This is Fez II: The Contract (1983), the 2nd installment in the saga of the time-traveling wizard Fez, which was neatly concluded at the end of the first module. Many things repeat — Fez has spent time setting the stage for the adventure but is, for most of its duration, asleep. The players and their characters are then required to find their way through a skein of Seven Impossible Tasks in order to ensure Fez gets the bound service of Mephistopheles, which is integral to the events…of the first module (time traveling wizards gotta do things out of of order, I guess). They also do not know their character classes, thanks to some amnesia.

Unlike the previous module, most of the PCs are from the real world. There’s a football player, a curator, a rabbi, an engineer. The adventure is as much about figuring out the pregen character identities as it sorting out the Seven Impossible Tasks (especially since the authors suggest that player actions adhering to their class that are used in service to the quest should auto-succeed their rolls). There is a little calculator gizmo that can tell the players their attribute values, and Fez’s trusty robot, Warrior, hands out class-hinting weapons before sending the players off.

The players have to pick their way through a dungeon and a chunk of wilderness before they get access to the Tasks. That’s where things get interesting. The tasks are all very riddle-y and all have multiple possible solutions, one almost always being an annoying perversion of the spirit of the thing. Like the Third: “Destroy Spring.” You can travel to the monastery and defeat the Grandmaster of Spring in combat, or, you know, you can just find a mountain spring and drop a boulder on it. “Defeat the Beast of Antiquity” implies combat, but just winning a game of chess will work, too. And so on. The success of these modules is going to depend largely on your personal tolerance for such smug cleverness. I’m generally here for it.

Solid art by Victoria Poyser throughout.