Review: B4 "The Lost City" TSR - Tom Moldvay 1982

This intro dungeon crawl from 1982 is the perfect starting Dungeon Crawl that exemplifies the elements of Old School play

A few weeks ago we played through several sessions of the classic Basic D&D module "B4 - The Lost City" by TSR from 1982.

This module exemplifies everything that old school D&D has to offer. Being only a few pages in length, and a step pyramid with mostly rectangular rooms, it appears deceptively simple at first glance, and that is exactly what this module teaches about Old School D&D.

Like modern OSR adventures, a referee can read through B4 just once and then put it on the table for play with almost no prep at all. It's organization is as good as could be expected from 1982, and such simple organization for official modules has since been lost during the Hickman revolution until only these recent years of the OSR (and then only slightly improved by modern OSR designers).

Room descriptions are simple, providing only what is needed at a glance. There are very few paragraphs and blocks of text. When blocks of text do show up, they are necessary to explain something more complex immidiately in the dungeon, not drifting into a soliloquy of lore not immidiately important to the room at hand. The layout allows the referee to use just the map and the room descriptions to run, and this minimalism also makes the page count small. It is actually for the referee and useful at the table.

The elements of the dungeon combine into a soup of adventure that allows an emergent narrative to arise. This can all happen with very little work on the part of the referee. The intro text for the referee and flavor text is fairly short. Instead the mystery of the Lost City arises through gameplay and clues in the world the players can pull on and investigate, piecing together the mystery naturally. By using the Basic and Expert dungeon crawling procedures of the same era, factions and monsters will naturally interact and cause the space to evolve rather than being xp and gold pinatas put in the way of players, or just scary threats lurking in the dark (and they are scary).

The use of space in the dungeon makes the step pyramid feel vast by the 3rd level of it, even though the full diamater of the dungeon is perhaps only a few hundred feet. Because of the factions and levels, as well as the mystery beneath it all, B4 can actually become an entire setting allowing for dozens of gameplay sessions with almost no prep. We found we needed to come to a natural stopping point because we hadn’t anticipated needing multiple sessions to complete what seemed like a short module! You could easily make this a single one shot as a foray into a strange archeological site, or it can become an entire campaign. Best of all, whatever story and experiences arises from that unexpected setting will be entirely driven by player choice.

The Bad:

1. Some key information in different parts of the module - Using the pdf helped with this, but there are several pieces of key information that required me to flip back and forth through the module. For some reason, several of the explanations for key encounters was placed at the end of the module instead at the beginning with all the other tools. This resulted in needing to have 3 different places in the module held and flipped back and forth at the table, and it was easy to lose my place. For example, the wacky descriptions of the mutated Cynideceans were in the back of the module. The rooms where they could be encountered are in the body of the module, and the encounter tables where they are rolled for are in the front!

In another place the 3 gods are described in the body of the module, but I had to return to the front of the module to find it's details in the intro text.

The module would have benefitted from having all of the tools to run it in one place and the room descriptions in another.

2. The POD scan isn't perfect - At one point I actually caused the entire party to become lost as the referee and had to simply provide them the way out because between sessions they had winded their way around so much, that when they came back to certain parts of the dungeon from the opposite direction, I couldn't recall what they experienced.

This would be fine because I kept notes, but the scan from Wizards of the Coast (for me at least) made it very difficult to see the symbols defining changes in levels, stairs vs. ladders etc!

If possible, I recommend not getting a POD from Wizards and instead getting a good used copy from eBay or Noble Knight Games (I generally recommend this anyway).

The Good:

1. Dark Sword & Sorcery of a forgotten time - In every way drawing from the Dark Sword & Sorcery of an Clark Ashton Smith story, the step pyramid is just weird. Modern modules simply don't contain this amount of grit, attitude and depth. Everything from the descriptions of the inhabitants and their society (some of the weirdest in any module I've seen), to the horrific truth at the bottom of it all, the environs of the desert and step pyramid evoke a sense of a lost city that should perhaps have stayed lost. The whole thing is dripping with flavor, and would probably not be as well recieved by the broader “kitchen sink” high fantasy/power fantasy audience of modern days.

2. It pulls no punches on dungeon crawling - Going in, water resources are incredibly important, and several levels in the scarcity of food and water may cause the players to make...questionable...choices regarding how to stay alive. Light is life. There are no "stores" or merchants here, although there are factions that can be used as sanctuaries. Because of the use of claustrophobic spaces, weird factions, roaming monsters, moving corridors and scarcity of resources the Lost City becomes a "mythical underworld" of paranoia and survival.

3. The Cynidiceans - Without spoiling it, and related to "Good" point #1, the Cynidiceans are so weird and interesting they jump off the page with only a couple lines of description. These factions and the random table of weird encounters for them at the back of the module are worth the price of admission alone.

4. The perfect starting place for old school play - Many recommend "Tomb of the Serpent Kings" as the ideal "teaching" dungeon to begin old school play. I like that module (and it's free!) but I contest that I doubt the "teaching dungeon" formula has ever been improved since 1982. By simply reading the module and then applying the dungeon procedures from B/X to the game, players and referees will naturally learn the importance of clever thinking, planning and resource management without any need to brief them of their importance in advance or explain in blocks of text within the module. The interesting skills needed for old school play naturally arise from this brillaint adventure by Tom Moldvay.

Recommendations:

1. Run this as a pure, theatre-of-the-mind dungeon crawl - The players should have grid paper for this one! Describe the length of rooms and hallways in a creepy, uncertain and haunting way, but help them map with the raw details of dimensions and lengths. This is the perfect module to actually put the dungeoneering rules of Basic and Expert D&D to the test.

2. Use an old school game system for this - Don't use Dungeon Crawl Classics, Pathfinder or D&D 3 through 5e etc. that encourages fighting monsters at level 1. This is a module that makes older systems shine, and depends on resource tracking and light for the tension, as well as evading and being circumspect about social encounters and monsters. Use "Old School Essentials", "Swords & Wizardry", "Knave" or even just one of the old games right out of the box and start the players at level 1.

3. Allow the story to emerge - This is the perfect module to show how an ecosystem in a dungeon environment using the lost dungeon crawling rules of D&D allows a story to emerge with a combination of the strange elements of fiction and player choices alone. It's an excellent module for the referee to kick back and observe the glory of emergent storytelling they had no hand in "writing."

We had an amazing time playing this module, and it took very, very little preparation on my part to run. Overall, I’d give this module an “A-”