White Plume Mountain: Dungeon Crawl funhouse

 

S2: White Plume Mountain. A dungeon crawl adventure full of traps, tricks, treasure, and of course monsters. Both a fan favorite & critically acclaimed. This installment I'm looking back at this classic TSR module. Let's get right to it...

Spoiler Alert: No spoilers here! Haha! I'm guessing if your reading & following this blog there's a good chance you've played the "classic" TSR modules. 

I have both a 1st print 1979 Mono copy and a 1980 (6th printing or later) Orange cover copy. Why? I wanted both, of course!

1979

1980?

First thing I noticed is that the olderversion has 3 artist listed: Dave Sutherland III, Erol Otus, and Darlene Pekul. The 1980 version adds art by Jeff Dee, Dave LaForce, Jim Roslof, and Bill Willingham.

Bill did the cool "Elric looking guy" on the back cover...more about that later.

Fun module to play! Classic "Dungeon Crawl" adventure...which is what I'm most comfortable with.

 The 3 treasures that you are after make for and adventure with purpose...which is something we, as young teens, often lacked in our own homebrew dungeons.

Great art in this module...from the before mentioned artist...

I know I had seen the works pf both Dee & Willingham before this....probably the new Basic & Advanced Box sets from around this time. This might be the 1st time I saw the works of Otus & LaForce...both stellar TSR artist!

Always loved this page by Erol Otus...love the visual of the mountain & surrounding area! Did any of you create an adventure based around Dragotha? I'd still like to myself!

 

And the Ogre Magi shapeshifter by Bill Willingham is another fav of mine!

And the last couple of works by Otus draw very different reactions from me. The 2 Efreeti make me really miss the art of Dave Trampier...his Efreeti in the Monster Manual is vastly superior to Otus'. The Kelpie is a different story. Erol is really a master of the feminine shape.

 The last page, lettered by the great Darlene, is a nice touch to end the module. Darlene's work is always excellent.

All in all WHITE PLUME MOUNTAIN is an excellent module for player & DM alike. Great tricks & traps that force a party to think. Enough monsters to keep the "hack & slash" crowd satisfied.

A great work by TSR. A module that still holds up after all these years.

Until next time.....EXCELSIOR!