Kellri's 18 Module Challenge - Day 3: A Fabled City of Brass by Anthony Huso

Day 3 - A Module You Like with a Place in the Title: _A Fabled City of Brass_ by Anthony Huso

Unlike yesterday's choices, which felt very limited to me, today's selections very-much span a cornucopia of good adventuring options!  Choosing what place-based titles to eliminate meant making some tough choices:

• I decided to exclude Castle Greyhawk since I've not played it as a published adventure, and it's not really been published yet (although I have DM'd several of the levels extracted from it, and have designed my own version too)
• I also disqualified other unpublished module manuscripts that I've played or run, like Kuntz's Lost City of the Elders and Castle El Raja Key, Barker's Jakallan Underworld, Chainsaw's Foolsgrave, etc., since they've not yet been printed or made generally available
• Other favorite adventures unfortunately lack place names in their titles (or fit later categories better than this one, in some cases):  WG5 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure (although I could squeak by using "Maure Castle" I imagine...), Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, 

After much deliberation, I finally settled in on a more-recent OSRIC title for today's module---Anthony Huso's A Fabled City of Brass:

A Fabled City of Brass map - by Anthony Huso

Anthony's take on the storied home of the efreet returns to the origins of its mythology via Scheherazade's Tales of A Thousand and One Nights, and is a two-volume set:

• A Fabled City of Brass (softcover - and also available in PDF)
• City of Brass Appendicies (software - also available in PDF)
• The beautiful maps are freely available to download...:
• Player map - high-resolution version
• Player Map Compressed for Fantasy Grounds 
• DM map - high-resolution version 
• ...and You can also watch a time-lapse video on YouTube that showcases Anthony's work creating the map

A Fabled City of Brass -
the books, by Anthony Huso

Why I Love A Fabled City of Brass

There are many reasons why any gamer could love Huso's take on the City of Brass, given it's wonderful skill in leveraging the OSRIC/1e rules set, but here are mine:

• Huso's high-level (12th+), extra-planar version of the City of Brass offers a fitting capstone for any AD&D campaign 
• It evokes the feel of both the Arabian Nights stories as well as Dave Sutherland's iconic Dungeon Masters Guide cover illustration:
  

  

  David C. Sutherland III's 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide cover artwork

• Huso leverages AD&D's own lore like a pro---he even goes a step further, recommending Rob Kuntz's "(To the) City of Brass" 1987 RPGA tournament module as an introduction to the setting
•  The Appendicies book contains random encounter tables, new flora, 29 new monsters, 6 new spells, 40 new or expanded magic items (including artifacts like the Codex of the Infinite Planes, Ehlissa Amooyan's Bejeweled Nighingale, and the Jacinth of Inestimable Beauty), 5 pregen/playtest PCs, and a 4+ page comprehensive index

Three Runners Up

I'm limiting myself to three, otherwise I'll just end up recreating my favorites list with each entry, and in today's case, the limitation is imperative:  there are just too many good adventures with evocative place names in their titles!

So, my somewhat-angst-ridden, winnowed-down listing of merely three runners-up includes:

• The Original Bottle City by Robert J. Kuntz (Pied Piper Publishing 2008; Black Blade Publishing 2014):  the only true dungeon level published from Gygax and Kuntz's Castle Greyhawk
• Caverns of Thracia by Jennell Jaquays (Judges Guild 1978; Goodman Games, 2016):  Jaquay's classic mega-dungeon!
• D1 Tomb of Abysthor by Clark Peterson and Bill Webb (Necromancer Games, 2002):  an OOP and under-appreciated 3.0-era classic that, while not as large as a true mega-dungeon, offers a compellingly-designed and large dungeon environment, with ties back to Necromancer Games' best early products---Crucible of Freya, Bard's Gate, Demons & Devils, and Rappan Athuk

My other posts in Kellri's 18 Day Module Challenge:

1. Day 2: Masks of Nyarlathotep by Larry DiTillio
2. Day 1: Empire of the Ghouls by Wolfgang Baur
3. Day 0: These are a Few of My Favorite Things...