Merle M. Rasmussen

MV1 Midnight on Dagger Alley (9104)
AD&D – Introductory Solitaire Adventure
8 page booklet, double-sided poster map, 3-panel fold out cover

I’m not sure how many of you are willing to admit that at some point in your life you were so desperate to play D&D that you played by yourself, but I would definitely have to raise my hand if the question came up. I guess the people at TSR were on to us. We were either the ultra-nerds that didn’t even have other nerd friends, or the regular nerds who were really bored and couldn’t find anyone to play with at the moment. So, I guess this module was supposed to be the next step up from that because you could actually be surprised by the result.

Thankfully they didn’t try to add any role-playing to the module, because that would just be weird, but you did get to move around an encoded map that could only be seen with the “magic viewer” and when you came to an encounter area you then found it in the book and used the viewer again to read what was in the area. You start off with one of three pre-rolled characters, all 6th level. Each character has a different goal and starts at a random “cell” on the map referenced by a cartesian graph system using letters and numbers.

This all seems fine, or at least as good as it can get for a single person trying to play an rpg, except that everything is extremely hard to view. The “magic viewer”, unfortunately, resides in the mundane world, and I found nothing magical about it other than its ability to give me a headache faster than an airplane full of screeching infants.

My other problem was that there were wandering monster areas that, when encountered, you were to roll a d6 and on a 1 there was an encounter. If there were a lot of area that would be fine (not sure because I couldn’t see the map), but then you roll another d6 and on 1-3 the encounter is non-hostile and you can just walk by, THEN some of the “monsters” on the list: domestic cat, ordinary rat, ordinary bat, light war horse, merchant. So this really just seemed like a waste of time and energy.

One thing I found strange was that this must have come out after the Fiend Folio because other monsters included in the wandering monsters were: osquip, bloodhawk, kenku, and snyad.

Final verdict is that this is for collectors only or those who are extremely desperate and don’t mind headaches.… (mehr)