Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Furioso D&D adventure

This is Furioso, a Dungeons & Dragons adventure published by Dimension Six, Inc. and written by Davy Davis.  Or maybe I should say adopted, since it's based on a piece of sixteenth century European literature.  I picked up this obscure D&D product at a game store in a Denver mall about 30 years ago on a church ski trip.
This adventure was used at Genghis Con II in 1980 and it's based on the Italian author Ludovico Ariosto's work Orlando Furioso.  I never actually ran it as a DM or went through it as a player.  But I've read it a few times over the years.  One interesting concept is that it includes "pre-rolled" saving throws, attacks and damage for all the monsters in the module, the idea being to make the tournament as consistent as possible among different participants.
Furioso's very railroady, as appropriate for a scenario based on a literary work or meant for a convention tournament in the early years of roleplaying.  The typesetting and layout's pretty primitive, too--about what you'd get from Judges Guild products of the time.  I don't know what spurred me to buy this back in the 1980s, but I've never seen anything else like it; have you?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looking at it to convert to my rules (Antheel Rules, a non-munchkin 3.0-ish system). It looks interesting. Very little seems tied together however, so will be adding more story (RPG) details. All that I can say now - as I cannot find a download, so will need to scan (or retype) each of these old pages.

Desert Scribe said...

Let us know how the adventure plays out.

Anonymous said...

Don't hold your breath, as this is going to take a while. Still, I will try to provide updates. For the moment -

Background
Many years ago, a terrible weapon was created that threatened to destroy the world. Other great things were being attempted at that time with the people getting hope that a true Age of Peace would finally be assured. This weapon however threatened to not simply keep the balance, but tilt it back toward a time of meager existence and chaos again ruling the lives of men. Great men went to work to destroy the weapon with most saying that due to their neglect of their wonderful projects the blessing of a true prosperous period collapsed. The weapon however was destroyed, so life did nothing more than return to normal.
A being known as Cimosco however has managed to find the device. He hopes to restore it and with its power create a fear of him so great that all will bow to his desires. As before, good people are set to keep evil from tilting the balance in its favor. The problem is that they are not that good, so are very grateful the party of adventurers are available.

Setup
The adventure begins on the edge of a body of water. How the party gets there is up to the moderator and his type of campaign. Note that this scenario was originally designed to be a tournament dungeon, so it should work by simply plopping a party down and going into Set Encounter #1. Others might want to work in some rational for going to a certain location. The adapting author had his party traveling near a good location, so could just begin Set Encounter #1 as if it was a usual late-night occurrence.