Pyramid Review
Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (for Dungeons & Dragons)
Published by Wizards of the Coast
Written by Monte Cook
Illustrated by Brom & David Roach
192 b&w pages, 16 page color map insert; $29.95
As part of their twenty-fifth anniversary, TSR revisited some of its first edition AD&D and Basic D&D adventures with the silver-covered Return to . . . modules, notably Return to White Plume Mountain and Return to The Keep on the Borderlands. Each of these revised, expanded, and explained the originals, even adding depth, enabling those who had played them the first time around to enjoy them once again. Of course, these were for second edition AD&D, so DMs wanting to run them using the Third Edition will have a certain amount of work to adapt them across. Now WotC have got in on the concept and released a complete Third Edition campaign with Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.
Written by Monte Cook, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is based upon The Temple of Elemental Evil campaign book by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer, itself an oddity among TSR's 1st Edition campaign books. Almost all of these compilations were collections of classic module series. Thus the A series was compiled as A1-4, Aerie of the Slave Lords, and the G, D and Q series was rereleased as GDQ1-7, Queen of the Spiders. Gygax's Dungeon Module T1, The Village of Hommlet first appeared in 1979. An introductory scenario designed as the first of two modules, its sequel, T2, The Temple of Elemental . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 20, 2001
Copyright © 2001 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.