Palace of the Vampire Queen Review

Thanks to The Other Side Blog I was recently able to snag a reprint of the first published Dungeons & Dragons adventure, Palace of the Vampire Queen. If you want to know more about the history of the adventure, please check out this post by my friend Tim Brannan.

It's referred to as a Dungeon Kit (as the term module hadn't been used) and is pretty straight forward. A dwarven princess has kidnapped by a vampire queen and the party must rescue her. There are a few labeled and unlabeled maps, but a majority of the adventure is laid out like the picture below. You get a room number, creatures encountered, Max Damage (which I assume means HP) and contents of the room. That's really about it. There are a variety of foes: goblins, ogres, and undead mainly.

You can see what I mean by bare bones. However, the DM is encouraged by the author embellish, alter, and customize the adventure to their heart's content. I really like this idea. I will either adapt it to Old School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, or D&D 5e and give it a go. Given my typical group of players, it'll probably be 5e.

I'm really excited that I was able to get a copy of this. It's a piece of history and it's really cool when you think about it. It shows that D&D is a game for the players. The first adventure released was third party! The game was designed to be used and supported by folks other than the main publisher.

If you'd like to own this replica of history you can get it here.