Did I mention that Tunnels & Trolls can also be effortlessly weird? Because boy, can it.

This is Catacombs of the Bear Cult: Level 1 (1981), written by Jim “Bear” Peters, who also wrote the three Dungeons of the Bear modules. If you’re detecting a theme, good, you’re on the right track. Anyway, Dungeon of the Bear was the first group play module for T&T (one of not very many, honestly) and I don’t recall any actual bears in it (I could be wrong!). Catacombs of the Bear Cult corrects that oversight. Boy does it ever.

The title tells you a lot. There is a cult of werebears. They live in caves. They raid merchants passing nearby and the Death Goddess, the regional ruler, has posted a bounty on them (which potentially includes an nice coastal villa!), so the players show up to collect. Nothing super out of the ordinary, right?

Yea. Everything beyond this point is pure bonkers. The main way the designers want the adventure to start is by the cult capturing the players, stripping them of their stuff (I hate this) and dumping them in a pit with a giant bear that the cult worships as a god, that grows with each human it eats and will eventually grow so large as to battle the Death Goddess (but I love this). Surviving the bear’s initial appearance, the party can escape into the nearby caves, where other folks who haven’t yet been eaten by the bear camp out, including a pack of wolves, some goblins, a elf lady with a secret and several elementals. Quite the cast of factions.

I haven’t even gotten to the process the cult uses to make werebears or that beartaur (cenbear?) on the cover or the mechanical bear. This just gets weirder as it goes, in that glorious, imaginative, utterly unpretentious way early adventures sometime are. It is a shame the other levels never came out.

Art by Liz Danforth, who tackles that hilarious and horrifying cover with style. Steve Crompton joins her in the interiors – I love his iconic trap diagrams, but it is nice to see his conventional work here as well.