Queen's Harvest is probably the best introductory adventure module ever produced for the now obsolete Basic Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying system. Published in 1989 (ISBN 0-88038-768-8, TSR product number 9261), the module was written by the inimitable Carl Sargent and features cover art by John and Laura Lakey with interior art by Karl Waller. The whole module easily converts to 2nd Ed AD&D or 3E D&D. Although it is designed for 4-6 characters levels 1-3, I've found that it works great as a stand-alone adventure to throw at a single 4th or 5th level character or two 3rd level characters.

Nominally the sequel to King's Festival, the only thing this module really has in common with that one is locale, so these adventures can easily stand alone. What makes Queen's Harvest so great is that it packs not one but two cleverly written, good-sized adventures into one normal sized module. The interesting situations and NPCs therein can easily jumpstart a whole campaign. An added bonus are the included pre-rolled characters with interesting character histories - even if you don't foist these on your PCs they can be the basis of some cool emergency NPCs down the road.

The first adventure finds the PCs hired to explore a recently deceased wizard's basement with some neat surprises, and the second adventure is a truly daunting assault on the fortress of an evil queen who has gathered an army of orcs and goblins thanks to an evil sword of great power. The second adventure can get a bit too hack-and-slash if you just play it straight up, but the sequence of events is pretty open-ended and the adventure has a lot of room to add stuff, so with minimal effort you can really spice it up. For example, in a glaring omission, the module leaves out the evil sword entirely, reasoning that it would be too powerful a weapon for such low level characters to find. Thus when they defeat the queen, the sword is simply nowhere to be found. But I always figured, why not put the sword in the adventure, and see what happens? Sure I could never let the characters have it for too long, but a sword like that is undoubtedly an artifact of great power and evil and just putting it in the game can lead to some pretty interesting adventures down the road. Just think of all the people and things that would kill (or worse) to get their hands on it!

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