Life is good for you as player characters. You are all bold adventures, each with a full kit of equipment and a fifteen-camel caravan of supplies. You had intended to travel to the ruins of a fabled city far in the mountains. As you were moving through a desert valley you were stopped for a day by a terrible dust storm. When you could get out of your tents with your animals you discovered a formerly hidden set of stairs descending down into the sand. Some of your group didn’t want to bother with this distraction, but others will intrigued and argued that the chance to explore some long forgotten tomb was too good to pass up.
The camel drivers in your caravan make short work of the sand blocking the stairs. You see a large portal at the bottom of the stairs. You are not happy at what you see because there is some obvious magical effect on the door. The camel drivers flee in fear, shouting about curses and deadly magics.
It takes you several hours to catch all of the drivers and calm them down. You have them camp several miles from the tomb opening. They agreed to stay there for two days, refitting equipment and giving the camels a rest.
Once again, your party talks about the advisability of checking out this obviously magical portal. You take a vote and most of you want to at least check out this door and find out what they did to it many generations ago.
- Player Introduction
Angry Dwarf Games had commissioned this module from Jim Ward in 2020 to be compatible with AD&D. It is designed for 3 to 8 level 3+ PCs. With his death on March 18, 2024, they decided to release the adventure as a limited edition, soft cover book, releasing it at the 2024 DaveCon in Bloomington, Minnesota. Only 275 were produced, and all profits were earmarked as a donation in Jim’s name to the Diabetes Foundation for the outreach and education of gamers about the disease.