"The King Under The Forest" (the first ever Dragon Warriors scenario)

I can tell you when it was: 1984, and fairly late in the year. And where: Ridge Close, near Woking, which was my parents’ home but I had all my reference books there so I’d have come down from London to write. And I’ll have banged it all out on an Olympia Traveller typewriter, the same one I’d used for school prep, short stories, and contributions to fan magazines like The Mystery Trader.

I’m talking about “The King Under The Forest”, the first ever scenario for Dragon Warriors. It was just a dungeon bash. Oliver Johnson and I figured that was the easy-in for new roleplayers, even though we seldom resorted to dungeons (or even Tekumel underworlds) in our own games. Still, in the Deliverance-like sequence with the elves there was a foretaste of the British folklore elements that would come to dominate DW.

You can read the original adventure here. It has echoes of King Arthur's promised return and sets up the PCs with a shared bond as potentially the King's paladins (not in the D&D sense). You’ll need Dragon Warriors if you want to play it as written. Alternatively, if dungeons are your thing, you might be familiar with D&D 5th edition and so prefer this 5e version.

I was already rethinking the scenario for my Jewelspider RPG when a friend got in touch to say he was going to modify it to run as a Dungeons & Dragons game for his son and his school chums. He had some interesting changes to suggest:

Scene 2. The chest in the map room has a lock-rose of verdigris, and contains no silver, just the bag. (The green lock is to provide a hint for later.)

Scene 6. The dragon never appears in plain sight. Instead, there are hints and rumbles – steam emerging from cracks, the very earth shaking beneath their feet. Instead, the oak tree is tended by a stocky, diminutive fellow with a red hat who tells them that this is the dragon Fengel's domain. The little man doesn't give his name – ‘It's not important’ – but will speak for Fengel and even agree to a riddling contest on Fengel's behalf. The lurking presence of the dragon in the background should be impossible to forget, but regular reminders will be given.

Scene 7. The sculpture of the north wind is of verdigris (matching the chest earlier).

Scene 9. The spider's web contains not a helmet but a wreath of black roots and white flowers (moly) which will protect the wearer against the spells of Elaine and Morgrin.

Scene 11. Instead of the barrier of light, there are three gateways, each narrow so that only one person may pass at a time, and the inscription, ‘The race goes not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.’

On the right is the gate of strength: it contains a portcullis that a sufficiently strong character might be able to lift. The portcullis, however, is even heavier than it looks, and there is a real risk that a person trying to squeeze under may let it slip, with disastrous consequences. (Holding up the portcullis while others pass is a further test of strength; trying to prop it up might be possible but might also destroy the object being used.)

On the left is the gate of swiftness. An unseen mechanism triggers a flurry of stinging darts, and only a character with tremendous reflexes and athleticism will be able to dive forward fast enough to evade them. Subsequent characters will meet the same test, since there is no apparent end to the supply of darts.

The middle path is a narrow gap in the rocks, barely wide enough to squeeze past, with a somewhat wider section to allow a person's shoulders and arms through. (Perceptive characters – or players – may notice that the effect is to make the shape of the cross.) To squeeze through is no easy feat, but any character who relinquishes weapons and armour will manage it easily. Others risk becoming wedged, with various negative consequences possible. Any character who abandons their weapons and armour and passes through the cross, leaving them behind, will (later) find themselves immune to the spells of Elaine and Morgrin, and able to damage both of them even without a magic weapon.

Scene 19. Instead of a gorgon, Elaine is a beautiful golden-haired woman who presents a banqueting table full of tempting treats, including berries and a wine which she assures the group each have healing properties. She reassures the party that she is one of Vallandar's retainers, set here to care for any travellers on their way through the underworld. Of course, to eat anything is to fall under Elaine's power.

If she fails to trick them, she will attempt more blatant sorcery to enchant them. If that fails in turn, her hideous undead visage will become visible and she will try to claw out their eyes.

Scene 21. Each of the skeletons has a single golden hair tied around its neck bones. These are victims of Elaine, who became her servants in death.

I especially like the strands of hair around the skeletons’ necks, which put me in mind of Donne’s line ‘a bracelet of bright hair about the bone’ from the poem ‘The Relic’.

The little fellow in the red hat is as much Lyonesse as Legend, perhaps, but is a brilliant way to avoid throwing a dragon into the campaign on day one. I suggested that later, perhaps as an epilogue to the adventure, the characters could come upon a discarded pile of cloth. It proves to be a life-sized hand-puppet with a faded but still recognizably red hat. But they saw the stocky fellow up close, they spoke to him, and he looked and sounded real and alive. No mere puppet, surely? And anyway, what giant hand would be needed to operate such a puppet? Examining the puppet more closely they see that the fabric inside is torn in long gouges releasing wads of stuffing, as if the hand that used the puppet had long sharp talons.

Like my friend, I was concerned about the gorgon encounter in scene #19. A gorgon doesn't fit the British folklore feel and medieval setting of Dragon Warriors, and my only excuse for including it in this introductory scenario was to give new players the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a variety of opponents. To develop the Vallandar/Arthur resonance I could have made her Nimue (or Nymenche, or Nivienne), and I might do something along those lines in the Jewelspider reboot of the adventure, but for the 5e version I switched it to a basilisk.

There are many better Dragon Warriors scenarios that came later. Some of them have appeared on this blog, and if I had to single out some favourites I'd pick "A Box of Old Bones", "Wayland's Smithy", "Mungoda Gold", and Robert Dale's Bymstone campaign. And that's just restricting the choice to scenarios specifically with DW stats -- there are plenty of other wondrous adventures to be found like gold nuggets among the old posts. If you want to mark the game's 40th anniversary, there's something to fit every taste.

And finally, here are a couple of curious fragments I came across by chance while writing this post. The first is my original back-of-a-fag-packet type sketch of the dungeon for this scenario. At centre right there's a doodle of the helm with the reflective visor, though at this early stage it doesn't look like the gorgon (or basilisk) was included on the dungeon map. How strange to think that, forty years on from this, I'm about to embark on yet another iteration of the scenario for Jewelspider. What would my 27-year-old self have thought of that?

The other sketch is of the evil wraith Morgrin. You might think it was intended as a guide for the illustrator (Leo Hartas), but no -- it was addressed to none other than Bryan Ansell at Citadel Miniatures. There had been some talk at Games Workshop about them publishing a book of Dragon Warriors adventures in 1986, with the plan of tying that in with a range of DW figurines much as they'd done with my "Dealing With Demons" articles from White Dwarf, only with the difference that I'd get paid this time. That might have been what scotched it, come to think. At any rate, it was just talk and no scenario pack appeared, nor figurines neither. I don't use figurines myself so it was no great disappointment, though the adventure book might have included Brymstone so it was a real pity to lose that.