This article originally appeared in d20 Weekly

The Rappan Athuk Series

The Rappan Athuk Series

Published by Necromancer Games

Written by Bill Webb and Clark Peterson

Rappan Athuk -- The Dungeon of Graves: The Upper Levels: 48 pages; $9.99
Rappan Athuk 2 -- The Dungeon of Graves: The Middle Levels: 64 pages; $11.95
Rappan Athuk 3 -- The Dungeon of Graves: The Lower Levels: 112 page; $15.95

Do you remember your early days with the Dungeons & Dragons game? If it was anything like my early days, terms such as "deep immersion roleplaying" were yet to be widely uttered, and a pad of graph paper on which you could scrawl a challenging and deadly dungeon held more excitement than the prospect of a nice published adventure.

We were not the only ones with the feeling.

Necromancer Games was one of the first new companies created to take advantage of the d20 system. Started by Clark Peterson and Bill Webb, one of the company's first major projects was a dungeon adventure entitled Rappan Athuk. Rappan Athuk was originally a homebrew dungeon created by Webb; Peterson approached him with the idea of actually publishing the adventure that was to them a homebrew classic adventure.

Rappan Athuk is a classic mega-dungeon written with an eye toward the "first edition feel" that Necromancer Games' authors pride themselves for. Webb and Peterson claim adventures such as Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain, but the dungeon more closely resembles such huge dungeon crawls as Ruins of Undermountain and Greyhawk Ruins.

The books themselves are a fairly good value. Necromancer . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: August 21, 2002

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