In contrast to City of Adventure, Rogues in Lankhmar, published late in the campaign setting’s run, is a great example of both the best and worst of D&D’s take on the city had to offer. Let’s tackle the best first: as with City of Adventure, this one (which focuses on just two districts) is pure gold in terms of detail and adventure hooks. All the Lanhkmar supplements excel at capturing the feeling of Leiber’s original stories and extrapolating new ideas that fit in seamlessly. There is great love for the source material on display here.

The bad is that the Lankhmar supplements struggled to find a visual hook. They look bland as hell and most feature bad art (there’s not a single interior illustration in this book worth reproducing). That was one thing back in the mid-80s, but this book came out in 1994, four years after Howard Chaykin and Mike Mignola’s definitive comic book adaptation of Leiber’s stories and three after TSR’s own shift to aesthetic-focused design for campaign settings. The Lankhmar books almost never feel sexy, which is a huge failing, because the source material certainly is.

How the line survived, on and off, for more than a decade is a mystery to me. Lankhmar is hand’s down one of TSR’s best and most deftly realized settings, but it is a small miracle anyone was ever tempted to cracked the covers.