The Gem & The Staff Session Summary

"I am not Eric the Bold for nothing!"

Continuing on from my review of this module, available HERE.

The Gem & The Staff is available on DriveThruRPG, or you can borrow a copy on the Internet Archive.

My revised version is available HERE. You’ll want to read this first to make sense of the commentary that follows.

My friend Alex and I played through part 1 (The Gem) of my revised version of The Gem And The Staff. In both versions of the module Eric the Bold is hired to steal a gem from an archmage (Tormaq in the original, Abracadazzar in mine). While in the original the client is unnamed and claims to have access to the only witness to one of Eric’s prior thefts, I gave this person a name (Warren the Warlock, a rival and occasional ally of Eric’s) and said that the witness was one of Warren’s imps. Eric is given a rod that will allegedly teleport him to safety when touched to the correct gem and the adventure begins.

We played over the phone: I put the character sheet for the module’s pregenerated character, Eric the Bold, on a shared Google Doc and texted Alex numbered photos of the dungeon map. This jury-rigged setup worked a lot better than I had expected – Alex seemed to have no trouble telling where he was, and we were able to move along at a good clip. We explained the player-facing map by saying that a master thief like Eric the Bold would have done his research before attempting such a dangerous heist.

(The original module has the DM hand out illustrated maps of individual rooms as the player comes to them. Not having time to draw nice room layouts before our game, my implementation of the player-facing map was inspired by the procedure that Josh lays out HERE)

Apart from that one bit of bad puzzle design on my end, Alex took the place apart with remarkable precision.

The Gem & The Staff Review

I recently ran a heavily adapted version of the first adventure in The Gem & The Staff, a 1983 module by John and Laurie Van der Graaf of TSR UK. Meant to be played at conventions with one DM and one player, the module includes a pair of linked adventures in which an 8th level Thief (Eric the Bold) must rob a pair of powerful wizards. 

The adventure has a lot to recommend it. With a real-world time limit of 30 minutes per adventure, both adventures combined only take up 14 pages but manage to fit in a variety of tricks, traps, and opportunities for clever solutions into that space. Apart from his high-level Thief abilities, Eric’s player has an interesting toolbox: a magical sword and dagger, a powerful sleeping potion, a shrinking potion, and a Ring of Spell Storing loaded up with a variety of utility spells. The ring and the two potions give the adventures a bit of a point-and-click adventure game feeling, but to the writers’ credit most of the encounters can be solved in multiple ways. For example, several monster entries note how they could be tricked into drinking the sleeping potion. Most of the combat encounters are far too dangerous for a single PC (a hydra guarding the castle drawbridge can easily kill Eric in a single combat round), but they’re telegraphed and clearly designed to be tricked, snuck past, or avoided rather than fought.