet I’ve always been on the lookout for what Richard Baker does, because he’s produced so much great work that has had such a lasting impact on the game.
Did you know, for example, that he designed the sorcerer for 3rd edition, a class we’re still playing 25 years later? And the warlock, in 3.5’s Complete Arcane. He’s the co-writer of Red Hand of Doom, widely considered one of the best adventures of the 3rd edition era, which I know Matt Colville has talked about at great length, and which I still want to run some day (I have an immaculate copy sitting on my shelf). And, in a blink-and-you-miss-it credit, he’s also one of the main writers behind Lost Mine of Phandelver, which I still consider the best introductory adventure for 5th edition, and possibly one of the best 5th edition adventures full stop.
He’s clearly a very careful and thoughtful designer. If every adventure in that adventure path had been as well designed as The Forge of Fury, they’d all be classics, and still being replayed today.
So what can we take from it?
So what’s my conclusion here, other than being a bit of a Richard Baker fanboy? First, if you haven’t played this adventure, you absolutely should, and you definitely can. It’s easy to find, easy to run, and hugely replayable. But there are lessons in it, too.
The best adventures don’t have to be shockingly original or wildly fantastical. They can have obvious influences—Moria, in this case—and even feel quite familiar, and that’s not a bad thing. They’ll inevitably become unique and original through how they’re treated. Setting out to make something wildly new isn’t necessarily a recipe for success.
We should worship at the temple of meaningful player choices. You’re ultimately creating a situation, not a story. Create an interesting premise, an interesting setup, and litter the place with choices that matter. That, by the way, is not the same as random choices. If doors A and B are essentially the same, that’s not a meaningful player choice; that’s a coin toss. A meaningful choice is one where you have some information, you make a decision based on it, and it matters: it leads to a different outcome. Lots of this, please.
And the best adventures feel real, even when they’re packed with fantasy. That might seem contradictory in a fantasy role-playing game with ‘dragons’ in the title. But if the fantasy feels plausible and grounded—if it makes sense within its own fiction—it paradoxically becomes more magical and fantastical, precisely because it feels real. Consider Nightscale, a dragon placed somewhere that suits it, where it can use its powers strategically, where it makes sense that it has survived for however long and built up a vast hoard—and where a hidden tunnel explains how it comes and goes, waiting for a party clever enough to find it. That’s so much better than a random dragon lazily crowbarred into a setting where it obviously doesn’t belong.
So: do I love The Forge of Fury because it was my first? A little, perhaps. But mostly I love it because it’s really, really good.
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