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.

The Gem & The Staff has a light-hearted charm to it that endeared it to me, which is most easily summarized by a bit of illusionism that links the two adventures. If the player succeeds in stealing The Gem, then the wizard he robbed shows up at his house the next week looking to hire someone to steal The Staff from his rival. If the player fails and is caught, however, then the wizard locks him in a jail cell and orders him to take the job on pain of death. This implied setting where archmages are apparently constantly pulling pranks on each other reminded me strongly of Jack Vance's Cugel the Clever. Many of the details are charming as well: a giant doorkeeper who sings a little ditty about how hungry he is, a clue hidden in a letter to a sorceress bragging about the wizard’s accomplishments, a conservatory with fairies who impose rhyming curses, an art gallery designed to magically ensure you see everything in it, a loyal hench-troll who has his own bedchamber.

The second adventure (“The Staff of Fazzlewood”) is a little shorter and in my opinion is less charming, although I haven’t playtested it yet. It does feature some amusing pranks and the incredible name “The Wizard Fellspell”.

About half of the book consists of charmingly illustrated player handouts of each room, which would have made things even easier. I had planned to use these, but I ended up rearranging the map too much and had to sketch out a new floorplan. However, this scheme did serve a useful purpose in convincing me that it would be pretty easy to run this adventure over the phone and inspired me to make my own handouts, for which I’m grateful. As an over-ambitious perfectionist DM who is also prone to stage fright, The Gem & The Staff’s finest quality may be in making running a session of D&D seem easy and fun.