M1. Blizzard Pass
Welcome to 1983. Blizzard Pass is another of those wacky solo modules. In the 80s, TSR was trying to find the right way to do a solo module. Like all gaming companies, modules are the worst selling product that you make. You sell a lot more handbooks or guides than you do modules. Even books which will have little impact on your campaign (such as Legends and Lore) sell more than modules do. So TSR was trying to get a hit, at a time when solo gamebooks were all the rage and books such as Lone Wolf were selling like hotcakes. They tried several methods. Lathan’s Gold is a pretty good one, it reads like a gamebook, adds some rule about sea travel, food and ships, and moves you into the game. Ghost of Lion’s Castle is also very gamebook-y, with some changes to spells and magic in there. On the other hand, M2, Maze of the Minotaur used an invisible pen to write on the book and reveal what happens. We might even see one later on that uses a red plastic screen to filter out red junk and reveal things beneath it. TSR used the tech of the 80s to push through solo adventures.
And so, that brings us to M1. Blizzard Pass. This is another invisible pen module, written by David Cook and edited by Troy Denning. None of these solo modules are on anyone’s best of list. But what they do is give me a chance to run them naked, without knowing what is coming. While I try to remove Alzar and my own knowledge and keep them separate, we all know that’s never 100% certain. But here, there is no chance Alzar knows, because I haven’t been peeking at the end.
Now, the M1 that I own only has some of the places revealed by a pen. Plus, some are hard to read after 30 years. So I purchased a football game book from Lee Publications and I will be using that pen to illuminate the sections in this module.
I am altering the plot line considerably. Instead of being a thief on the run from false accusations of murder, Alzar is just heading to the pass as normal as part of Forest Oracle, and runs into this.