This week I unpack TSR’s Known World and its connection to an obscure module…
Age of Ravens: Karameikos Unveiled
This week’s Fear of Black Dragon podcast covers the mid-80s TSR module B6 The Veiled Society. Co-host Tom ran a session of it for Red Moon Roleplaying. B6 has several innovations. As Shannon Appelcline mentions in his history of the module on DTRPG, it’s among the first highly plot-driven adventures from TSR. It’s also one of the earliest urban-adventure modules, where action takes place full in the city, rather than it being a hub or pass-through point. Finally it showcases TSR’s experimentation with new adventure chrome: pages of stand up buildings. They would try this with several releases, but it never really caught on.
In the episode, Jason and Tom comment that the city and adventure featured in The Veiled Society hint at something larger. It is, but the module doesn’t do a great job of explaining that context. My guess is that TSR assumed gamers at the time would have simply known it. See, The Veiled Society takes place in Specularum. If you’re an old-school Basic D&D player that’s likely rung bells for you. It connects it with one of the TSR’s most forgotten settings: The Known World. And it connects it with one of my favorite lines, the D&D Gazetteer series (GAZ).