Lands of Adventure is a 1983 RPG written by Lee Gold and published by Fantasy Games Unlimited. Folks who go nuts for Bill Willingham’s D&D art will be shocked to learn that his very best piece of RPG art is on the cover of this game. (I kinda don’t go in for Willingham generally, but man, this box is worth it for his cover art alone). Worth mentioned that Lee Gold is the editor of Alarums & Excursions, the RPG amateur press association that has been going non-stop since 1975(!).

Anyway, Lands of Adventure was envisioned as a vehicle for semi-historical roleplaying. In the box was a book called a “Culture Pack” that covered ancient Greece and Medieval England. I assume the idea was to expand this modularly, which anticipates those neat green book campaign settings TSR did for 2E D&D. Gold’s culture packs are shockingly detailed for their length, packed with historical, folkloric and cultural info.

The game itself is…it doesn’t feel like a cohesive game to me, honestly. More like a collection of mechanical experiments taped together. A lot of them are interesting! There are three pools of health, for instance — one for “energy” (which makes sense, since one of Gold’s first designs was a magic point system for D&D), one for health (traditional hit points) and one for life (that deplete after you run out of health). This is rather reminiscent of the way the Palladium system works. The magic system verges on free form, with spells designed by the caster and reminiscent of superpowers in Champions while at the same time deployed in a larger context that makes me wonder if Tweet and Rein-Hagen were playing this while developing Ars Magica.

There are other nifty ideas in here, too, ripe for mining. And it is cool they are part of the historical record. It is easy to see, though, why this system (with 11 attributes!) didn’t take off — the industry had largely moved on from this sort of complex experimentation and was already flirting with more narrative-focused play (this came out the same year as Ravenloft!).